If you sometimes wonder why Rush Limbaugh has changed his mantra from the “drive-by media” (lazy, disinterested character assassins who can’t be bothered to get blood on their hands) to the “state-controlled media” (slavish lickspittle apparatchiks bucking for career advancement), you need look no further than this news announcement, courtesy of Politico’s Ben Smith:
Another jump from the media to politics: ABC News’s deputy political director, Teddy Davis, emails that he’s leaving the network to join SEIU’s already-muscular communications and politics operation.
He’ll be Assistant Director of Communications at the giant union, he said, “working with the SEIU team on their political campaigns and policy agenda.?”
The hire is a sign that SEIU’s new leadership intends to keep its large Washington footprint.
No kidding. Davis now joins a host of other former news professionals who have thrown their lot in with the Obama Administration or its satellite operations, such as the thuggish SEIU, including Jay Carney of Time Magazine, who’s now Joe Biden’s press secretary.
In fact,for some, journalism at the highest Beltway and Manhattan levels has become the equivalent of those “think tanks” that surround Washington, places in which to sit out the lean years while plotting your side’s political comeback. Actually, such behavior goes way back, to this guy:
That would be the sainted Walter Lippman, celebrated today in J-schools across the land as a secular saint of professional journalism. But Lippmann, a dyed-in-the-wool progressive, segued easily from being one of the founders of The New Republic to a job in the Wilson Administration (where he helped draft the famous “Fourteen Points”) to back to journalism again. In his most famous book, Public Opinion (1922), Lippmann argued:
My conclusion is that public opinions must be organized for the press if they are to be sound, not by the press as is the case today.
And that, in a nutshell, is how many of today’s elite journalists still think of their jobs. They’re a mandarin class, a collection of high priests who circle the thrones of power and interpret the words and deeds of the sovereign for the benefit of the masses. (Unless, of course, the king is a tyrant and a usurper, in which case they work overtime for his speedy removal.)
So in light of the Teddy Davis news, how can anyone take ABC News seriously any more? We’ve known for years that reporters and journalists skew heavily Democratic in their political affiliation and their campaign contributions, but lately the shameless partisanship has been elevated to a whole new level of chutzpah.
It’s bad enough that ABC has former Clinton hack George Stephanopoulos as one of the faces of its news operation. And the recent ugly window opened onto the interior workings of the news operation hasn’t exactly burnished the network’s reputation. But now, to have the “deputy political director” jump to, of all things, the SEIU…
Really says it all, doesn’t it?