The Washington Post’s New Hire Shows Media Will Never Hold Themselves Accountable.
The Washington Post just announced they hired Alexi McCammond to be a new opinion editor. Having any idea who Alexi McCammond is, much less caring about her, is exactly the kind of political inside baseball I don’t expect anyone to know. I do this stuff professionally, and the news business has been so dispiriting for so long that I don’t remember when my professional duty to keep up with developments in the news business started to resemble rubbernecking.
But if you’re looking for a tale of why the media establishment deserves every ounce of righteous anger you can muster — these stories are not in short supply, I know — it’s hard to top the continued professional failing upward of Alexi McCammond.
So here’s the whirlwind recap: McCammond arrived on everyone’s radar as a plucky young reporter covering Democrats for Axios. She started covering Biden’s presidential campaign, where she met Biden campaign press secretary T.J. Ducklo, and shortly after Ducklo was diagnosed with lung cancer in December of 2019, she was driving him to his treatments. “When TJ was diagnosed … I had a sense then how much he meant to me,” McCammond said.
The details of how and when the relationship that followed got started are hazy — McCammond was supposedly in a relationship in the beginning, Ducklo was not — but they told their respective bosses about their relationship in November of 2020, rather conveniently after the election. Had the two been public about a relationship before then, McCammond almost certainly would have been pulled off of covering the 2020 campaign. This would have been very bad for an ambitious young McCammond’s career. It wouldn’t have looked great for Biden either, but that depends on how willing the D.C. press corps is to criticize one of their own for being physically intimate with a Democratic campaign rather than just metaphorically so.
Then:
Since then, the media landscape hasn’t gotten any better. McCammond told her bosses all her reporting on the campaign was effectively compromised, and this time around her employer’s public response was “we stand behind her and her coverage,” and she was “a valued member of the Axios team.” Not only was she not fired, a few months later she participated in a gauzy PR campaign to make the relationship public. Said PR campaign was almost certainly coordinated with White House participation, or at least it appeared in the Biden White House’s favorite outlet for ludicrously obsequious news dumps: People magazine. Actual quote from Ducklo about their relationship: “We’re both really happy, and we wanted to do it the right way.”
Read the whole thing.
h/t Stephen Green