George Stephanopoulos, seen in 2014, is now wading through an ethics controversy, but it seems as if he hasn’t missed a beat: He co-hosted “Good Morning America” as usual on Friday, for example. (Evan Agostini/Invision/Associated Press)
George Stephanopoulos is no Brian Williams, it appears. In fact, the early indications are that he’s got more in common with Bill O’Reilly.
Like Williams and O’Reilly, Stephanopoulos crossed an ethical threshold. ABC News’s chief anchor apologized last week for making three contributions to the Clinton Foundation over a three-year period, a no-no for anyone who aspires to journalistic independence and neutrality. Worse, the disclosure of his $75,000 in donations revived Republican suspicions that Bill Clinton’s former adviser is in the tank for the charity’s co-proprietor, Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom Stephanopoulos will cover during the presidential campaign.
NBC News’s Williams and Fox News’s O’Reilly have had their own “how do you explain this?” moments, too. Both told tall tales about their long-ago reporting exploits, setting off weeks of negative publicity.
But the outcomes for O’Reilly and Williams have been quite different. O’Reilly denied everything and aggressively rebutted his critics, and he remained on the air. Williams couldn’t withstand the media onslaught and was suspended for six months without pay.
So far — and it’s very still early — Stephanopoulos is showing that he may be able to ride out “Stephanopoulos-gate” without serious career impairment.
Despite calls from some conservatives for him to resign or recuse himself from political coverage, Stephanopoulos has not missed a beat. He co-hosted “Good Morning America” as usual Friday and took his regular turn moderating “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” on Sunday. Indeed, his primary guest on the public-affairs show was Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), a leading member of the GOP establishment, no less. McConnell’s appearance sent a strong symbolic message: Stephanopoulos is not radioactive for Republicans.
Stephanopoulos is not a daily news anchor like Williams — Stephanopoulos’s principal gig, on “GMA,” involves light banter and interviews — nor is he a polarizing personality like O’Reilly. What’s more, his ethical trespasses are of a different flavor from those of either of his two peers.
Further, Stephanopoulos’s image undoubtedly has been helped by the absence of follow-up stories showing further ethically dubious ties to the Clintons (whereas O’Reilly and Williams faced a steady drip-drip-drip). Like O’Reilly, he has benefited from his network’s support; ABC has declined to take any disciplinary action against its leading news personality and issued a statement standing by him last week. Network spokeswoman Heather Riley reiterated that support Sunday.
In the meantime, ABC News’s communications staff — including Riley, a former Clinton White House staffer — has fed a steady stream of positive tidbits about Stephanopoulos to the news media, such as the notion that his Clinton Foundation contributions represented just a small fraction of his overall charity.
All told, the Stephanopoulos controversy is unfolding in predictable ways, with professions of “limited contrition and spin of the facts, the hunkering down in the hope the controversy will blow over,” said Mark Feldstein, a professor of broadcast journalism at the University of Maryland.
But it’s still premature to say that the worst is over for Stephanopoulos, said Feldstein, who is writing a book about media scandals.
“It’s a long way between now and the November 2016 election, and if Clinton opponents keep banging the drums about this, it’s going to be hard for Stephanopoulos to lead ABC News’s campaign coverage the way he has in the past,” Feldstein said. “Indeed, Republicans may prefer that Stephanopoulos remain in place during the campaign to serve as a useful punching bag symbolizing what they view as liberal media bias.”
Broadcast news analyst Andrew Tyndall takes a somewhat milder view. He frames the question about Stephanopoulos this way: Does the new information about him undercut his established persona among viewers?
In Williams’s case, it did, painting the likable anchorman as a “vainglorious” and fudging self-promoter, he said. Hence Williams’s continuing troubles.
The flap over O’Reilly, though, merely seemed to conform to his persona as “the argumentative blowhard who wears partisan criticism as a badge of courage.” Hence O’Reilly carries on.
Stephanopoulos’s association with the Clintons has always been part of his persona, said Tyndall, who writes the Tyndall Report, which tracks the evening-news broadcasts. So, too, is the anchorman’s “liberal conscientiousness,” which comports with his donations to a charity working in behalf of HIV prevention and rain-forest preservation, he said.
Although Stephanopoulos erred in not disclosing his donations during an interview last month with the author of a book about the Clinton Foundation’s finances, “the underlying donation itself only has the status of controversy, not scandal,” according to Tyndall.
“Mostly this brouhaha represents standard working-the-refs operating procedure by right-wing activists,” he said. “They are laying down a marker with ABC that Stephanopoulos’s Clinton baggage will be a factor throughout Campaign 2016. . . . Crunch time will come at the conventions and the debates, when Hillary will presumably be centrally involved. That is when his history with the Clinton dynasty becomes unavoidable.”
On the other hand, he asks, won’t a George-and-Hillary interview be even more newsworthy now?
