MediaWatch: April 1990
Table of Contents:
Revolving Door: New Investigators
New Investigators. CNN has set up a new investigative unit. Ken Bode, a former Morris Udall aide and Chief Political Correspondent for NBC News, has signed on as a contributing correspondent. Bode will remain Director of the Center for Contemporary Media at DePauw University while covering the White House for CNN. Wall Street Journal Washington reporter Brooks Jackson also leaves the print world for the CNN unit. Replacing Jackson on the Journal's lawyer and lobbying beat: Timothy Noah, a Newsweek reporter until last year who was Issues Director in Democrat Kathleen Kennedy Townsend's unsuccessful 1986 campaign for Congress.
Archive Removal. Scott Armstrong, a Washington Post reporter from 1977 to 1984, set up the National Security Archive in 1986 as a depository for classified government documents he managed to obtain through Freedom of Information Act requests. After four years Armstrong has moved into academia as a visiting scholar at American University's Washington Center for International Journalism. Armstrong once worked as an investigator for the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Practices, better known as the Watergate committee.
From Observer to Participant. Two Charlotte Observer veterans have jumped into activist politics on the side of Democrats. Susan Jetton spent most of the 1970's reporting for the Observer. Now she's Press Secretary to former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt, the leading Democratic candidate in the race to oppose Senator Jesse Helms this fall. For the past four years Jetton's held the same title in the office of Willie Brown, Speaker of the House in California, a job she took after working from 1979 to 1986 as a San Diego Union political reporter.
Ken Friedlein, Executive National Editor, has been named Press Secretary to North Carolina's junior Senator, Terry Sanford. Friedlein also served as political editor, metro editor and assistant business editor since joining the Observer in 1979. Previously he worked for the Winston-Salem Journal, Raleigh Times and Durham Morning News.
Getting Educated. Andy Plattner, a U.S. News & World Report Associate Editor since 1985 who most recently covered Congress, has opted for a career in the executive branch. Plattner's gained an appropriately bureaucratic title: Special Adviser to the Assistant Secretary of Education for educational research and improvement.
Surfacing for Politics. As a Navy Times reporter in 1983, Tom Burgess, according to Roll Call, "was the first reviewer to pan Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October." Seven years later Burgess has joined the staff of U.S. Representative Jim Bates as Administrative Assistant and Press Secretary for the liberal San Diego Democrat. In between he spent four years covering the military for the San Diego Union, a subject he knows something about: Burgess was a nuclear submarine weapons officer from 1979 to 1981.
