George Stephanopoulos made the mistake of buying the song of the Mighty Wurlitzer and apologizing for his donations to the Clinton Foundation, and as somebody who has been around the noise machine for decades, he should have known that once his blood hit the water, the sharks would come to rip him to pieces.
It has been a rough weekend for ABC News’s embattled chief anchor, George Stephanopoulos, and an even worse Sunday.
On CNN’s Reliable Sources media criticism program, Stephanopoulos’s former ABC News colleague, Carole Simpson, unloaded on the former top aide to Bill and Hillary Clinton that she said she likes and respects.
“There is a coziness that George cannot escape,” said Simpson, who toiled for two decades at ABC News, notably as the weekend anchor of World News Tonight from 1988 to 2003. “While he did try to separate himself from his political background to become a journalist, he really isn’t a journalist.”
Thus Simpson attempted to obliterate Stephanopoulos’s claims of impartiality as the 2016 presidential campaign heats up, featuring Hillary Clinton’s status as the prohibitive frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.
Like Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter and another former ABC News colleague, Jeff Greenfield, Simpson said she was “dumbfounded” by Thursday’s revelation that Stephanopoulos failed to disclose $75,000 in recent donations to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation—this, as he conducted a confrontational April 26 interview with Clinton Foundation critic Peter Schweizer.
“I wanted to just take him by the neck and say, ‘George, what were you thinking?’ Clearly, he was not thinking. I thought it was outrageous,” Simpson said. “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 added that despite Stephanopoulos’s alleged lack of journalistic bona fides, “ABC has made him the face of ABC News, the chief anchor, and I think they’re really caught in a quandary here. While ABC says this was ‘an honest mistake,’ they don’t feel that way. Secretly, they are hopping mad, I am sure.”
It’s kind of hard to feel totally sorry for George the Villager, his Sunday show exists as nothing but empty space to fill with what NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen dubbed “The View From Nowhere” way back in 2003, and ironically it’s now Stephanopoulos who is caught in this No Man’s Land.
Suddenly his Clintonian past is very much the present, and in the space of a week he’s gone from ABC’s front man to evil Clinton operative, and the long knives are out.
I’d say good riddance to him if there was any chance ABC would install a real journalist at This Week, but then again he was hired for being a Villager in the first place, and everyone knew it. Suddenly that’s an issue and everyone’s circling, looking for signs of weakness.
So yes, I’m torn between seeing somebody who should definitely be in the tumbrel get rolled down the street and hating the sight of another “liberal media” head on the Rough Beast’s wall.
Stinks seeing the bad guys about to score again.