Chris Wallace: Douglass Joining Obama Team Proof of Liberal Media Bias

The day after it was revealed that former ABC News Capitol Hill correspondent Linda Douglass was going to be joining Barack Obama's presidential campaign, "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace said this was a perfect example of how liberal and biased the mainstream media are.

As my colleague Brad Wilmouth reported Wednesday, The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder wrote at his blog that Douglass was going to be leaving her position at National Journal to "join Barack Obama's presidential campaign as a senior strategist and as a senior campaign spokesperson on the roadshow."

The following day, Wallace was interview by WOR radio's Steve Malzberg, and was asked, "Do you have a problem with media people, you know, switching to go to work for political campaigns like that?

Wallace responded (audio available here, relevant section begins at minute 2:40):

I don't have a problem with somebody doing it. I do have a problem if they've been talking as a non-partisan, objective journalist when they're in the process of negotiating their deal to go work for the campaign. I mean, that, that certainly bothers me. And we've seen some cases of that, Carole Simpson, and both of them I worked with at ABC. And I like both of them, and admire both of them, but, you know, they seem to have made this very strange move in the midst of, you know, one second they're an objective journalist, and the next second they're a mouthpiece for a campaign. It's, you know, and, and I have to also say, you know, we always get hammered at Fox for complaining about the mainstream media and how liberal and biased they are. I mean, here are two reporters that went right from the mainstream media to work for, one for the Clinton campaign, and one for the Obama campaign. Coincidence? I think not.

For some background, former ABC News anchor Carole Simpson endorsed Hillary Clinton for president last October. As my colleague Brent Baker reported on October 21:

Endorsing Hillary Clinton for President at a Tuesday night rally in New Hampshire, former ABC News anchor/reporter Carole Simpson exclaimed, an NBC News blog reported, that “it's very freeing now that I'm not a journalist, that I'm able to speak my own mind.” But Simpson hardly hid her liberal political views during her years at ABC. “Long Live Hillary” read the headline over an online tribute from Simpson, then anchor of World News Tonight/Sunday, following Clinton's 2000 senatorial victory. At about the same time, she denounced Clarence Thomas as the “cruelest” Supreme Court justice “because he has consistently voted against human rights.” If Bush names more like him, she groused, “God help us.” The 1994 GOP congressional victories upset her: “I would like to think that the American people care about poor people, about sick people, about homeless people, and about poor children. I am shocked by the new mean-spiritedness.”

As for Douglass's biases, Baker reported on May 21 (emphasis his):

Weeks before Linda Douglass announced she would be jumping aboard the Barack Obama presidential campaign as a senior strategist, the former CBS News and ABC News Washington correspondent was already aiding the Obama campaign. Back on the May 4 Reliable Sources on CNN, for instance, she became defensive: “I hate to keep being in the position of defending Barack Obama...” Yet that's exactly what she did on a panel with Amy Holmes and Joan Walsh. On that Sunday, the weekend after Obama held a press conference to denounce Jeremiah Wright, she pronounced media attention on Wright to have “been too much” and contended: “To make your judgments about how to cast a vote for President based upon the statements of this pastor seems to be a bridge too far."

Makes Wallace's case a bit of a slam dunk, doesn't it?