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Last week ABC News announced it has hired departing presidential aide George Stephanopoulos as a contributor to “This Week,” “Good Morning America” and other programs. The network seemed delighted with its catch. Mr. Stephanopoulos is “one of the best known and most articulate presidential advisers this country has ever seen,” news President Roone Arledge said. “His vast knowledge of Washington politics and policy will be an enormous asset to ABC News.”
The announcement created some confusion about Mr. Stephanopoulos’s role. A press release issued by ABC last Wednesday stated that he “will serve both as a political analyst and as a correspondent.” Vice President of News Joanna Bistany now says Mr. Stephanopoulos will be just an analyst; he will not report news or question guests on “This Week.” Ms. Bistany says his role will be similar to that of ABC contributor William Kristol, who was Dan Quayle’s chief of staff. “We want a mix of voices,” she says, adding that Mr. Stephanopoulos “won’t do anything that has any appearance of conflict.”
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As it turned out, that didn’t last long. Just three years later, in 1999, as the 2000 presidential campaign got under way, Stephanopoulos had shed his pundit’s role and was reporting on the campaign. Here is the beginning of a 1999 piece I wrote for National Review:
Back in December 1996, when ABC News hired former Clinton spinner George Stephanopoulos, the network said he would “serve both as a political analyst and a correspondent.” The announcement raised eyebrows even in liberal journalism circles; would the famously partisan Stephanopoulos become an instant network newsman? Within days, ABC was in full backtrack mode. “I don’t know how that got into the press release,” a spokeswoman told me. “He will not report the news.” Network vice-president Joanna Bistany said Stephanopoulos would be a commentator like Republican William Kristol, who appears with Stephanopoulos on “This Week.” “I view it the same way as Kristol,” she said. “He has a point of view, a political persuasion.”
That was then. Now ABC says Stephanopoulos really is a reporter after all. He began appearing in a variety of roles last August, regularly contributing pieces to “World News Tonight” and “Good Morning America” and even co-anchoring ABC’s overnight news program.
But even as they unveiled Stephanopoulos’ new role, network officials took pains to say they will keep a close eye on him. “We’re all conscious of the sensitivity with him having been part of the news in Washington,” news division president David Westin told the Washington Post. For that reason, Westin said, Stephanopoulos will stay away from touchy political stories. “We wouldn’t have him be the beat reporter on the Gore campaign,” Westin assured the Post.
That’s become something of a mantra around ABC these days. “He’s not a beat reporter on any of those campaigns,” spokeswoman Eileen Murphy told me recently. “He will not be the beat reporter assigned to a campaign.” Although such statements might at first seem definitive, they actually aren’t. The key word, it appears, is beat. Even though Stephanopoulos will not be the regularly assigned reporter—the beat reporter—on any one campaign, Murphy says that “does not mean that we won’t have him doing more general political stories.” Which means he will, in fact, cover the campaigns.
In short order, even those weak restrictions on Stephanopoulos’ role would fall away and he would be covering all sorts of politics for ABC. By 2002, Stephanopoulos was host of “This Week,” occupying David Brinkley’s old chair. A couple of years after that, he was named ABC’s “chief Washington correspondent.”
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Although conservatives would occasionally complain — as when Stephanopoulos grilled Mitt Romney at length on the out-of-the-blue topic of birth control at a 2012 presidential debate — Stephanopoulos seemed to have put the suspicions of partisanship behind him.
Now comes word that even as he interrogated Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer, and in effect served as a defense lawyer for the Clinton Foundation, he was not disclosing his own $50,000 contribution to the organization. It was a performance that seemed right out of Stephanopoulos’ War Room days; some habits of mind, apparently, never go away.
