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Ceci Connolly Cashes In

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Who knew the world of journalism had the same kind of revolving door as government does? But apparently, if you build a reporting beat entirely around portraying the views of top corporate representatives as the only views that count, and if your newspaper pimps you out as the “play” in a Pay2Play scandal, then you, too, can make the jump to consulting.

CECI CONNOLLY leaves the WP for McKINSEY: “Friends, Pardon the group email but I wanted to tell you all my big news. After 13 great years on the National staff of the Washington Post I’ve decided to take on a new adventure, serving as a senior adviser at McKinsey & Co. to the firm’s new Center for US Health System Reform and its global Health Systems Institute. It is a phenomenal opportunity to grow, learn and have an impact on health care worldwide. I have been blown away by the brainpower at McKinsey and felt that its non-ideological, fact-based approach is the ideal environment for an old-fashioned news gal like me. Throughout 25 years in journalism, I have been blessed with fascinating assignments, warm colleagues and generous sources. Six presidential campaigns, epic health care battles, Hurricane Katrina, two blogs and the machinations of Capitol Hill gave me all I could have ever hoped to write about. Whether bumping along the frost heaves of New Hampshire, talking politics with Juan and Brit on Fox and Gwen on PBS, racing to catch Air Force One (and Two) or sneaking a bite of black market lobster in Cuba, it has been an amazing journey. I hope to catch my breath for a few weeks, do some cooking and play a little golf. I’ll send out my McKinsey coordinates soon. Chrs, Ceci.”

Mind you, I’d rather Connolly be brokering health care deals for McKinsey than do it under the guise of “reporting,” which is what she was doing at the WaPo. So we’re probably all better off!

The biggest problem, though, is the lesson it offers for other journalists: the best way to get out of the troubled news industry and into something more lucrative is with corporate shilling masquerading as journalism.

Pay2Play Connolly’s Sources Are “Mystified”

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Before I get into the jist of this story, note two things.

First, Ceci Connolly, the reporter the WaPo was selling in their Pay2Play salons, is one of the bylined authors. (In fact, Connolly was the one recruited to convince Nancy Ann DeParle–Obama’s health care czar and the recipient of millions for serving on the board of corrupt health care companies–to attend, which sort of makes Connolly a broker rather than a reporter.)

And second, Connolly and her co-author egregiously break the WaPo’s rules on anonymity, which Ombud Andy Alexander reviewed just a few days ago.

Those are the two details I’d use to answer Aravosis’ puzzle–are these guys lying or idiots?

Neither. They’re trying to pivot their failure back onto progressives.

Here are the anonymous quotes that, for some reason, Ceci and friend couldn’t see fit to present in a way that accorded with the WaPo’s anonymity rules.

President Obama’s advisers acknowledged Tuesday that they were unprepared for the intraparty rift that occurred over the fate of a proposed public health insurance program, a firestorm that has left the White House searching for a way to reclaim the initiative on the president’s top legislative priority.

Administration officials insisted that they have not shied away from their support for a public option to compete with private insurance companies, an idea they said Obama still prefers to see in a final bill.

But at a time when the president had hoped to be selling middle-class voters on how insurance reforms would benefit them, the White House instead finds itself mired in a Democratic Party feud over an issue it never intended to spotlight.

"I don’t understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo," said a senior White House adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We’ve gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don’t understand how that has become the measure of whether what we achieve is health-care reform."

"It’s a mystifying thing," he added. "We’re forgetting why we are in this."

Another top aide expressed chagrin that a single element in the president’s sprawling health-care initiative has become a litmus test for whether the administration is serious about the issue.

"It took on a life of its own," he said. [my emphasis]

Remember how we got to the stupid co-ops. Read more →