Two liberal journalists go to work for Obama White House

December 24, 8:59 AMConservative Politics ExaminerKathy Shaidle

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 It is no secret that the mainstream press has long favored Democratic candidates; a widely reported poll showing that journalists voted for Kerry over Bush by a margin of 68 percent to 25 percent in the 2004 election is just one of many similar studies dating as far back as 1964.

Barack Obama’s campaign, however, set a new standard for media favoritism. So slanted was the coverage toward the Illinois Senator that a July 2008 Rasmussen Reports survey found that 49 percent of likely voters believed reporters would favor Obama in their campaign coverage over his Republican rival John McCain.

The latest chapter in the media’s love affair with Obama comes as prominent journalists, no longer content to cheer the president-elect from the sidelines, have decided to join his administration.

Most recent is the case of TIME’s James Carney, who is leaving the magazine after 20 years to serve as Vice President Joe Biden's communications director. The well-connected Carney is a regular guest on Washington’s Sunday shows, and is married to Claire Shipman, the senior Washington correspondent for ABC's Good Morning America.

Meanwhile, ABC’s Linda Douglass, who signed on as Obama’s campaign spokesperson in May of this year, is now on his Inaugural Committee. An unnamed Democratic official admitted to Politico when the news broke, “There are those on the right who will see this as the embodiment of their assertions about the media and Obama, and this is just making it official.”

One of “those on the right” is Tim Graham. The director of media analysis at the Media Research Center, Graham saw Carney’s move as another “example of the revolving door between journalism and Democratic politics.”

“James Carney at TIME magazine has been a very traditional TIME magazine liberal, so it’s not a stretch for him to move over into working for Joe Biden,” Graham remarked. “This is a man who has mocked, for example, Congressman Dan Burton [R-Indiana] as a ‘Torquemada’ figure. He is not someone who's hesitated from slamming conservatives in the pages of TIME magazine.”

Indeed, Carney and Douglass are merely the latest examples of the revolving door between the press and Democratic politics.

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