Geraghty: Left's Overpraise of Chelsea Clinton Gives Away Their True Feelings About Aristocracy

Via @rdbrewer4, a really good piece.

Chelsea assures us that her past workplaces were “incredibly, fiercely meritocratic.” Sometimes in past interviews, the interviewer inadvertently expresses surprise at the seemingly high-level jobs Chelsea Clinton gets handed...

Chelsea took that “Assistant Vice Provost” position [at an NYU school] in 2010, at age 30.

Now Chelsea’s “making her move”, which warranted that Fast Company cover piece:

Now, finally, she has decided to join the Clinton family business. As vice chair of the recently rebranded Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, she is helping one of the world’s most notable philanthropies grow up.

She must have been extraordinarily talented to be named vice chair of an organization that has her name in its title, huh? What are the odds?

...

Dear friends on the Left: You can’t bemoan the death of opportunity in America, and rail against the richest one percent, and then devour puff pieces on how exceptionally talented and wonderful the offspring of our super-wealthy political leaders are, earning plaudits just by showing up with their famous last names.

The New York Times' public editor (ombudsmen) Arthur Brisbane described exactly how the media covers their favorite causes in 2012:

I also noted two years ago that I had taken up the public editor duties believing “there is no conspiracy” and that The Times’s output was too vast and complex to be dictated by any Wizard of Oz-like individual or cabal. I still believe that, but also see that the hive on Eighth Avenue is powerfully shaped by a culture of like minds — a phenomenon, I believe, that is more easily recognized from without than from within.

When The Times covers a national presidential campaign, I have found that the lead editors and reporters are disciplined about enforcing fairness and balance, and usually succeed in doing so. Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.

As a result, developments like the Occupy movement and gay marriage seem almost to erupt in The Times, overloved and undermanaged, more like causes than news subjects.

posted by Ace at 01:52 PM

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