Right-wingers are always complaining that journalists are hopelessly biased liberals, but lately they seem to think they have new evidence to support the old beef. The latest edition of “Obama-Biden Watch,” a newsletter published by the rabidly conservative group Citizens United, contains a short feature on all of the mainstream reporters who’ve recently joined the Obama administration.
Among those singled out by CU: Chicago Tribune reporter Jill Zuckerman, who’s headed to the Transportation Department; former Time magazine Washington bureau chief Jay Carney, who’s gone to work in Biden’s office; Peter Gosselin, a former Los Angeles Times reporter, who’s now a speechwriter for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner; and former ABC News correspondent Linda Douglass, who worked on the Obama campaign and is rumored to be slated for a job at Health and Human Services. The newsletter came out before the news of Obama’s appointment of Nancy Ann DeParle to a senior post at HHS, but no doubt her marriage to New York Times poverty reporter Jason DeParle might have rated a mention as well.
Of course plenty of journalists also went to work in the Bush administration (think Tony Snow and Karen Hughes), so the liberal bias connection is still, as always, pretty weak. But it’s even weaker if you consider that this latest flight of reporters into government is happening at the same time the newspaper industry is imploding. It’s not entirely surprising to find reporters from the bankrupt Tribune Company papers on the list of new Obama administration officials. In this economic climate, the government is one of the few places that’s hiring!
