Of course, the faux fury evidenced a double standard. A number of Democratic operatives had already jumped across the fairly narrow divide between political advocacy and journalism with nary a peep of protest. One of the better known and most respected people who has successfully made the transition is Tim Russert. Russert served on the Senate staff of Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and has been host of NBC's Meet the Press since 1991. Russert has earned a reputation as a tough, but fair interviewer.
Molinari never attracted enough viewers to last long on CBS, but that has not stopped others from transitioning from politics to journalism. The notion that a partisan cannot be a good journalist rests on the false assumption that conventional journalists are apolitical.
No serious person can cover politics as a journalist and not develop opinions and perspectives. These views cannot help but inform journalistic coverage. The best one can hope for is that journalists are sufficiently introspective to try to be balanced in their reporting. The one advantage of having a known partisan as a journalist is that at least the perspective from which that person reports is apparent. News consumers are thus free to weigh this potential bias with the information presented.
Another partisan that seemed to have made a successful transition from partisanship to journalism is George Stephanopoulos. Stephanopoulos was the White House Communications Director for President Clinton and is now the host of ABC's This Week.
Recently, Stephanopoulos interviewed his old boss, one-on-one. One might have thought that ABC would blush, at least a little, in embarrassment to have a former president being interviewed by his former chief Communications Director, the person hired to handle the press, in a straight news interview. The lineup has the outward credibility of a political infomercial.
Stephanopoulos has generally been earnest and sincerely attempts to be balanced. This is what makes his performance when interviewing former President Bill Clinton so disappointing. We have come to expect that Clinton would violate the polite and respectful convention of not commenting on a successor President's policies. It is no surprise that Clinton dissembles and deliberately misleads in conspicuous ways. However, one would have hoped that Stephanopoulos would have called Clinton on a few of his more outrageous remarks.
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