Staff members at CBS News are in an uproar over the venerable news department’s hiring of former Trump White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney as a news commentator.
Their indignation is understandable and proper. Mulvaney, a long-time Republican functionary, distinguished himself during his tenure in the administration as a loyal Trump lackey.
He showed a micron-deep understanding of political and economic issues even when he served as Trump’s budget director and acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
If he loses, Trump will bow out gracefully.
— Mick Mulvaney, the new political commentator for CBS, showing how well he knew Trump in 2020
But he displayed a bottomless capacity to promote Trump’s political goals, which boiled down the evisceration of federal programs aimed at helping the average American.
We’ll get into the details in a moment. But first, let’s examine the explanation that CBS brass offered to the network’s news staff when they questioned Mulvaney’s hiring.
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“Being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms,” CBS News co-president Neeraj Khemlani told staff members, according to the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi, who was working from a bootlegged recording of the meeting. “A lot of the people that we’re bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation.”
This is, of course, absurd. CBS is perfectly entitled to hire as many lobbyists as it wishes to make its case on Capitol Hill; putting them on the air, in essence to lobby the public, is another matter entirely. One question it raises is what value Mulvaney brings to the table. He’s hardly a neutral voice, but if he’s on the air merely to present his partisan slant, who needs him? Don’t we get enough of that from elected politicians?
To be fair, CBS isn’t the only news organization trying to curry favor in this way. In the old days, political types offering nothing but spin would be thrown out of the press room; now they’re given a well-paid sinecure to provide “balance.”
What Khemlani doesn’t appreciate — or maybe he does and doesn’t care — is that the quest for “access” has become the scourge of American journalism.
It’s what produces puff pieces about political insiders (they’re known in the trade as “beat sweeteners”) and softball questions for politicians on the Sunday TV news programs.
TV news has become expert at taking people at their own level of self-esteem. What that fails to produce, however, is incisive news coverage of the sort crucial to the workings of our democracy.
So here comes Mick Mulvaney, introduced for his first appearance as a CBS commentator by anchor Anne-Marie Green to deliver his opinion of President Biden’s proposed billionaires income tax.
“So happy to have you here,” Green fawned. “You’re the guy to ask about this.” The burden of her introduction was that Mulvaney was a Man Who Knows, but with his first words he acknowledged that he didn’t know anything more about the billionaires tax than was embodied in Biden’s own proposal; beyond that, his analysis was largely dismissive and, more to the point, indistinguishable from what one might hear from any GOP politician. (Mulvaney served as a Republican congressman from South Carolina from 2011 to 2017.)
Now let’s take a closer look at Mulvaney’s qualifications to opine about public issues. He was always someone who never let facts get in the way of partisan goals.
Start with his appearance in March 2017 on the CBS Sunday program “Face the Nation,” when he was director of the Office of…
Read More: Hiltzik: Mick Mulvaney, commentator? What is CBS thinking?