Flacks Fueling Fire

By Brian Beutler

A headline in the New York Times informs me that “Ex-Journalists’ New Jobs Fuel Debate on Favoritism”. Now, I like to think of myself as someone who keeps abreast of big political debates, but somehow I must’ve missed this one. Conservatives and liberals, present company included, are always sort of arguing with each other about media bias, but this happens at a low simmer. Here’s what the Times says:

An unusual number of journalists from prominent, mainstream organizations started new government jobs in January, providing new kindling to the debate over whether Mr. Obama is receiving unusually favorable treatment in the news media….

Jay Carney, the new communications director for Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., was, until late last year, the Washington bureau chief at Time magazine, where he covered the campaign and, coincidentally, was a co-author of an article in September titled, “McCain’s Bias Claim: Truth or Tactic?”

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the leading candidate for surgeon general, is CNN’s chief medical correspondent. His résumé as a practicing neurosurgeon — and one of People magazine’s “sexiest men alive” in 2003 — is not that of a traditional journalist. But he reported on the health records of the presidential candidates last year, along with their health care proposals….

On Capitol Hill, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts has hired Douglas Frantz as his chief investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Mr. Frantz is a former managing editor of The Los Angeles Times and before that was an investigative reporter there, at The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune.

If my math is right, that makes one press flack. Gupta and Frantz will be working for Democrats, yes, but their jobs won’t involve the sort of relentless spinning that would make one question their fitness to return to journalism in the future. So, three people. Or, as the Times would have it, “an unusual number”. Enough, in other words, to claim a troubling trend where no such trend exists.

Of course, in the past there was this. And today there’s this. Carney may or may not be too biased for mainstream journalism standards, he’s not doing journalism anymore. If he returns to Time after a few years, that’s an interesting piece of information, just as it was interesting information when he took the job with Joe Biden. Meanwhile, Fournier’s still running the the AP’s Washington Bureau, and the Times couldn’t care less.

If at the end of the Obama administration, a bunch of his press folks burrow into Reuter’s, that would be a trend. If a bunch of outgoing Bush press secretaries were getting scooped up by some major publication, I’d want to know. But until that happens, let’s stop pretending there’s something extremely unusual going on here, OK?