On Friday, after the announcement that State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert would be the next U.N. Ambassador, The Washington Post mocked President Trump for hiring former Fox News personalities, titling its article, “The Foxification of the Trump White House, visualized.”
The Post noted, “Before working at the State Department, she worked for Fox News — specifically, for Trump’s favorite show, ‘Fox & Friends.’” The Post pointed out that Bill Shine, former co-president of Fox News, is now the head of communications for the White House, adding, “That’s a remarkable bit of interplay between the administration and the network that is also the only one Trump has praised regularly since taking office, the one he watches the most and the one that’s the most popular with his base.”
In addition to Nauert and Shine, the Post listed former head of communications Hope Hicks; national security advisor John Bolton; Mercedes Schlapp; Anthony Scaramucci; Tony Sayegh at the Treasury Department; John McEntee, K.T. McFarland, and Sebastian Gorka. Hilariously, the Post also listed Kimberly Guilfoyle because she is Donald Trump Jr.s’ girlfriend.
The Post concluded: “The point should nonetheless be obvious: The interplay between Trump and Fox News that plays out on Twitter has frequently extended much further than that.”
Of course, the Post ignored the intimate relationship between its iconic hero, former President Barack Obama, and the press, when it came to hiring practices. By September 2013, only halfway through Obama’s tenure, his administration had hired at least 24 reporters to work for them, as The Atlantic noted.
The Atlantic wrote, “A wave of reporters went to work for President Obama early in the administration, a time when many media organizations were going through layoffs and Obama’s approval rating was sky-high.”
Here’s a partial list from The Atlantic. Mind you, this was only halfway through Obama’s tenure:
Douglas Frantz at the State Department; he had at the The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times until 2009,
Boston Globe online politics editor Glen Johnson, who joined Secretary of State John Kerry in January as a senior adviser.
Stephen Barr at the Labor Department; he had penned the Federal Diary column for The Washington Post.
The Washington Post’s Shailagh Murray, who became Vice President Joe Biden’s communications director .
Rosa Brooks, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, became counselor to Michele Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy.
Desson Thomson, who became a speechwriter for the U.S. ambassador to the U.K., and had served as a film critic for The Washington Post.
Roberta Baskin, who supervised the Center for Public Integrity, then joined the Department of Health and Human Services.
Education Week reporter David Hoff joined the Education Department in May 2009.
Sasha Johnson, a senior political producer for CNN, served as spokeswoman for the Department of Transportation.
The Chicago Tribune’s Jill Zuckman, who served as the Department of Transportation’s communications director.
Rick Weiss , who worked for the The Washington Post, then became the communications director and senior policy strategist in the White House Office of Science and Technology.
For more names, see here.