REASON:
When former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders joined Fox News as a contributor last week, her announcement was greeted with a predictable flurry of jokes about the minimal difference between her new role at the conservative network and her old job for the Trump administration. But she was hardly the first government official of either major political faction to find a new perch in the media—or to move the other way, for that matter. It’s all part of the creeping merger between the political class and the journalists supposedly tasked with subjecting government to scrutiny.
That kind of close relationship between the public and the nominally private sector isn’t new. The revolving door between government and lobbying has long seen officials, both elected and appointed, move from powerful jobs regulating industry to well-paid jobs glad-handing their old colleagues on behalf of regulated industries. Although it troubles seemingly everybody, the relationship is inevitable given the power of the state and the need by companies to cultivate insider contacts to beg (or pay) for special favors or just leniency when navigating red tape.
But the lobbying business evolved to formalize contacts between officials and industry that were going to take place anyway. The flow of faces and names between government and “news” media has turned what was supposed to be a watchdog over the destructive power of the state into little more than a forum for political marketing and an extended battleground for factional fighting.
