When Reporters Sleep With Their Sources

By Ben Shapiro

In the past, I have claimed that the mainstream media is in bed with the Obama Administration. This time, I mean it literally.

According to the New York Post, Obama budget boss Peter Orszag is engaged to ABC correspondent Bianna Golodryga. Meanwhile, his ex-girlfriend Claire Milonas, gave birth to his illegitimate child on November 17. Orszag is already a two-time father by his first wife (they are divorced, naturally).

Bianna Golodryga and Peter Orszag

The media is treating this whole story as a seedy morality play starring an incredibly nerdy Director of OMB. But even though it now appears that Orszag was spreading his seed just as profligately as taxpayer money, that isn’t the real story.

The real story here is actually Bianna Golodryga and the extremely cozy relationship that sometimes develops between reporters and their sources.

Golodryga, according to her profile at ABCNews.com, covers “the economy and business beat for all of the network’s programs, including World News Tonight, Good Morning America Weekend, and Nightline… Golodryga reported extensively on the housing and credit crisis as well as the collapse of Bear Stearns.”

Now, it would be unseemly for a reporter on Afghanistan policy to be sleeping with General David Petraeus. It is just as unseemly for the main economic reporter for ABC News to be sleeping with the Director of the OMB. Golodryga also covered Orszag when Orszag was running the Congressional Budget Office. Reportedly, they did not meet in person until the White House Correspondents Dinner in May 2009. They immediately began going out, even though the week they met, Orszag was featured together with Milonas in an article in The New Yorker.

Golodryga, it should be mentioned, is just as liberal as her fiancée. In a May 2008 Nightline report, she participated in open class warfare, stating, “As many Americans watch personal investments like their homes go belly up, many of the super rich have seen their fortunes only grow.” She’s also a water carrier for the Obama administration. “One year ago,” she said on Good Morning America in November while defending treasury secretary Tim Geithner, “the stock market was in a nose-dive. Major banks were going under. And the economy suffered its biggest quarterly contraction in seven years. Now, all of that has significantly improved today, except for when it comes to jobs.”

Abe Rosenthal, who headed up the New York Times from 1969 to 1986, had a very simple conflict of interest policy, one that become known in journalism circles as the Rosenthal Rule: “I don’t care if my reporters are [sleeping with] elephants, as long as they aren’t covering the circus.” That policy, by the way, was occasioned when a Times reporter began having an affair with a Pennsylvanian politician she was covering.

Read the rest here.