Most Trusted Name in News? CNN political analysts Hilary Rosen, Alex Castellanos tied to BP oil

[babylonsister]

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2010/06/22/2010-06-22_most_trusted_name_in_news_cnn_political_analysts_hilary_rosen_alex_castellanos_t.html


Most Trusted Name in News? CNN political analysts Hilary Rosen, Alex Castellanos tied to BP oil
Tuesday, June 22nd 2010


Should CNN cede its trademark as the Most Trusted Name in News to the Huffington Post?

Despite poor ratings, the cable news network that Ted Turner founded in 1980 has long prided itself on journalistic integrity. But media insiders say CNN's continued ties to lobbyists and special-interest consultants - whom it bills as political analysts - now threaten its sterling reputation. And one source says the network's parent company, Time Warner, is paying close attention to the matter.

Two names that repeatedly come up are Hilary Rosen, a former recording-industry lobbyist who was hired to be a D.C. navigator for public relations consulting firm The Brunswick Group, and Alex Castellanos, a founder of public-affairs PR firm Purple Strategies. As political blogger Greg Sargent reported in The Plumline Monday, BP has retained the services of Rosen, a Democrat, who has farmed out some of the work to her fellow CNN talking head Castellanos, a Republican.

snip//

The Washington CNN source says "a lot of the network's producers are upset over this," and that CNN political director Sam Feist and Lucy Spiegel, executive director in charge of D.C.-based contributors and analysts, are under scrutiny and "pointing fingers at each other." Feist, Spiegel and Castellanos did not return calls. A colleague in Rosen's office returned our call to direct us to Emery's statement, calling the matter a "nonissue." Gatecrasher wonders if Ted Turner thinks it's a nonissue, too.

[Vinnie From Indy]

1. The funniest part ofthe OP is the part where it offers CNN has a "sterling" reputation

CNN is actually more dangerous than FOX News in that it "appears" more legit when in fact it is the same BS in a kindler, gentler wrapper. Let no one forget the parade of military folks working in secret with the Pentagon that appeared on CNN to pimp the war in Iraq. A sterling piece of crap is more accurate.

[Junkdrawer]

6. Next you're going to tell me that Jenna Jamison isn't a virgin....n/t

[KharmaTrain]

2. And This Is News?

Chicken Noodle Nuze has had corporate hacks as "experts" and "commentators" for years. What do you expect from a network that loves that corporate money...especially from groups like the American Petroleum Institute and Chamber of Commerce as well as others who know their money gets them access to spin stories.

This network lost its "sterling" reputation over a decade ago...it's been a joke (and the ratings prove it) since...

[flyarm]

3. and so are those close to Obama..

ahhh the strange bedfellows.....remember Dashle who pushed Obama during our primaries..and was one of his top advisors...........working with Whitman..the lady who lied about the air quality at Ground zero in NY?? Can i tickle your memory..she lied and people died and keep dying!! And that is just one example..

Spill, Baby, Spill
By Michael Isikoff, Ian Yarett and Matthew Philips | NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated May 10, 2010

BP has been trying hard to burnish its public image in recent years after being hit with a pair of environmental disasters, including a fatal refinery explosion in Texas and a pipeline leak in Alaska. One major step was to announce, in 2007, that it had hired a high-powered advisory board that included former EPA director Christine Todd Whitman, former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, and Leon Panetta, who were each paid $120,000 a year. (Panetta left when he became President Obama's CIA director.) Two years ago the oil giant's chief executive, Robert Malone, flew board members out to the Gulf of Mexico on a helicopter to demonstrate the safeguards surrounding BP's advanced drilling technology. "We got a sense they were really committed to ensuring they got it right," Whitman told NEWSWEEK.

Now BP, formerly known as British Petroleum, finds itself blamed for what could prove to be the worst oil spill in U.S. history. And only weeks after Obama announced an ambitious plan to open up more U.S. offshore waters to oil drilling, shunting aside environmental concerns from his own Democratic Party, his administration is facing a comeuppance from hell. "There was a lot of wishful thinking, I guess," says Villy Kourafalou, a scientist at the University of Miami's Rosensteil School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. "The new technologies were said to be so wonderful that we'd never have an oil spill again." Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), who had sought to block the expanded drilling, says the oil and gas industry was pushing this idea hard. "They said, 'We'll never have a repeat of Santa Barbara,'?" referring to the 1969 rig explosion off the California coast. Both the Bush and Obama administrations "were buying the line that the technology was fine," Pallone adds.

BP pressed hard to make that point in D.C. Its PR efforts included payments of $16 million last year to a battery of Washington lobbyists, among them the firm of Tony Podesta, the brother of former Obama transition chief John Podesta. Last fall, after the U.S. Interior Department proposed tighter federal regulation of oil companies' environmental programs, David Rainey, BP's vice president for Gulf of Mexico exploration, told Congress that the proposal was unnecessary. "I think we need to remember," he said, that offshore drilling "has been going on for the last 50 years, and it has been going on in a way that is both safe and protective of the environment."

Read the full article at:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/237298

[mod mom]

4. HuffPost cuts ties with BP consultant Rosen

June 04, 2010
Categories: Internet
HuffPost cuts ties with BP consultant Rosen

The liberal news site Huffington Post has cut ties with its former Washington Editor at Large, Hilary Rosen, because of Rosen's new role as a consultant for the embattled oil company British Petroleum.

Rosen, a Washington figure and former chief music industry lobbyist, now heads the Washington office of the Brunswick Group, which is part of a phalanx of lobbying and communications firms retained by BP to battle Congressional and Administrative retribution and new regulation for its massive Gulf oil spill.

"Hilary is no longer our Washington Editor at Large, a mutual decision we recently reached given her involvement with BP," wrote Arianna Huffington in an email today, responding to a query from POLITICO. "However, we still have a great personal relationship. And, of course, Hilary’s work with BP has had zero effect on our coverage of the company or the disaster in the gulf. Comprehensive and hard-hitting, our coverage speaks for itself."

Rosen's shift is recent enough that her Huffington Post and Brunswick biographies still describes her as Washington Editor-at-Large. She has not written for the site, however, since January.

-snip
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0610/HuffPost_cuts_ties_with_BP_consultant_Rosen.html

[SoCalDem]

5. Wow.. whorehouses have ..well.... whores living there

When "news" venues became primarily businesses, they laid off most of their full-time "real" journalists and instead relied on contract workers/stringers. These folks have families and and old age to prep for, so of course they contract their "services" to just about anyone who will pay.. no surprise

[mod mom]

7. The Nation: The Media-Lobbying Complex

The Media-Lobbying Complex


-snip

These incidents represent only a fraction of the covert corporate influence peddling on cable news, a four-month investigation by The Nation has found. Since 2007 at least seventy-five registered lobbyists, public relations representatives and corporate officials--people paid by companies and trade groups to manage their public image and promote their financial and political interests--have appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, CNBC and Fox Business Network with no disclosure of the corporate interests that had paid them. Many have been regulars on more than one of the cable networks, turning in dozens--and in some cases hundreds--of appearances.

For lobbyists, PR firms and corporate officials, going on cable television is a chance to promote clients and their interests on the most widely cited source of news in the United States. These appearances also generate good will and access to major players inside the Democratic and Republican parties. For their part, the cable networks, eager to fill time and afraid of upsetting the political elite, have often looked the other way. At times, the networks have even disregarded their own written ethics guidelines. Just about everyone involved is heavily invested in maintaining the current system, with the exception of the viewer.

While lobbyists and PR flacks have long tried to spin the press, the launch of Fox News and MSNBC in 1996 and the Clinton impeachment saga that followed helped create the caldron of twenty-four-hour political analysis that so many influence peddlers call home. Since then, guests with serious conflicts of interest have popped up with alarming regularity on every network. Just examine their presence in coverage of the economic crash and the healthcare reform debate, two recent issues that have engendered massive cable coverage.

As the recession slammed the country in late 2008 and government bailouts followed, lobbyists and PR flacks took to the air with troubling regularity, advocating on behalf of clients and their interests while masquerading as neutral analysts. One was Bernard Whitman, president of Whitman Insight Strategies, a communications firm that specializes in helping "guide successful lobbying, communications and information campaigns through targeted research." Whitman's clients have included lobbying firms like BGR Group and marketing/PR firms like Ogilvy & Mather, which in turn have numerous corporate clients with a vested interest in shaping federal policies. Whitman is a veteran of the Clinton era and when making television appearances continues to be identified for work he did almost a decade earlier.

-snip

http://www.thenation.com/article/media-lobbying-complex


these two are just more DLC types getting called out for their greed!