Revealed: VP Debate Moderator Martha Raddatz Hosted President Obama at Wedding, Never Told Public
The liberal media/politician/bureaucrat revolving door spins so rapidly, sometimes it's hard to keep pace. Today we learn via the Daily Caller that the moderator for tomorrow's vice presidential debate, ABC News reporter Martha Raddatz, hosted President Obama as a guest at her 1991 wedding to the man who would later become Obama's FCC commissioner, Julius Genachowski.
That's shocking enough in its own right but things are further compounded by the fact that ABC News, home of veteran Democratic adviser George Stephanopoulos, has long known about this conflict of interest and did nothing about it. Even worse, the network has actively tried to prevent the public from learning of it.
The Obama-Raddatz connection is not as clear-cut as one might think, however, since Raddatz and Genachowski divorced in 1997 and have since married other people. Still, ABC News is acting very curious in its behavior as the Daily Caller's Josh Peterson reports:
After TheDC made preliminary inquiries Monday to confirm Obama’s attendance at the wedding, ABC leaked a pre-emptive statement to liberal-leaning news outlets including Politico and The Daily Beast Tuesday, revealing what may have been internal network pressure felt just days before Raddatz was scheduled to moderate the one and only vice-presidential debate Thursday night.
Both Politico and The Daily Beast jumped to ABC and Raddatz’s defense. The Huffington Post, another liberal news outlet, joined them shortly thereafter, while calling “unusual” ABC’s attempt to kill the story before it gained wide circulation. [...]
On Monday evening ABC spokesman David Ford grudgingly confirmed Obama’s attendance at the wedding, after shielding Raddatz in August by declining to comment when The Daily Caller first reported the story.
“This is absurd,” Ford said, in the same statement now circulated by ABC’s media allies on the left.
Obama, Ford wrote, “attended their wedding over two decades ago along with nearly the entire Law Review, many of whom went onto successful careers, including some in the Bush administration,” he said without providing a specific number of Harvard Law Review employees to verify the statement.
When pressed further on Tuesday for a specific number of Harvard Law Review employees in attendance at the wedding, Ford could offer none, despite circulating the same unverified approximation through sympathetic media outlets earlier that day in order to discredit The Daily Caller’s reporting.
Of course, if a Fox News employee hosting a presidential debate were to exposed as having such a relationship with a Republican president, the story would be plastered all over the media and left-leaning journalists would be calling for him/her to be immediately replaced. Clearly this would be a good idea in this case as well.
Besides employing Stephanopolous to interview his friends and former colleagues and Raddatz to cover the White House of her former wedding guest, ABC is also the place that current Fox Business Network host John Stossel left after he couldn't take the suffocating liberally biased atmosphere. "I can't stand it anymore," he told Fox News chief Roger Ailes.
Asked later about his time at ABC, Stossel described a climate of intolerance for anything that was non-liberal:
"It sucked there. They were hostile to these ideas that have made us [America] prosperous and I consider so important. I mean, they tolerated me for years. I got good ratings, so they put the stuff on. They sort of held their nose and put it on."
ABC is also the home of one Brian Ross, the investigative reporter who falsely smeared a Tea Party leader as a mass murderer simply because he shared the same name as James Holmes, the lunatic who shot up a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.
Even left-wing comedian Jon Stewart thought the error was so bad he should've been fired. Sadly he hasn't been, despite his making a mistake so stupid, even a high school journalist would've known better.
Or for a succinct summary, please see this excellent post from Red State's Erick Erickson which is more than just a recounting of recent revolving door spins, it is also a discussion of how the "conventional wisdom" in DC inevitably is liberal:
Neil King is a political reporter for the Wall Street Journal. He is married to Shailagh Murray who left a reporting job at the Washington Post to take the job of Joe Biden’s communications director. She replaced Jay Carney who moved to the White House and who himself left Time to take the communications director role for Biden.
John Harris of the Politico is married to an abortion rights activist who used to run NARAL Virginia.
The Politico’s Chief Washington Correspondent, Jonathan Allen, left the Politico to work for Debbie Wasserman Schultz, then returned to the Politico.
Andy Barr of the Politico left the Politico to work for the Democratic National Committee and now works for Richard Carmona, the Democrats’ candidate for Senate in Arizona against Jeff Flake.
George Stephanopolous of ABC News used to be a strategist for Bill Clinton and even after becoming Chief Washington Correspondent still engaged in regular conversations with Rahm Emanuel, James Carville, and Paul Begala from the Clinton days. (Ironic, isn’t it, that John Harris wrote that story)
Michael Scherer of Time, where Jay Carney left to go to Joe Biden’s office, got his start in left wing publications, as did Ezra Klein of the Washington Post who famously created the left wing Journolist filled with Washington journalists and pundits to bounce around themes in the left wing echo chamber.
Linda Douglass of ABC News left ABC to serve as Chief Propaganda Officer for the Obama White House in charge of getting Obamacare through.
Andrew Rosenthal of the New York Times made up the story about President George H. W. Bush being surprised and taken aback by a common supermarket check out scanner. The story was made up by Rosenthal who was not even present. Andrew Rosenthal is now the Editor of the New York Times Editorial Page.
The BuzzFeed crew are mostly left of center, hang out with left of center reporters and pundits, and the media considers them and their cat GIFs the second coming of a supposedly objective Huffington Post.
Chuck Todd himself is married to a former DNC staffer and he worked as a Democratic staffer to Senator Tom Harkin. He works with Chris Matthews who worked for a Democrat in Congress and Jimmy Carter. They both work with Andrea Mitchell who is married to Alan Greenspan, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve. And they’re all just a degree or two removed from Tawana Brawley thanks to their relationship with MSNBC host Al Sharpton.
