digby: Disclosure [View All]

[babylonsister]

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/disclosure-by-digby-cnn-roundtable.html

Disclosure

by digby

The CNN roundtable analyzing the upcoming Democratic debate features Campbell Brown making her debut with CNN. It's funny though. I didn't hear any disclosure that she is married to someone who worked for the Bush administration and is now on the Romney campaign.

Ron Brownstein quit the LA Times when they told him he couldn't cover the presidential race since his wife works for the McCain campaign. But no harm, no foul:

Ronald Brownstein, who joins the Atlantic Media Company as political director next week, is the type of reporter who reads the 1994 CBO score of the Clinton health care plan. For fun.

He is the political reporter who takes policy seriously, honing his craft at National Journal, after all, before becoming the chief political correspondent at the Los Angeles Times and then its national affairs columnist after the paper objected to the woman he fell in love with.

He is the political reporter who other political reporters secretly envy because he is so damn smart and so damn perceptive. (He was a Pulitzer finalist, twice.)

It's just wrong to assume journalists' marriages might influence their coverage. They're are objective and unbiased by definition. Pulitzer Prize winners! They have jobs to do. Like determining whether Hillary's husband is going to be secretly running the country. 0r whether Mrs Obama is a detriment or an asset to her husband's campaign. Or whether it's appropriate for John Edwards to continue running for president when his wife has a cancer diagnosis.

Or writing a new book which essentially says that now that the Republicans have completely spent themselves in a decades long orgy of rhetorically violent partisanship, it's time for the Democrats to let bygones be bygones.

It's just nobody's business if reporters have biases or conflicts of interest. They will rise above them because they are professionals. Certainly there's no need to know if they are married to someone who is working on a Republican presidential campaign. Why ever would anyone ever think so?

Update: James Carville, married to a Fred Thompson operative, was on the post debate show and failed to disclose his relationship with the Clinton campaign when he declared her the winner.

The Village is an incestuous little berg, isn't it?

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