HIDE your children! An other journalist is eng aging in PDCA – Pub lic Display of Clinton Affection.
Not since 1998 – when women’s magazine writer Nina Burleigh told The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz that she’d be happy to give President Bill Clinton oral sex to “thank him for keeping abortion legal” – have we seen such open and obsequious Clinton worship as ex-ABC newswoman Carole Simpson gave to Hillary last month.
At a Clinton campaign stop in New Hampshire, Simpson stood up and declared: “I want to tell you tonight, because I happen to be here with my students, that I endorse you for president of the United States. It’s very freeing now that I’m not a journalist and I can speak my mind. I think you are the woman, and I think this is the time.” The crowd erupted in applause.
Sen. Clinton immediately issued a press release about the “eloquent,” unsolicited endorsement and featured the audio clip of Simpson’s grandstanding on her campaign Web site.
Geez, Professor Simpson, get a room already.
Yes, Professor Simpson. You see, Simpson felt free to gush because she’s “not a journalist” anymore. But, as a faculty member at Emerson College’s School of Communications in Boston, she is training the next generation of Serious Media Professionals.
Weeks after joining the Hillary bandwagon, Simpson admitted to The Boston Globe that she “made a mistake.” But there will be no repercussions. Despite telling BlackAmericaWeb.com earlier this year that “I still think of myself as a reporter who is now teaching about reporting,” Simpson is now “considering an offer from the Clinton campaign to stump for the candidate” in front of black Southern audiences. In exchange, the college asked her not to teach “political journalism courses.”
But what journalism lessons wouldn’t be political in Simpson’s hands? “I anchored for 15 years,” Simpson snorted, “and I defy anyone to have determined my political feelings from that.” Oh, Professor Simpson, you make this too easy.
At the Hillary campaign event, she basked in her supposed liberation from contraints of a working journalist. But Simpson showed her pro-Clinton, liberal bias while anchoring at ABC for years without any inhibitions.
Here she is engaging in PDCA in a piece for ABCNews.com after Hillary won her Senate seat in 2000:
“What an exhilarating moment it must have been for [Hillary] – the first First Lady in history to be elected to public office. There, for all the nay-sayers to see, was the woman who had finally come into her own, free at last to be smart, outspoken, independent, and provocative, all qualities she had been forced as First Lady, to ‘hide under a bushel.’ Still she was voted one of America’s most admired women. Just wait. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
The title of her love letter: “Long Live Hillary.” Not very hard to determine the professor’s feelings from that.
Need more? Here’s Simpson gushing over Bill Clinton – and herself – in a 1999 interview at an Arkansas tomato factory
“I have to bask in this moment, for a moment, because I am here talking to the most powerful man on the planet, who was a poor boy from Arkansas. . . I am an African-American woman, grew up working class on the south side of Chicago, and this is a pretty special moment for me to be here talking to you. How does it feel talking to me? That I made it, too, when people said I wouldn’t be able to?”
Clinton responded: “It’s a great country.”
The Media Research Center also points out that Simpson also attacked Clarence Thomas in 2000as the “cruelest” Supreme Court justice “because he has consistently voted against human rights.
And the 1994 GOP sweep in Congress provoked this reaction from her: “I would like to think that the American people care about poor people, about sick people, about homeless people, and about poor children. I am shocked by the new mean-spiritedness.”
Few will be shocked by Professor Simpson’s coming-out party – or by the Clinton campaign’s ready embrace of this self-important liberal activist who has masqueraded as a fair and objective journalist for more than two decades. The only real surprise is that Simpson and her Serious Professional Journalism colleagues bother to keep up the pretense of neutrality and perform their media ethics kabuki theater.
C’mon, media titans: Just “liberate” yourselves from self-delusion, put on the Team Hillary and Team Democrat t-shirts, and be done with it.