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Authors: Michael Savage
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school together, marry each other, or go into business together. Journalism was a working-class trade and there were few Ivy League graduates in the newsroom. For that matter, most journalists didn’t even go to college, much less major in journalism. Journalists started out on a beat. They covered city hall or the police department and worked their way up from there, with hard-nosed editors questioning everything that they wrote.
That experience, which often lasted for decades before they were promoted, shaped them into a skeptical jury of ordinary citizens with extraordinary access and information. By the time they made it to Washington, they weren’t impressed by senators, ambassadors, or even presidents. They had covered politicians for decades and knew the breed well. They were suspicious, even hostile. They knew that they were the “people’s intelligence service” and had to be tough to earn their readers’ trust. And they enjoyed catching the politicians trying to pull a fast one.
Today, journalists go to Ivy League schools and start in Washington, D.C. They attend the same schools they send their kids to. More to the point, they attend the same schools as government officials. They socialize with politicians and brag about them coming to dinner parties at their homes.
Let me give you an example of something you’ve never heard in the mainstream media: Tammy Haddad. She’s had a varied career as a producer at CNN, Fox News, NBC, CBS, and MSNBC. She’s the head of Haddad Media, a company that develops Internet and event programming. She’s also the former executive producer of Chris Matthew’s MSNBC show. 1 Haddad throws a garden party every year, right before the White House Correspondents Association Dinner, and she eagerly tweets the arrival of every politician to her front yard.
The Correspondents Association Dinner itself is such a love-in between the president and the press that Obama joked at the 2009 dinner, “All of you voted for me.” 2 He won huge applause for that line because the nearly 2,000 members of the working press in the room knew it to be true. Surveys repeatedly show that some 91 percent of the broadcast and print media vote for Democrats. 3
And the press now marries government officials. Consider the case of NBC on-air reporter Andrea Mitchell, who in 1997 married then-chairman of the United States Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan. Or the case of President Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice. She is married to an ABC News executive. ABC’s Christiane Amanpour is married to a former Bill Clinton State Department spokesman.
Other journalists treat the wall between the press and the people they cover as a revolving door. Chris Matthews was a top assistant to House Speaker Tip O’Neill. After leaving that job, he wrote a book and became a bureau chief for the San Francisco Chronicle , penning a weekly column for that paper. Next, he got his own television show, called Hardball . 4
And he’s far from the only one going through the revolving door between government and media. Dana Perino, a former Bush White House spokeswoman, now anchors a show on Fox News Channel called The Five . Bill Clinton’s former ambassador to Morocco, Marc Ginsberg, is now a columnist for the Huffington Post and a producer of Arabic-language television. 5 Tony Blankley, a former spokesman for House Speaker Newt Gingrich, is now a syndicated columnist and Fox News talking head. 6 Mary Matalin, previously the Republican Party spokeswoman, is now heading a division of Simon & Schuster, the book publishing outfit. 7 Her husband, James Carville, a key Clinton campaign operative in the 1990s, writes a newspaper column and regularly appears on cable news programs. 8
And so on.
If you’ve wondered why you hear the same thing from every news outlet in the country, it’s because “big media” has such a streak of ideological conformity. It is the same people pushing the same
That experience, which often lasted for decades before they were promoted, shaped them into a skeptical jury of ordinary citizens with extraordinary access and information. By the time they made it to Washington, they weren’t impressed by senators, ambassadors, or even presidents. They had covered politicians for decades and knew the breed well. They were suspicious, even hostile. They knew that they were the “people’s intelligence service” and had to be tough to earn their readers’ trust. And they enjoyed catching the politicians trying to pull a fast one.
Today, journalists go to Ivy League schools and start in Washington, D.C. They attend the same schools they send their kids to. More to the point, they attend the same schools as government officials. They socialize with politicians and brag about them coming to dinner parties at their homes.
Let me give you an example of something you’ve never heard in the mainstream media: Tammy Haddad. She’s had a varied career as a producer at CNN, Fox News, NBC, CBS, and MSNBC. She’s the head of Haddad Media, a company that develops Internet and event programming. She’s also the former executive producer of Chris Matthew’s MSNBC show. 1 Haddad throws a garden party every year, right before the White House Correspondents Association Dinner, and she eagerly tweets the arrival of every politician to her front yard.
The Correspondents Association Dinner itself is such a love-in between the president and the press that Obama joked at the 2009 dinner, “All of you voted for me.” 2 He won huge applause for that line because the nearly 2,000 members of the working press in the room knew it to be true. Surveys repeatedly show that some 91 percent of the broadcast and print media vote for Democrats. 3
And the press now marries government officials. Consider the case of NBC on-air reporter Andrea Mitchell, who in 1997 married then-chairman of the United States Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan. Or the case of President Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice. She is married to an ABC News executive. ABC’s Christiane Amanpour is married to a former Bill Clinton State Department spokesman.
Other journalists treat the wall between the press and the people they cover as a revolving door. Chris Matthews was a top assistant to House Speaker Tip O’Neill. After leaving that job, he wrote a book and became a bureau chief for the San Francisco Chronicle , penning a weekly column for that paper. Next, he got his own television show, called Hardball . 4
And he’s far from the only one going through the revolving door between government and media. Dana Perino, a former Bush White House spokeswoman, now anchors a show on Fox News Channel called The Five . Bill Clinton’s former ambassador to Morocco, Marc Ginsberg, is now a columnist for the Huffington Post and a producer of Arabic-language television. 5 Tony Blankley, a former spokesman for House Speaker Newt Gingrich, is now a syndicated columnist and Fox News talking head. 6 Mary Matalin, previously the Republican Party spokeswoman, is now heading a division of Simon & Schuster, the book publishing outfit. 7 Her husband, James Carville, a key Clinton campaign operative in the 1990s, writes a newspaper column and regularly appears on cable news programs. 8
And so on.
If you’ve wondered why you hear the same thing from every news outlet in the country, it’s because “big media” has such a streak of ideological conformity. It is the same people pushing the same
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