Woah. Philadelphia Blog Attytood obviously has more stomach for the smug and self-obsessed than I have and has actually been reading Arianna Huffington’s group blog. In doing so he’s come across this nugget of pure political gold:
“…the overhyped site has been up and running for less than 24 hours, and already one of its many “group bloggers” has accidentially dropped a scoop right in Attytood’s lap.
The highly rated news anchor for the ABC affiliate in Pittsburgh (in a key battleground state, you’ll recall) admits in his very first post that — in so many words — he’s a conservative mole in the mainstream media, that he’s actively helping a Karl Rove acolyte to train new right-wing journalists, and that one of his “star pupils” is none other than the notorious “Jeff Gannon,” the gay-hooker-turned-bogus-pro-GOP journalist.
The TV newsman is named Scott Baker, and for nearly a decade he’s been the anchorman on the 5 p.m. and noon newscasts on WTAE (Channel 4) in Pittsburgh, a Hearst-Argyle station that carries ABC programming.
But Baker has another job — one that he doesn’t list on his resume, although he does (sort of) ‘fess up in his Huffington Post post. It turns out he teaches journalism to young conservatives at the Leadership Institute School of Broadcast Journalism, founded by Karl Rove associate and former national Young Republican director Morton Blackwell. And anchorman Baker is not just their star instructor — he’s also a graduate.”
A neat little illustration of the porousness between US journalism, paid lobbying and politics – not that the UK is much better; after all we are the country in which a Prime Minister elected on barely a third of the potential vote can appoint an unelected crony to the cabinet. But I digress. This is a very juicy nugget of information, if true.
