Dylan Byers and Maggie Haberman of Politico reported Chelsea Clinton earned an annual salary of $600,000 at NBC News before switching to a month-to-month contract earlier this year.
This might not be a shocking number if the former president’s daughter was an experienced journalist with tons of charisma...and if she was churning out a pile of stories. So how many stories do you think Chelsea filed since joining NBC in November 2011?
The Business Insider website guessed 14, so they missed about half.
Our count using the Nexis news-data retrieval system is 28. That’s 14 stories in her first 12 months, 13 in her second 12 months, and only one since last November. Four of those ran more than once, so that’s 24 original stories. Most of her stories were fluffy stories about baby elephants or street musicians.
In other words, she was producing less than one story a month for about $50,000. How this doesn’t look like a Comcast/NBC favor to the Clintons is anyone’s guess. Remember that she was only the "talent" in these segments, the face and voice. The people writing and editing these segments were surely much poorer than Chelsea.
The whole enterprise has seemed over since last June, when NBC’s primetime magazine show Rock Center was cancelled. She did one Nightly News story on September 20, 2013, and then one this year on January 13. So for the last five months, it’s money for nothing.
Politico was right to add The New York Post take on this: in the end it looks like “just another spoiled, aimless child of rich, successful parents chauffeured through adulthood by Mommy and Daddy’s connections.”
