Fly Specks on the Debate Commission Table
The last thing I read before going
to sleep was Rick Ballard’s
pithy comment on the news that almost every media operation and figure had
contributed to the Clinton slush fund:
“It's
actually the perpetual Clinton Campaign using tax deductible donations to the
Foundation to finance itself. If the investigative press were not extinct, they
would be trumpeting the names of Clinton campaign workers and vendors sustained
by employment by the Foundation rather than paying access fees to it.”
So it wasn’t surprising that I had a
weird dream in which I was a fly on the wall of the Commission on Presidential
Debates as they tried to figure out who could moderate the next presidential
debates. Actually, I was perched on the ceiling out of reach of the fly
swatter. I could only see the tops of their heads so I can’t say who said what,
but I here’s how the discussion went:
“Darn, Stephanopoulos. He’s making
our job impossible. First, the former Clinton staffer, doesn’t report that he
contributed $75 thousand to the Clinton Foundation even as he reports on
political matters and interviews both candidates and (dismissively) the author of the book, Peter Schweizer, who cracked the story in Clinton
Cash.”
“Then it turns out the he was deeply
entwined with Hillary’s campaign operation itself. Her campaign manager interned for him; Stephanopoulos participated in daily strategy calls in
2009 with key operatives in the Clinton and Obama White House.
“You mean the coordination with the
Democrat campaign staffs wasn’t obvious already? Tell me how this
out-of-left-field questioning of Romney in the debates didn’t set the stage for
the Democrats’ ridiculous suggestion that the Republicans wanted to ban
contraceptive devices and lay the foundation for the preposterous “war on women” theme:
“Governor Romney, do you believe
that states have the right to ban contraception? Or is that trumped by a
constitutional right to privacy?” Stephanopoulos asked the slightly
bewildered-looking former Massachusetts governor.
“George, this is an unusual topic
that you’re raising,” Romney responded, “Do states have a right to ban
contraception? I can’t imagine a state banning contraception. I can’t imagine
the circumstances where a state would want to do so…Given that there’s no state
that wants to do so, and I don’t know of any candidate that wants to do so,
you’re asking could it constitutionally be done? We could ask our
Constitutionalist here,” Romney said, gesturing toward Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX).
Stephanopoulos persisted.
“Do you believe states have that
right or not?” he asked Romney.
“George, I don’t know if the state
has a right to ban contraception, no state wants to! The idea of you putting
forward things that states might want to do, that no state wants to do,
and then asking me whether they can do it or not is kind of a silly thing,”
Romney responded, much to the crowd’s delight.
“Is he really that different than
his colleagues elsewhere?” asked one of the Commissioners, drawing attention to
Jonathan Tobin’s article in Commentary:
[I]t still must be pointed out that
if a journalist were exposed as giving money to the Koch Brothers charities and
then reported on them, there would be howls for his scalp throughout the media.
The rules are different for liberals. Analysts who wonder about the shrinking
audience for such shows and networks whose political coverage is drenched in
the tired rhetoric of liberalism need wonder no more. Stephanopoulos’s lack of
transparency i[n] this story is just one more piece of evidence indicting
mainstream outlets for outrageous and blatant liberal bias.
But it has ramifications far beyond
the media bubble.
“True. Audiences are dropping off
and we can’t use Stephanopoulos as a moderator any more, who’s left?”
“Here’s our problem, as Peggy Noonan observes about the Clinton Foundation, it “functioned, at
least to some degree and in some cases, as a pay-for-play operation and… the
Clinton Foundation has functioned, at least in part, as a kind of high-class
philanthropic slush fund.” And pay to play involved almost the entire U.S.
media. To gain access to the Clintons they kicked in and in return got to toss
them softball questions and, for the most part, downplay their patent,
overwhelming corruption.
Take the arm of the Clinton
Foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative, which offers access to Bill Clinton
and networking opportunities with his supporters to its membership. Membership
usually requires $20,000 annual contributions or high profile participation in
its activities. Except for 2008, George was a member from 2005-2011, and he was not alone. Either as guests who participated and were exempt from the
fee or as fee-paying members, these media stars were part of the CGI:
CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Christiane Amanpour, Fox’s Greta Van
Susteren, NBC’s Matt Lauer and Tom Brokaw, New York Times‘s
Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof, Fox Business Network’s Maria
Bartiromo, Yahoo’s Katie Couric, The Economist‘s Matthew
Bishop, and Financial Times‘ Lionel Barber.” Certainly at a
minimum these media personages were unlikely to ever question the slush fund’s
operations. In fact, at least previously undisclosed
contributor Judy Woodruff,
promoted it.
...on September 23, 2013, in the usual round of softball interviews that Bill Clinton
does at that annual-confab time. Woodruff had just been named co-anchor with Gwen Ifill. Like Stephanopoulos, Woodruff did not
disclose she was a donor to Clinton’s efforts:
So blind to the contradictions of
their behavior were Katie Couric, Stephanopoulos, and Charlie Rose that even weeks
after pedophile Clinton buddy Jeffrey Epstein was convicted they partied with him at his New York apartment.
“And then there are the media
contributors to the Clinton machine which list is even more extensive:
NBC Universal, News Corporation,
Turner Broadcasting and Thomson Reuters are among more than a dozen media
organizations that have made charitable contributions to the Clinton Foundation
in recent years, the foundation's records show.
The donations, which range from the
low-thousands to the millions, provide a picture of the media industry's ties
to the Clinton Foundation at a time when one of its most notable personalities,
George Stephanopoulos, is under scrutiny for his previously undisclosed $75,000 contribution.
The list also includes mass media
groups like Comcast, Time Warner and Viacom, as well a few notable individuals,
including Carlos Slim, the Mexican telecom magnate and largest shareholder of
The New York Times Company, and James Murdoch, the chief operating officer of
21st Century Fox. Both Slim and Murdoch have given between $1 million to $5
million, respectively.
Judy Woodruff, the co-anchor and
managing editor of PBS NewsHour, gave $250 to the foundation's “Clinton Haiti
Relief Fund" in 2010.
The following list includes news
media organizations that have donated to the foundation, as well as other media
networks, companies, foundations or individuals that have donated. It is
organized by the size of the contribution:
$1,000,000-$5,000,000
Carlos Slim
Chairman & CEO of Telmex,
largest New York Times shareholder
James Murdoch
Chief Operating Officer of 21st
Century Fox
Newsmax Media
Florida-based conservative media
network
Thomson Reuters
Owner of the Reuters news service
$500,00-$1,000,000
Google
News Corporation Foundation
Philanthropic arm of former Fox News
parent company
$250,000-$500,000
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publisher
Richard Mellon Scaife
Owner of Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
$100,000-$250,000
Abigail Disney
Documentary filmmaker
Bloomberg Philanthropies
Howard Stringer
Former CBS, CBS News and Sony
executive
Intermountain West Communications
Company
Local television affiliate owner
(formerly Sunbelt Communications)
$50,000-$100,000
Bloomberg L.P.
Discovery Communications Inc.
George Stephanopoulos
ABC News chief anchor and chief
political correspondent
Mort Zuckerman
Owner of New York Daily News and
U.S. News & World Report
Time Warner Inc.
Owner of CNN parent company Turner
Broadcasting
$25,000-$50,000
AOL
HBO
Hollywood Foreign Press Association
Presenters of the Golden Globe
Awards
Viacom
$10,000-$25,000
Knight Foundation
Non-profit foundation dedicated to
supporting journalism
Public Radio International
Turner Broadcasting
Parent company of CNN
Twitter
$5,000-$10,000
Comcast
Parent company of NBCUniversal
NBC Universal
Parent company of NBC News, MSNBC
and CNBC
Public Broadcasting Service
$1,000-$5,000
Robert Allbritton
Owner of POLITICO parent company
Capitol News Group
$250-$1,000
AOL Huffington Post Media Group
Hearst Corporation
Judy Woodruff
PBS Newshour co-anchor and
managing editor
The Washington Post Company
“What are our alternatives, now? I
mean there’s really no one left untainted that I can see. We can’t find anyone
to moderate the presidential debates whose hem isn’t soiled.”
“We can scratch the debates or skip
moderation altogether. I mean after Candy Crowley’s awful role in the
Obama/Romney debate where she falsely and inappropriately questioned Romney’s perfectly true statement in a way
suspiciously redolent of coordination with the Obama camp, we have to be on
guard. We could just pick one general debate question and simply have a time
keeper and keep the press out of it altogether.”
I couldn’t stand it any more, and
deprived of speech had only one way to make my point, I fly specked on the
commission table the only way the media could salvage itself on debate
moderation, “Keep Hillary from running.”
Not that they’ll listen to me.
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