John Fund:
If George Stephanopoulos had simply donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation while also serving as one of its favorite media panelists, the controversy over his conflicts of interest would be much less. Stephanopoulos would be guilty of a clear error, but he also would have had a lot of media company.
What makes his scandal different is that he himself chose to interrogate Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, the new exposé on the Clinton Foundation. If you watch the interview, it’s pretty obvious that Stephanopoulos is playing prosecuting attorney against Schweizer while also declining to ask key questions, for instance, about Hugh Rodham, Hillary Clinton’s brother and his highly questionable dealings involving the foundation. In an op-ed today in USA Today, Schweizer says he views himself as a victim of “hidden hand journalism” in which his work was undermined without the audience’s knowing the interviewer’s biases.
That is no doubt one reason that Carole Simpson, a former colleague of Stephanopoulos’s at ABC News, decided to drop a bomb on him today on Reliable Sources, CNN’s media-criticism show. “There is a coziness that George cannot escape,” Simpson explained. “While he did try to separate himself from his political background to become a journalist, he really isn’t a journalist. . . . And I am sorry that again the public trust in the media is being challenged and frayed because of the actions of some of the top people in the business.”
Simpson also stated the obvious: “While ABC News says it was ‘an honest mistake,’ they don’t feel that way. Secretly, they are hopping mad, I am sure.”
They should be looking in the mirror. As Byron York has laid out in the Washington Examiner, the danger signals about Stephanopoulos were evident nearly 20 years ago when he was hired by ABC News almost immediately after he left the Clinton White House. We know from his 1999 memoir that upon his departure in late 1996, he told Hillary Clinton that he loved her. York noted that for a few years ABC News put up a pretense of calling Stephanopoulos an analyst and assuring people he wouldn’t be reporting on politics: “He will not report the news,” an ABC spokesman assured York in 1999. But in 2002, Stephanopoulos was named the host of ABC’s Sunday-morning interview show This Week, and in short order he became ABC’s “chief Washington correspondent.”
