Journalists are very mad online this week following CNN’s announcement that it has added former Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur to its news division ahead of the 2020 election.
The going complaint is that it’s ghastly that a newsroom would hire a longtime Republican operative to “coordinate political coverage for the 2020 campaign at the network,” as Politico reported.
“This is pure, 100-percent corporate chickenshit,” complained Esquire’s professionally angry person Charles P. Pierce.
The Huffington Post’s Elise Foley wondered in part-caps, “Wonder how CNN’s coverage of immigration and race issues will be affected by JEFF SESSIONS’ FORMER SPOKESWOMAN coordinating their 2020 coverage.”
Wonder how CNN’s coverage of immigration and race issues will be affected by JEFF SESSIONS’ FORMER SPOKESWOMAN coordinating their 2020 coverage https://t.co/fbYHLn5Edv
— Elise Foley (@elisefoley) February 19, 2019
“Very glad to work in a newsroom that never in 100 years would hire a political operative of either party to help ‘guide’ or ‘coordinate’ coverage of a presidential election,” boasted the New York Times’ Trip Gabriel, whose newsroom rather infamously employed a Soviet propagandist who rather infamously guided the newspaper’s rosy-eyed coverage of the Stalin regime.
Very glad to work in a newsroom that never in 100 years would hire a political operative of either party to help ‘guide’ or ‘coordinate’ coverage of a presidential election.
— Trip Gabriel (@tripgabriel) February 20, 2019
Beyond the pale! The sanctity of the newsroom!
Look, I don’t like the revolving door between journalism and politics either. It’s a bad gamble, trusting professional political agents to report cleanly and fairly on the news. The revolving door also encourages the toxic trend of newsrooms elevating access above the pursuit of difficult stories that make the powerful uncomfortable.
It’s nice, then, to learn this week that many in the news media agree with me on this issue. I’ve been wondering where you’ve all been for the last, oh, three or four decades. Really, it’s nice to see that so many are concerned now about the revolving door. That the woman whose hire has so enraged reporters this week also spent several years serving Republicans is, I’m sure, a coincidence.
More seriously, though, the issue of partisan operators making the jump from politics to journalism, with little to no relevant newsroom experience in between, has been a problem for years.
Consider, for example, George Stephanopoulos. Prior to joining ABC News, his strongest journalism credential was that he worked as a sports broadcaster for his college radio station. Right out of Columbia University, where he received a bachelor of arts degree in 1982 in political science, he worked for former Rep. Ed Feighan, D-Ohio. Stephanopoulos then earned a masters in theology from Balliol College in Oxford, Mass., and was right back at it, working for former Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo. Stephanopoulos later worked for Michael Dukakis’ failed 1988 presidential campaign, and then went on to land the big gig working the Clinton “war room.” After leaving the White House in 1996, Stephanopoulos was hired by ABC, where he immediately became a fixture on the network’s flagship news programs, including “This Week,” “World News Tonight,” and “Good Morning America,” playing the role of the straight-news political correspondent. ABC just agreed to a four-year deal with him valued at around $15 to $17 million. Not bad for a professional political agent who came to news reporting with basically no applicable background experience whatsoever.
Then there’s the late, well-loved Tim Russert, whose academic background was in law and political science. He was hired by NBC News in 1984 after serving as an aide to New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, a Democrat. Prior to working for the governor, Russert served as special counsel and then as chief of staff to former Sen. Daniel Moynihan, D-N.Y. And prior to that gig, Russert oversaw one of Moynihan’s law offices. Upon being recruited by NBC, “Russert worked behind the scenes, helping supervise the coverage of major events,” the Los Angeles Times recalled. By 1989, he was NBC’s Washington bureau chief. Not bad for a guy whose professional background consisted entirely of serving Democratic officials.
There are less extreme examples, including the people with actual backgrounds in journalism who transitioned back-and-forth between professional politics and news reporting. There’s CNN’s Jake Tapper, who once served as press secretary to former Rep. Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, D-Pa. There’s Diane Sawyer, who served as a staff assistant to former President Richard Nixon. CNN’s Chief National Security Correspondent Jim Sciutto is a former Obama appointee. He worked the State Department from 2011 to 2013 as chief of staff to U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke.
And so on and so on.
The point is: Isgur is hardly a first. Treating the CNN hire as if it were unprecedented, and after so many in journalism have followed the exact same path, suggests the outcry this week is not about protecting newsrooms from political biases so much as it’s about partisan gate-keeping. It’s either that or the people doing the complaining have terrible memories.
What’s funny about the Isgur freak out is that no one except for CNN’s top brass seems to know what she has been hired to do. We know that she’ll report to political director David Chalian, but that’s about it. Not even CNN’s Brian Stelter seems to know what her title entails, and he works for the network. We don’t know what purpose she’ll serve at CNN, but we know we’re angry about it! Again, I’m sure the fact that she worked for Republicans is just a minor detail in all of this.
If CNN hired Isgur with the idea of offsetting criticisms that its newsroom suffers from a liberal bias, thus addressing the longstanding claim that national newsrooms suffer from a left-wing tilt, reporters losing their cool over news that a female Republican operative will soon follow in Tim Russert’s footsteps sort of proves the criticism accurate.
