Staff from within CBS News are expressing their dismay at the company’s decision to hire ex-Donald Trump chief of staff Mick Mulvaney as a pundit for the network, the Washington Postreported.
On Tuesday, the company announced that the former Trump aide, who was notorious for spreading falsehoods and bashing the very press he’s now joining as an on-air contributor, would be a welcome addition to the network for the varied experience he would bring from within the White House (he’s served as both Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget and chief of staff).
Notably missing from Mr Mulvaney’s first introduction on CBS, however, was that important context.
“So happy to have you here … you’re the guy to ask about this,” anchor Anne-Marie Green said, introducing Mr Mulvaney as a “former Office of Management and Budget director”, but failing to mention under which administration.
The Washington Post reported that an emailed message from the standards department at CBS was later circulated to staff, without explicitly referencing that morning’s segment, to remind staff that “as we introduce these folks, we must always identify relevant background and biographical information,” including the specific administration a person worked for as a necessary disclosure.
The Post went on to report that, according to a recording obtained of CBS News’ co-president Neeraj Khemlani addressing staff about the new hire, the decision to bring Mr Mulvaney into the CBS family was part of a larger strategy to bring in people who can help with “access” to otherwise untapped parts of the political spectrum.
“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,” the network’s co-president said, according to the Post’s reporting.
“A lot of the people that we’re bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation.”
It’s not uncommon for administration officials to go on to cushy contributor jobs, oftentimes raking in annual six-figure salaries. But the particular gripe that has put some CBS staff, and many political journalists online, at unease is the record of truth-telling that Mr Mulvaney exhibited during his tenure in the Trump administration, and has much less to do with the fact that he worked under the previous president.
One anonymous source who works at CBS News told the Post that: “everyone I talked to today was embarrassed about the hiring”, while another staff member, who also asked the news outlet for anonymity because they were unauthorised to comment on the matter, said “everyone is baffled”.
The ire that’s being drawn up by Mr Mulvaney’s hiring stems from his track record both with the press and with the truth.
Poynter Institute’s Politifact, a nonprofit group of fact-checking journalists who have won a Pulitzer Prize for their work probing political claims made during the 2008 presidential election, ranks Mr Mulvaney’s scorecard as mostly false, false and at best, half-true.
In February 2020, while acting White House chief of staff, Mr Mulvaney attended the Conservative Political Action Conference and, while a deadly and then unknown virus was spreading across the globe and beginning to take hold in the US, he falsely claimed the “attention” then nascent pandemic was receiving was the press’ fault.
“They think this is going to be what brings down the president,” he told a room full of conservatives. “We know how to handle this.”
And in 2017, when acting as the head of the Office of Management and Budget, he went to the White House lectern and defended a Trump administration decision to withhold military aid from Ukraine for political purposes.
