For David Axelrod, the great cash-in is beginning. Today, NBC and MSNBC announced they’ve hired Axelrod as a “senior political analyst,” to appear exclusively on their networks.
From an NBC News statement:
For nearly three decades, Axelrod guided successful campaigns at every level on the ballot. He began his career as a journalist, spending eight years as a political writer, columnist and City Hall bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune before stepping into politics in 1984.
He founded Axelrod and Associates, a political and media consulting firm which became AKPD Message and Media. He later founded the communications management firm ASGK Public Strategies.
Axelrod, an alumnus of the University of Chicago, was recently named director of the university's new Institute of Politics, and as a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Harris School of Public Policy. He previously worked as an Adjunct Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University.
Local
We’ve seen this a dozen times before. Working for a president is training for a bigger, better paying job with a newspaper or a TV station. Here’s a partial list of White House alumni who’ve gone on to lucrative media careers.
- Bill Moyers: Special Assistant to Lyndon Johnson, went on to become publisher of Newsday, commentator for CBS and NBC, host of Bill Moyers’ Journal and The Power of Myth on PBS.
- William Safire: Richard Nixon speechwriter was a New York Times op-ed columnist from 1973 to 2005.
- Pat Buchanan: Another Nixon speechwriter, Buchanan was one of the original hosts of CNN’s Crossfire.
- Diane Sawyer: Was administrative assistant to Nixon’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler. Now anchor of ABC World News.
- George Stephanopoulos: Bill Clinton’s communications director now hosts Good Morning America.
- Dick Morris: The man who brought triangulation to the Clinton re-election campaign was a Fox News analyst -- until he predicted a Mitt Romney landslide last November.
- Karl Rove: George W. Bush’s political director is a political analyst for Fox News and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal.
