Chelsea Clinton has announced the obvious: she’s leaving NBC News, telling People magazine in a statement she will “continue focusing on my work at the Clinton Foundation and as [her husband] Marc [Mezvinsky] and I look forward to welcoming our first child." New York magazine tweaked the news that Chelsea was "Leaving Her Unbelievably Cushy Fake Job at NBC."
As NBC nepotism goes, she made Luke Russert look like Edward R. Murrow. She’s been featured in only three reports in the last year, but still making the $600,000 salary. (So that's about $200,000 a story while her "news" career was in limbo, also known as the "Hillary speech rate.") We found her entire career was 30 reports (and four of those ran more than once). From June 14:
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.
After that report, NBC aired two more Chelsea segments on Nightly News, on June 21 and on August 1.
Earlier Bozell & Graham column: Chelsea Clinton's baby, politicized
