Well-connected journalists

Posted on by

I learned recently that the wife of the foreign minister of Poland is a columnist for the Washington Post. Or, should I say, the husband of a Washington Post columnist is the foreign minister of Poland. (I also learned that said columnist is not a fan of Hilary Clinton–perhaps not the most diplomatic thing to say right now, foreign policy-wise?)

What I’m wondering, though, is how common this sort of thing is, for a major journalist to have open political connections. Here I’m not thinking of retired politicians who write for the press (an op-ed by Newt Gingrich, a column by Eliot Spitzer) or pundits and politicos such as William F. Buckley and Pat Buchanan who appear on TV, but someone with this kind of political role who has what seems to be more of a straight journalist job.

I’m certainly not trying to imply that there’s anything wrong here–I’d be the last to claim that relation by marriage to the foreign minister of a midsize country is any disqualification from commenting about politics–I’m just wondering how often this occurs, and whether it’s more common now than in earlier decades. I recall seeing occasional conflict-of-interest items of this sort before, but always on a case-by-case basis.

P.S. When I posted this at the sister blog, several commenters named the husband-wife couple of NBC’s Andrea Mitchell and Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan. There must be a lot more though, no? What I was imagining was not a list of individually prominent cases, but some kind of count, even if incomplete.

8 thoughts on “Well-connected journalists”

  2. I'd put her in the Pat Buchanan category–a politico who's on TV–not in the category of a journalist who happens to have political connections.

  3. Don't think it's just marriage. Somerby has been all over this for a while. <a>Here he discusses "Michael Chertoff, then an assistant attorney general," being a guest at David Gregory's wife's baby shower. He goes on to say

    But big Washington journos live in a world of wealth and insider connection—a world that seldom gets discussed in the press corps. Your press corps knows to play by the rules! It rarely discusses … the shoulder-rubbing that may transpire among its biggest players. They cluck about this—in other professions. They clam when it comes to their own.

    suggesting a list may be hard to find.

  4. I don't follow the personal lives of the press, but I'm sure there are quite a few. I can think of two recent ones off the top of my head.

    Christiane Amanpour is one. She is married to James Rubin and he was one of the various Assistant Secretaries and a chief spokesman for the state department during the Clinton administration while they were married. This seems even more relevant considering her specialty was international issues. According to Rubin's wikipedia page he's also an informal adviser to Obama and Clinton currently.

    I also know Peter Orzag is engaged to someone who works as a reporter for ABC.

  5. There are three well-known examples in France:
    – Anne Sinclair, wife of Dominique Strauss-Kahn
    – Béatrice Schönberg, wife of Jean-Louis Borloo (minister of Ecology and vice-president of the UMP party)
    – Christine Ockrent, wife of Bernard Kouchner (minister of Foreign Affairs)

    Sinclair and Schönberg have interrupted their careers at times when their husbands were given major political offices.

    Also, Wikipedia tells me that Connie Schultz, 2005 Pullitzer Prize winner, is married to Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH). To find more, see <a href="http://toolserver.org/~daniel/WikiSense/CategoryIntersect.php?wikilang=en&wikifam=.wikipedia.org&basecat=Spouses+of+politicians&basedeep=6&mode=cs&tagcat=Journalists&tagdeep=6&go=Trouver&format=html&userlang=fr&quot; rel="nofollow">this link.

  7. The lady who is now president of Harvard launched her academic career as a historian by divorcing her first husband and marrying her history department chairman at Penn.

    There used to be a lot of rules against marital nepotism, but they mostly got junked after feminism came along. Ambitious women tend to marry powerful men, so the old rules tended to restrict women's advancement.

Comments are closed.