Top Time Editor Becomes Latest Journalist to Join Team Obama

At least he made it official.

Time's Washington bureau chief Jay Carney is quitting his magazine post to take the fearsome task of managing the communications problems of incoming vice president Joe Biden.

This hardly comes as a surprise. During his tenure at Time, Carney accrued a reputation for bashing Republicans. In March, he urged President Bush to give a speech on the economy and say that he is "a Republican who actually cares about people that are suffering."

In a November 2007 blog post, Carney slammed the Bush administration for "los[ing] touch with reality" for insisting that the situation in Iraq was improving, despite many indicators that the surge strategy was working.

A number of reporters have gone through the revolving door to work for Democrats this year including:

• CNN reporter Aneesh Raman who signed with the Obama campaign in September
• ABC reporter Linda Douglass who in May signed up as an Obama strategist and spokesman
• Former "Dateline" anchor Jane Pauley who toured the country campaigning on Obama's behalf
• ABC News anchor Carole Simpson who teamed up the Hillary Clinton campaign during the Democratic primaries
• CNN reporter Andrea Koppel who signed up with a left-wing PR firm in February
• Kate Albright-Hanna, a producer with CNN who crafted web video strategy for Obama while working at the network

As far as we can tell, John McCain and his former Republican presidential rivals couldn't get any Big Media journalists to go work for them.

For many more examples of journalists crossing the line between media and liberal politics, please see our Revolving Door category.

Update 19:40. A few alert NBers reminded me of a fact I neglected to mention: Carney's wife is ABC News correspondent Claire Shipman.

All the lefties who were angry at Fox News for allowing a relative of President Bush to serve in a top spot at that channel will without a doubt express similar reservations about the credibility of ABC.

Update 12/16 8:52.
"I didn't even know Jay was a Democrat," liberal Time columnist Joe Klein tells Michael Calderone.

Could that be perhaps because he and Carney never disagreed on anything?