MSM-BHO: All in the Family
By Ed Driscoll Jun 15, 2013 11:06 AM ET
"Last week John Nolte of Breitbart observed that the mainstream media had failed to break any of the controversial news occupying Washington. This week Paul Farhi of the Washington Post, without intending to, explained why."
Matthew Continetti of the Washington Free Beacon flips open Occam's Razor and slices up one of the chief reasons "Why the mainstream media failed to break Obama scandals:"
"Conflicts" is not the best description of Farhi's subject. His topic is marriages, unions, and blood, legal and romantic and familial connections between individuals where one party works in media and another works in politics. The extent of such links is staggering. Farhi has to interrupt his story to announce, in a parenthetical, that Post reporter Sari Horwitz, who covers the Justice Department, is married to William B. Schultz, who is Kathleen Sebelius' top lawyer at the Department of Health and Human Services. Ben Sherwood, the president of ABC News, is brother to Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, "a top national security adviser to President Obama." Another Obama national security aide, Ben Rhodes, is brother to David Rhodes, president of CBS News. One of CNN's top D.C. hacks is married to Tom Nides, whose upward career trajectory has taken him from the office of Democratic congressional powerbroker Tony Coelho to, where else, Fannie Mae, Credit Suisse, and Morgan Stanley, as well as a two-year stint as an undersecretary of state for Hillary Clinton. Whose daughter is on contract with NBC.
White House spokesman Jay Carney, who worked for many years at Time magazine, is married to Claire Shipman, a correspondent for ABC News. The White House correspondent for NPR, Ari Shapiro, has been married to former White House counsel Michael Gottlieb since 2004. Longtime NPR personality Michele Norris went on leave in 2011, when her husband Broderick Johnson, a corporate lawyer who served in the Clinton White House, joined the Obama reelection campaign as a full-time adviser. Wall Street Journal political reporter Neil King is married to Shailagh Murray, who serves as communications director for Vice President Joe Biden, and who used to report on Congress for the Post. Savannah Guthrie of NBC recently became engaged to Mike Feldman, a former Gore aide who is now part of the Democratic Glover Park Group consultancy. Syndicated columnist Connie Schultz is married to Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio.
Tracing these associations is enough to keep busy any student of the caste.
Read the whole thing.
Oh, and speaking of keeping it all in the family, "Obama Chooses HBO VP for Ambassador to Spain Position:"
HBO co-president Richard Plepler gave between $50,000 and $100,000 to Obama, and James Costos, HBO VP of Global Licensing and Retail donated north of $500,000 while hosting fundraisers for the Commander in Chief.
Costos just received a very nice thank you note from Obama.
As was widely expected, President Barack Obama today named James Costos as next Ambassador to Spain. The HBO VP of Global Licensing and Retail was a big bundler for Obama's reelection campaign last year and co-hosted fundraisers in both LA and NYC along with his partner Michael Smith.
HBO is part of the Time-Warner conglomerate, which also owns CNN. As Continetti notes above, Jay Carney, the president's press secretary, cut his teeth at Time, and CNN's Fareed Zakaria has attempted to position himself as a wannabe Obama advisor.
Add the above to the JournoList, and it's one big revolving door between the offices of the MSM and BHO.
Related: "Our Partisan Bureaucracy — Lawyers Love President Obama," as this ominous chart illustrates, "detailing political giving by government lawyers," David French writes at the Corner: