Who is pundit Ceci Connolly?

[Nikki Stone1]

I was just reading Rolling Stone's 2001 article about the royal screwing of Gore by the media and saw Connolly's name mentioned a lot. There are articles of hers on line, but not much background info.

Also, did her dad just die? There's a link:

http://www.legacy.com/Philly/DeathNotices.asp?Page=Notice&PersonID=90106826

It says she is living in Mexico City and a lot of her recent articles seem to be coming from there. Did she get booted south of the border by the Post?

Edited to add link of Rolling Stone article:

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/5920188/the_press_vs_al_gore/print

"Perhaps nowhere were those bells going off more loudly or more often than in the head of Washington Post reporter Ceci Connolly. Her dispatches, frequently heavy on spin and regularly filled with biting jibes, were often the talk of campaign journalists, not to mention Gore officials.

Connolly was one of the reporters who botched Gore's Love Canal quote more than once. In her first dispatch on the matter, she used the twisted quote to mock Gore for dissembling about his record, a theme she had been hammering for months. In her follow-up story the next day, she printed it again, jeering, "The man who mistakenly claimed to have inspired the movie Love Story and to have invented the Internet says he didn't quite mean to say he discovered a toxic-waste site."

Incredibly, none of the three examples Connolly offered to highlight Gore's compulsion for exaggerating were based on fact. Eleven months later, and just three weeks before Election Day, the Post returned to the topic of Love Canal, reporting how Gore's "clumsy" statements "suggesting he discovered the Love Canal disaster" had made him an easy target for ridicule.

At the same time that the paper was busy propping up the Love Canal story, it suddenly decided that the Love Story hoax was no longer based in fact, pointing out on October 15th, 2000, "Gore never claimed he and his wife were the models for the book Love Story but instead referred to an article in which author Erich Segal was misquoted as saying so." It just proved, the Post emphasized, "how closely Gore's anecdotes and statements are being watched" and that his every utterance will be "fact-checked.""

[JI7]

1. i think i have seen her on Fox News

[Nikki Stone1]

3. Yeah, she writes for the Washington Post but

I just wondered what her background was. She seemed to be extremely anti-Gore and I wondered where she went to school and what her affiliations were. She doesn't seem to have a Wikipedia entry, and when I enter her name, I get mostly articles and that link above.

[orleans]

2. she was a faux news bitch

"Connolly, like Sammon, is also a FOX News analyst."


http://www.americanpolitics.com/20030310foxwatch.html

[Nikki Stone1]

4. Does she still work for FAUX?

?

[orleans]

5. i have no idea--i used to watch faux and see her on there.

i just can't turn it on anymore. for a long time. (had enough? yep!)

[Nikki Stone1]

6. I'm surprised FAUX kept her. She wasn't particularly good looking

and they are pretty shallow over there.

[Mabus]

7. Ceci Connolly, Kit Seeley and Sandra Sobieraj were the worst

From mediamatters.org

Serial misinformer Kit Seelye reportedly set to become NY Times "Web political correspondent"

***
Indeed, in their book The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008 (Random House, 2006), ABC News political director Mark Halperin and Politico Editor-in-Chief John F. Harris noted that many in the media view Seelye's coverage of Gore as one of the "main reason(s)" he lost:

A number of members of the Gang of 500 ("the group of columnists, consultants, reporters, and staff hands who ... serve as a sort of Federal Reserve Bank of conventional wisdom") are convinced that the main reason George W. Bush won the White House and Al Gore lost was that Gore's regular press pack included the trio of Katharine "Kit" Seelye (of the New York Times), Ceci Connolly (of the Washington Post), and Sandra Sobieraj (of the Associated Press).

Halperin and Harris asserted that these three reporters "were more representative of Gore's problem than they were the cause," but later added: "Gore made mistakes, and had some bad luck ... (but t)he media, the New leading the Old, helped Bush tell his good story about himself, and helped Republicans tell a bad story about Gore" (Page 130).

Eric Alterman, now a senior fellow for Media Matters for America, further noted in the October 21, 2002, issue of The Nation that "Katharine Seelye's and Ceci Connolly's coverage turned out to be so egregious that the two were singled out by the conservative Financial Times of London as 'hostile to the (Gore) campaign,' unable to hide their 'contempt for the candidate.'"

http://mediamatters.org/items/200703090004

You should also check out The Daily Howler for samples of their attacks on Gore. Go to http://dailyhowler.com and search for any of their names in the archives. As I recall, they were called the bitches at the back of the bus and they did everything they could to sink Gore.

Here's Ceci's bio from PBS:

Ceci Connolly has been a national staff writer at the Washington Post since 1997. She is currently writing about health care in America. Her articles cover a wide range of subjects including Medicare and Medicaid reform, bioterrorism, the uninsured, the pharmaceutical industry and the debate over embryonic stem cell research.

***

Prior to joining the Post, Connolly was a Washington correspondent for the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times. She reported on Congress from the beginning of the Republican Revolution in 1994 through the 1995 budget battles. In 1996, Connolly was assigned to the Bob Dole presidential campaign, traveling to more than 30 states with the GOP nominee.

Connolly moved to Washington in 1992 to work for Congressional Quarterly, the magazine of record on Capitol Hill. At the weekly magazine, she wrote about politics and health care. She has also worked for the Associated Press and two New England dailies, the Concord (New Hampshire) Monitor and the Quincy (Massachusetts) Patriot Ledger.

In 2001, Connolly was awarded a fellowship at the Institute of Politics at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. She is a graduate of Boston College and the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.

http://www.pbs.org/weta/washingtonweek/aroundthetable/connolly.html

her bio on Huffington Post:

Ceci Connolly has been a national staff writer at the Washington Post since spring 1997, covering national politics, healthcare and several major disasters such as Hurricane Katrina.

As a freelance journalist, she has been published in Every Day with Rachael Ray, the Washington Post’s Book World, Inside Mexico and on the website www.mediamogirl.com.

****
In summer 2001, Connolly was named national health policy correspondent for the Post, producing stories on bioterrorism, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, skyrocketing medical bills, physician-assisted suicide, embryonic stem cells and the Terri Schiavo case. Her articles have examined the history of the smallpox vaccine, the Cleveland Clinic’s battle to oust McDonald’s and one Seattle hospital’s effort to employ “Toyota-style” management.

****

Connolly appears frequently on television and is sought after for public speaking appearances. She has been a regular commentator on PBS' Washington Week and the Fox News Channel.

A graduate of Boston College, Connolly was awarded a fellowship at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in 2001. She also attended “journalist boot camp” at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She presently lives in Mexico City, writing about life in Latin America. In summer 2006, she chronicled the Mexican presidential contest in her daily Campaign Conexion blog.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ceci-connolly-

Hope this helps.

[grasswire]

8. had to flee the country, eh?

IIRC, she was one of those at WaPo who regularly whined about citizens who criticized her comments.

[Mabus]

9. It wouldn't surprise me

Another one is Joe Klein. I think they cut the comments to his stuff after he got pounded by criticism of his inaccuracies.

[Nikki Stone1]

11. She's apparently "on leave" from the WaPo, and is blogging from Mexico City

That's why I thought the obit in my OP was her dad.

[Nikki Stone1]

10. I had no idea how much the coverage of Gore was Connolly's fault

So after the election, they reassigned her to health issues? Why did they give a scientific assignment to someone who couldn't tell the truth?

[UTUSN]

12. The 3 of them were called "The Spice Girls". Since she covered the Mexican election, perhaps

AMLO's supporters might have a legitimate gripe after all.