Journalists: If You Can't Beat Them, Buy Them

We can speculate about The Fourth Estate's motives and loyalties and our conclusions can be dismissed as partisanship but two facts scream bias. 1. The Obama Administration has hired a record number of mainstream reporters to work for them. 2. The Obama Administration has employed at least four relatives of high level news people.

Let's examine the second statement first. David Rhoades is the president of CBS News. His brother, Ben Rhoades is a White House national security battle.

Virginia Mosely is a CNN Vice President and Washington Bureau Chief. She is married to Tom Nides, a Deputy Secretary of State in the Obama Administration.

Former White House Press Secretary, Jay Carney, is married to ABC News senior national correspondent, Claire Shipman.

Another president of a network news division, Ben Sherwood of ABC News, is the brother of special adviser to Barack Obama, Dr. Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall.

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In the old days, we would call this graft. This behavior might be legal but it is highly unethical. Whatever credibility the Fourth Estate might have had left in its account, it has squandered it in the Obama Administration.

Not quite as egregious is the Obama Administration practice of hiring journalists on a scale never before seen. That practice has a long tradition and I am not of the opinion that reporters should be blackballed but the Obama Administration exceeds with excess.

On May 5, 2009 Ed O'Keefe of 'The Washington Post” wrote an article on the bumper crop of administration jobs awarded to news people. Eleven lucky recipients not counting David Axelrod, who is a former reporter at “Chicago Tribune.” One of the mentioned was a Bush Administration holdover, Geoff Morrell.

On February 17, 2012 Paul Bedard of the “Washington Examiner” listed 19 reporters and news executives who had gone to work for the Administration. Bedard reported that to be a record number of news people hired by an administration.

Records are made to be broken. On September 12, 2013, Elspeth Reeve reported at The Wire that the Obama Administration had hired its 24^th journalist, former “Time” managing editor, Rick Stengel.

Not mentioned in any of the articles listed above are the graduates who went to work in media. Robert Gibs was hired at MSNBC before founding The Incite Agency. His successor, Jay Carney ended up at CNN. Peter Gosselin went from “Los Angeles Times” to speechwriter for Timothy Geithner to Senior Healthcare Analyst for “Bloomberg Government.”

The miasma of Ted Baxters serving the Obama Administration was rationalized by a poor economy and mainstream media's vanishing audience in both print and electronic media as well as the opportunity to participate in the highly noble mission of creating the most transparent administration in US History (insert laugh track here.) But it does seem in the examples of Gibbs, Gosselin and Carney, that old media has plenty of jobs for Obama loyalists. Institutional back scratching is alive and well.