TNR Democrats in the White House

by: Matt Stoller

Tue Dec 16, 2008 at 11:57

Jay Carney is leaving Time magazine after 20 years to be Vice President-elect Joe Biden's communications director in the White House, astonished magazine and gleeful transition sources said.

Carney's title will be assistant to the vice president and director of communications. TIME.com's "The Page" first reported his new job.

Carney, the magazine's Washington bureau chief, is one of Washington's best-known talking heads, with regular appearances on ABC's "This Week," "The McLaughlin Group" and MSNBC's "Hardball."

Biden has assembled a team of heavyweights: Ron Klain, who was chief of staff to former Vice President Al Gore, as chief of staff; Mike Donilon, one of Washington's best-connected Democratic consultants, as counselor; and Tony Blinken, a longtime Biden adviser, who is expected to fill a senior role on the National Security Council or on Biden's staff.

Jay Carney mocked Josh Marshall for pursuing the Bush Attorney scandals, arguing that "in this case some liberals are seeing broad partisan conspiracies where none likely exist."  He later retracted his words and apologized to Marshall, which is more than most reporters tend to do.

There's not really a point in criticizing this choice.  Joe Biden is who he is, he's obviously comfortable with Carney and Carney can clearly move a message through his former colleagues in the press.  It is useful to think about what this means.

When an administration chooses personnel, it's a validation of the set of institutions and social ties that nurtured that personnel.  In this case, the administration is validating the traditional press - Time Magazine in this case - as an important and credible organization.  Part of the new progressive movement's ideological core is about seeing the press as an explicit battle space without residual moral credibility.  The Lakeoff thesis of 'framing' makes the implicit argument that mediating institutions are no longer credible, but need to be molded along progressive lines.  A sustained critique of the media is core, just as it was core to the right in the 1970s and onward.

This is a different belief system that held by people like Jay Carney, who think that the press is a relatively honest authoritative group that does make errors but broadly operates in 'the best interests' of a democratic nation.  That such an important figure in journalism is going into this administration suggests that the Obama administration pretty well believes that the political conversation might need to be altered, but that the actors controlling our dialogue - mainstream journalists - are credible guides for the public.  We'll see how that works out.