Just a dozen years after being totally fine with George Stephanopoulos moderating the final primary debate between his former boss’s wife, Hillary Clinton, and then-candidate Barack Obama, liberals have pounced on upcoming vice presidential debate moderator Susan Page for hosting an off-the-record event “in honor” of Seema Verma, President Trump’s administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Page, the Washington bureau chief of USA Today, held a “Girls’ Night Out” event at her Georgetown home in November of 2018, per reporting from a congressional investigation into the scandal-ridden Verma. Although USA Today stands by the longtime reporter, who paid for the $4,025 catering bill herself, liberals have lambasted both Page and Verma, who charged taxpayers $2,933 for consultant Pam Stevens’s organization of the event. And now, liberals are very, very mad.
Hey, so I’m pretty sure @SusanPage has an obligation to back out of moderating the VP debate after she HOSTED A “GIRLS NIGHT” AT HER HOME “IN HONOR OF” A MEMBER OF THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION.
Yeah? h/t @ddiamond pic.twitter.com/9EhHLm0gQK
— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) September 10, 2020
Reporters regularly attend off-the-record events with the politicians or other powerful figures we cover, some with libations and hors d’oeuvres during lengthy discussions. But off-the-record evenings or briefings are meant to be informational and work on building sources, not using your own or taxpayer money to fete administration officials. As an objective matter, Page’s decision to host such a sycophantic event lacked journalistic integrity. As a subjective question compared to our contemporary standards, are you kidding me?
The Washington press corps and Acela cable news hosts have made a mockery of whatever semblance of personal objectivity journalists are supposed to have in socializing with sources for decades. Every day, it feels as if there’s a new audio leak of Chris Cuomo buddying up to Michael Cohen, Don Lemon partying with Michael Avenatti, and exhausting bombshells proving that Jeff Zucker was directly trying reaching out to the Trump campaign to try and assist his former celebutante protege. But openly partisan hacks hanging out with their political allies is one thing. The Left’s acceptance of completely compromised journalists hosting presidential debates, one of the remaining relics of our once-noble Fourth Estate, has gone back decades.
Consider, barely a decade after departing former President Bill Clinton’s administration as his de facto press secretary and senior advisor, Stephanopoulos was chosen to host the final and crucial Democratic presidential primary debate between Hillary Clinton and Obama. Although he notably faced some criticism for his oddly adversarial questioning of Obama after the debate, his legitimacy to host a debate between some guy from Chicago and the wife of the man who made him a media superstar was not questioned! Neither was his hiring by ABC News not as a liberal or media commentator, but as an objective news anchor on Good Morning America.
Another compromised debate host in 2008 was Gwen Ifill, who moderated the debate between then-vice presidential candidates Joe Biden and Sarah Palin despite penning a hagiography to Obama due for release on his eventual Inauguration Day. At least, unlike Stephanopoulos’s performance, Ifill performed with much more professionalism and objectivity.
When Fox News’s Chris Wallace was tapped as a presidential debate moderator this year, the Left lost its marbles because the choice supposedly legitimized his nefarious employer. Just imagine the uproar if Fox’s Dana Perino, former President George W. Bush’s press secretary but an objective news anchor by any measure, was chosen to moderate a presidential debate? But Stephanopoulos got a free pass because he had the right letter next to his name, and still, Page’s faux pas is beyond the pale. The whole exercise is a shameful reminder of the Swamp’s raging hypocrisy and an interesting insight into how a Biden presidency might elicit different behavior from the media.
