Now that CNN is in full High Dudgeon mode against Attorney General Jeff Sessions, asking whether he can "last" in office, Ben Shapiro at the Daily Wire reminds us that in the midst of Inauguration hoopla, CNN announced it had hired Laura Jarrett, the daughter of powerful Obama aide Valerie Jarrett, to be a correspondent at the Justice Department.
Valerie Jarrett wasn’t just President Obama’s top advisor. She’s also personally close to the Obamas to the extent that she’s reportedly moving in with them in their new Washington, D.C. digs. Jarrett called Trump’s election a “punch in the stomach…soul-crushing.”
Jarrett is a Harvard-educated lawyer, but has zero experience in journalism. (She has donated to Obama, twice.) It might look to some people like NBC News hiring Chelsea Clinton, except NBC put Chelsea on the Happy News beat, reporting on Paul McCartney's daughter being a vegetarian and interviewing the GEICO Gecko like that was news. That's different than hard-news coverage of a top Trump cabinet official doing ontroversial Trumpian things like enforcing the immigration laws.
Apparently, CNN quietly hired Jarrett in September, but she did not appear in a CNN transcript until January 23, but a Nexis search shows her name is already in 61 transcripts in the first few weeks, which is also much more frequent than Chelsea's dilettante dabblings.
Shapiro concluded with a good hardball at the family ties of the liberal media:
This is nothing new from the mainstream media-Democratic Party complex. Ben Rhodes, the National Security Advisor to President Obama who actively lied to the entire media about the Iran deal, is brother to David Rhodes, president of CBS. ABC News correspondent Claire Shipman is the wife of Jay Carney, former Obama press secretary. George Stephanopoulos, ABC News’ leading anchor, is a former Clinton staffer. Ben Sherwood, president of Disney-ABC television group, is brother to former Obama special assistant Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall.
The media claim that such relationships have no bearing on coverage. Perhaps. Or maybe, just maybe, people with close relationships to those in power tend to favor those people in their coverage. After all, that’s the entire basis of the rumors about President Trump’s conflicts of interests with regard to his businesses, which are now supposedly run by his children – their relationship makes him more likely to act in corrupt fashion to benefit those businesses. Why wouldn’t that same logic apply to the media?
PS: Here's a Twitter signal that Laura is going to fit in quite nicely with liberal CNN:
"undocumented" doesn't = criminal -- my explanation via @CNNPolitics https://t.co/Zx3BZR9SAN
— Laura Jarrett (@LauraAJarrett) February 25, 2017
