NEW YORK -- NBC's "Today" show has hired someone with White House experience as a new correspondent -- former first daughter Jenna Bush Hager.
Hager, a 27-year-old teacher in Baltimore, will contribute stories about once a month on issues like education to television's top-rated morning news show, said Jim Bell, its executive producer.
The daughter of former President George W. Bush said she has always wanted to be a teacher and a writer, and has already authored two books. But she was intrigued by the idea of getting into television when Bell contacted her.
"It wasn't something I'd always dreamed to do," she said. "But I think one of the most important things in life is to be open-minded and to be open-minded for change."
nbc hiring a republican?
wow the comments are open on this….im shocked.
Maybe it will show that NBC isn’t completely left wing when it comes to politics. They get people in which they think can do a good job at something. Its nice that the former first daughter is now going to do segments on positive things on the highest rated show on Television.
Romo: at some point I will be suggesting to Bill that our obsessive focus on comments is not a good use of our time — time that could be better spent on adding content.
There are a couple of paths. One, that we go the route of most bigger blogs and leave them open for everything and more or less let them be self-policing and ignore them for the most part. Unfortunately, I’m not sure, especially based on some recent experiments that I have the stomach for it (consider this post another experiment), Bill might have more tolerance for that approach than me. But I could argue I need to make my stomach stronger.
At this point I actually favor the notion of making people register for comments (or going back to Disqus and filtering out anonymous comments from people who have not registered with Disqus, but allowing people to login with their Facebook, Twitter, etc logins), even though this would absolutely lower the number of comments we get by a lot, I believe the quality of the commenting would increase quite a bit.
I don’t think this has much to do with politics. I’m sure Jenna Bush isn’t as involved in politics as other daughters like Liz Cheney (or sadly Meghan McCain). She has first hand experience in the White House and is a big name and I think that’s all NBC is looking for.
When I heard this an hour or so ago, I twitted that sure, she got this job without knowing anybody. Right. Tell me another…
Robert: My take on registering for comments. This is a TV ratings site, with some reasonable overlap in discussions about TV shows quality. Political comments don’t really belong here. So I’m in favor of not allowing them – or at least not allowing them to turn into flame wars. So I think your policy of allowing comments for a little while, then shutting them down makes sense. It’s the easiest compromise between forcing people to register – EVERY site is forcing people to register even when it’s not particularly reasonable to do so, and it’s getting to be a pain – and not allowing comments at all on anything.
As for focusing on comments in general, a good blog DOES respond to comments to a certain degree. And by doing so, generally improves the tone of the comments. Sites like Matt Yglesias political blog where Matt mostly ignores his posters tend to descend into dog fights. The fact that the bloggers in charge are watching tends to make most people a little more thoughtful, I think.
On the other extreme is a site like the Sarah Connor Society, where one sentence in a post that the board Nazis think is “off topic” can get your account suspended for a month. That’s just power tripping.
You guys are doing it right.
NBC isn’t too bad are hiring Republicans. They do let Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan say a lot of things.
Bush women are very non-political for the most part. While they often dissagree with the men on many issues they prefer to keep that private. The second NBC tries to push for a political slant on the reports, I suspect Jenna quits.
Jenna just doesn’t talk about education, she’s actually on the front lines of the matter. This is a good move on NBC’s part to put a well known name on the education reports to draw a few more eyes to the Today show.
I agree Ani I wonder how many other networks tried to hire her
This is all win for NBC
Who ever said that she was a Republican?
Richard-
They are trying to say she got that job without using connections? Wow. Who in the world would believe THAT?!
they wanted someone with “white house experience” I guess there is no better person than someone who lived their for 8 years
unfair? yes but thats life