By Becket Adams
Sunday, March 29, 2026
Scott MacFarlane, a former CBS News legal correspondent,
has made the jump from network news to outright left-wing advocacy. The move is
inherently funny, especially given that his peers initially hailed his
resignation from CBS as a great moment in principled journalism.
For our purposes, however, MacFarlane’s professional
downward spiral is more than funny. It’s a reminder of that oft-overlooked
revolving door between the legacy press and progressive chop shops.
We’re not talking about reporters who quit journalism to
become press secretaries to the president or take communications gigs in
Congress or the federal government. Those moves are commonplace and defensible.
Mainstream journalists do it; conservative journalists do it. (Though, if we’re
being honest, for every Tony Snow there are about a dozen Jay Carneys.)
We’re talking about reporters who jump from the major
leagues of journalism into openly, nakedly partisan advocacy. The list of
people who’ve done this recently is longer than you might realize.
First, there’s MacFarlane himself, who quit CBS in a huff
this month, alleging a loss of journalistic independence at the network. Two
weeks later, he announced that he had taken a gig at a progressive slop-farm
called MeidasTouch, which originally launched as an explicitly anti-Trump PAC.
Next, there’s Kate Smith, who removed all doubt that she
had used her perch at CBS News to defend and promote abortion when she quit her
journalism job in 2022 to join Planned Parenthood as its first-ever “senior
director of news content.”
Lastly, and perhaps most notoriously, there’s Tara
McGowan, who left CBS News to launch Courier Newsroom, a network of websites cleverly disguised
as authentic local news outlets but designed solely to disseminate Democratic
Party talking points. In 2019, McGowan, who has the slogan “Yes, we can”
tattooed on her left arm where former President Barack Obama once signed his
autograph, raised an estimated $25 million from liberal donors to fund her
faux-news network, which, again, exists for the sole purpose of promoting
left-wing politicians and policies.
Seriously, what’s going on at CBS? Bari Weiss has her
work cut out for her.
Elsewhere in the media, there’s more of the same.
In 2024, Lara Weber, a 25-year-plus
veteran of the Chicago Tribune, joined the progressive network
States Newsroom, which, like Courier Newsroom, is a sprawling “pink-slime”
operation designed to pass Democratic talking points off as local news to an unsuspecting public. Andrea Shaw, a 20-year-plus
Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran of NOLA.com, and Andrew DeMillo, a 20-year
veteran of the Associated Press, have also joined the States Newsroom network.
Mark Jacob, who served as an editor at the Chicago Tribune for two
decades, is now a content creator and consultant to Tara McGowan’s Courier
Newsroom.
In 2015, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Sydney
Freedberg, formerly of Bloomberg News and the Miami Herald,
joined David Brock’s American Bridge progressive super PAC.
Then, there are the honorable mentions: the
ex-journalists who let their left-wing freak flag fly the moment they no longer
had to pretend to be objective.
We have former CNBC reporter John Harwood, who not so
long ago moderated a GOP presidential primary debate. We also have former CNN
reporter Jim Acosta, former ABC News correspondent Terry Moran, and former CNN
host Don Lemon.
Let’s play a game. I’m going to share four headlines
published by those mentioned in the above after they had slipped the
surly bonds of gainful employment in legacy media. Your mission is to guess who
wrote what:
·
‘Crook, Liar, Racist’: As a Veteran Reporter, I’m Not Afraid to
Call Trump What He Is
·
Trump Put Me on His Media Hit List
·
Good Lord! Is The Iran War Driven by Christian Nationalism?
It’s a trick. No one cares who wrote what. They’re
interchangeable. Lemon could’ve written “‘Crook, Liar, Racist’: As a Veteran
Reporter, I’m Not Afraid to Call Trump What He Is” (Harwood) and Harwood
could’ve written “Good Lord! Is The Iran War Driven by Christian Nationalism?”
(Lemon).
It doesn’t matter. It’s all the same content. It must
feel so good to finally be who they’ve always wanted to be.
In this same vein, there are also lesser-known figures,
including former Washington Post analyst Philip Bump and Teresa Hanafin,
who spent more than 40 years at the Boston Globe before launching a
fire-breathing Substack aimed squarely at indulging the most deranged fantasies
of left-wing lunatics.
To be fair, this is not a strictly progressive-left
phenomenon. On the right, there’s Brian Timpone, once of WCIA-TV, who launched
a right-wing equivalent of Courier Newsroom. There are also a few former Breitbart
News staffers who have gone on to work at or found explicitly right-wing
advocacy groups, among others. But the examples on the left are particularly
prominent, and frequent, involving news organizations that pretend to be
nonpartisan.
There’s the temptation to argue that the
conservative-media-to-Trump-White-House pipeline more than compensates for
these moves, but this is a cope. The Trump pipeline exists for only one
administration, and it draws from a tiny handful of outlets. By contrast, the
sheer number of mainstream journalists who have staffed Democratic offices, especially under Obama and former President Joe Biden, is
vastly larger, spanning multiple administrations and drawing from a much deeper
pool of legacy-media talent. The Trump pipeline is real, but it’s nothing
compared to that which exists now and that which existed even decades before
Trump gave politics a try.
While we’re on the topic, there’s also the related
phenomenon of newsrooms plucking political hatchet men straight from their
Democratic perches, including Jen Psaki and Symone Sanders-Townsend from the
Biden and Harris press shops, respectively. Yes, Fox News has hired the odd
conservative politico for roles on its network. There’s also Scott Jennings at
CNN. But these are the exceptions to the new rules. The way that these
now-infrequent attempts to welcome right-leaning politicos into traditional media
have played out recently involve a lot of screeching, backbiting, unflattering
leaks, and outright rebellion. See: Mick Mulvaney at CBS News and Sarah Isgur at CNN.
You get the point.
There is definitely a revolving door between journalism
and politics — and it definitely benefits one party more than the other.
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