BREAKING: Cable contributors scarf contributions!

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 31, 2018

We cut and paste, you decide: CNN and MSNBC spill over with "contributors" from the major print press.

Two examples:

The New York Times' Maggie Haberman is a contributor at CNN. Her frequent writing partner, Michael Schmidt, helps out at MSNBC.

Yesterday, in that same New York Times, Michael Grynbaum wrote an analysis piece about the role of journalists in this age of Trump. It included the brief passage we've highlighted concerning issues of pay:

GRYNBAUM (1/30/18): Since Mr. Trump took office a year ago, the political press has endured a sustained assault from a chief executive who has called journalists ''the enemy of the American people.'' Yet the news media has also driven decisions inside the West Wing to a degree perhaps unmatched since the scandal-ridden days of Richard Nixon. And White House aides and reporters alike say that political reality is being refracted by the media in an unprecedented way.

Some reporters, in unguarded moments, say that they fear for journalists' safety. Margaret Talev, the president of the White House Correspondents' Association, was moved to tears in an interview as she recounted the death threats that now routinely land in her colleagues' emails.

Other journalists—ironic, cynical or simply enterprising, depending on your point of view—have embraced the moment as the wildest ride of their lives, and a lucrative one, too: The number of Washington reporters with cable television contracts, some with salaries verging on six figures, has surged.

According to Grynbaum, some of those contributors are being paid second salaries "verging on six figures."

For ourselves, we don't know how high the salaries go. Concerning Grynbaum's "verging on sic figures" assessment, it that a lot, or is that a little? Could this arrangement possibly produce a conflict of interest?

We've reported, now you can decide. We may discuss that second question tomorrow.