The Washington Free Beacon broke the news that ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos, who helped President Bill Clinton juggle various scandals during the 1992 campaign and as White House communication director, has made a total of $75,000 in donations to the controversial Clinton Foundation.
Yet he failed to disclose that before grilling Peter Schweizer, author of Clinton Cash, a major conflict of interest that's led to a hammering by both Republicans and his fellow journalists. The book's subtitle says it all: "The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich."
The former Democratic operative turned journalist issued an on-air apology Friday morning on ABC's Good Morning America and has pulled out of moderating ABC News' Republican primary debate in February 2016.
The New York Times ran a surprising front-page story Friday, "Stephanopoulos Gifts Reinforce G.O.P. Doubts," by Jeremy Peters and John Koblin, which actually touched on examples of Stephanopoulos bias against the GOP, though claiming that such bias had previously been only "circumstantial." Oh really?
Even after more than a decade as an analyst, anchor and public face for ABC News, George Stephanopoulos has never been able to shake the image that many Republicans have of him: Clinton hatchet man.
That image was glaring to the Republican strategists who blocked him from moderating a debate last year in the Senate race in Iowa.
It was the elephant in the room in 2011 when, after an interview that Mitt Romney’s advisers saw as especially argumentative, Mr. Stephanopoulos visited the campaign’s headquarters to try to reassure them that he was impartial.
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On Thursday, the question of Mr. Stephanopoulos’s political leanings and his future as a leader of the network’s campaign coverage spilled out into the open as he acknowledged donating $75,000 to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation over the past three years. He withdrew from playing any role in a planned Republican primary debate on ABC and called his donations an “uncharacteristic lapse.”
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But his disclosure of the contributions -- made after the conservative Washington Free Beacon started asking ABC News questions -- seemed only to deepen Republicans’ distrust in the most recognizable political journalist at the most-watched news network in the country.
Criticism from both party leaders and news media experts was more acute, because Mr. Stephanopoulos had just last month conducted an aggressive interview with Peter Schweizer, the author of a new book about the Clinton Foundation. During the interview, Mr. Stephanopoulos seemed to dismiss Mr. Schweizer’s reporting about conflicts of interest among donors to the charity who also had matters pending before the State Department. “We’ve done investigative work here at ABC News, found no proof of any kind of direct action,” he said.
Conservatives have a long list of grievances against Mr. Stephanopoulos dating back to when the American public first caught a glimpse of him as a scruffy caffeine-addicted and fiercely partisan strategist for Bill Clinton in “The War Room,” a documentary about the 1992 campaign.
Until now, though, allegations that he lacked journalistic objectivity had been mostly circumstantial -- a badgering interview, a series of off-subject questions in a debate. As he reminds his detractors regularly, including on Thursday, his history shows that he is not shy about asking difficult questions of Democrats and Hillary Rodham Clinton, like the time he pressed her in a debate in 2008 about why most voters did not find her honest and trustworthy.
The Times actually addressed some Republican beefs with Stephanopoulos's slanted coverage:
In 2012 advisers in the Romney campaign actively lobbied to exclude Mr. Stephanopoulos from the primary debates to no avail. Conservatives say their fears were borne out during the ABC News debate in New Hampshire that year. Mr. Stephanopoulos repeatedly asked Mr. Romney if he believed that states could outlaw birth control -- a question that the Romney campaign saw as off-point and far afield of the issues that concerned voters. Mr. Stephanopoulos pressed repeatedly, asking six follow-up questions.
Many Republicans have blamed him -- unfairly and conspiratorially, Democrats say -- for the genesis of the “war on women” line of attack, which became a defining campaign issue in 2012....
