“He really isn’t a journalist” is a devastating, if accurate assessment of George Stephanopoulos’s activities at ABC News, where he is the front man, the most visible embodiment of that organization. And this doesn’t come from some right winger, it comes from a former colleague at ABC News, Carole Simpson. Lloyd Grove, the former Washington Post writer now at the Daily Beast, recounts the flak that Stephanopoulos took from normally friendly sources on CNN’s Reliable Sources, Sunday morning:

Stephanopoulos’s former ABC News colleague, Carole Simpson, unloaded on the former top aide to Bill and Hillary Clinton that she said she likes and respects.

“There is a coziness that George cannot escape,” said Simpson, who toiled for two decades at ABC News, notably as the weekend anchor of World News Tonight from 1988 to 2003. “While he did try to separate himself from his political background to become a journalist, he really isn’t a journalist.” (snip)

“I wanted to just take him by the neck and say, ‘George, what were you thinking?’ Clearly, he was not thinking. I thought it was outrageous,” Simpson said. “And I am sorry that again the public trust in the media is being challenged and frayed because of the actions of some of the top people in the business.”

Simpson added that despite Stephanopoulos’s alleged lack of journalistic bona fides, “ABC has made him the face of ABC News, the chief anchor, and I think they’re really caught in a quandary here. While ABC says this was ‘an honest mistake,’ they don’t feel that way. Secretly, they are hopping mad, I am sure.”

The realization is dawning on many in the media that Stephanopoulos is damaging them, too. ABC News may have so much invested in him that they are reluctant to dump him, at least for now. But others, especially those passed over while his career flourished, may be less charitable.

I have noticed that almost everyone in the media swears that they like him, including conservatives appearing on Fox News. To his professional colleagues, evidently Stephanopoulos is polite and friendly. Ordinarily, that will carry a person quite some distance. And if the media were fully in bed with Hillary Clinton, Stephanopoulos would probably not be getting the type of criticism he is enduring.  But the left, which tends to set the fashion in the Democratic Party, is fed up with her, for reasons ideological and personal. They want her out.

Stephanopoulos apparently picked the wrong time to re-ingratiate himself with the Clinton Machine