Washington Post is appalled
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When word came the other day that a former top Trump aide, Mick Mulvaney, was joining CBS News as a paid pundit, the move was met with a fair amount of disgust — both inside and outside the network.
Why hire this partisan, the White House acting chief of staff for a time, who had such an execrable record of enabling his boss’s corruption and reinforcing his lies? What journalistic purpose could this possibly serve?
It was hard to understand until my colleague Jeremy Barr got hold of a recording of a CBS staff meeting that answered the question.
“If you look at some of the people that we’ve been hiring on a contributor basis, 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,” Neeraj Khemlani, the news division’s co-president, told the staff of the network’s morning show.
“A lot of the people that we’re bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation.”
And there it was: access.
