Campbell Brown to Lead Facebook’s News Partnerships Team

BY: Stephanie Wan   anuary 6, 2017

Journalist and education reformer Campbell Brown announced on Friday that she would be joining Facebook in a business role. Brown will be partnering with news organizations to improve their business models and figure out how those organizations can better profit from their relationship with the social media giant. The announcement comes as Facebook faces liberal criticism for insufficient censorship of free speech on its site.

     

Facebook is turning to a former television news journalist to help smooth over its strained ties to the news media, which views it as both a vital partner and a potentially devastating opponent.

It has hired Campbell Brown, a former NBC News correspondent and CNN prime-time host, to lead its news partnerships team, starting immediately.

The position is a new one for Facebook. In the role, Ms. Brown will “help news organizations and journalists work more closely and more effectively with Facebook,” she wrote on her Facebook page Friday afternoon.

  

Brown is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Seventy Four, a nonprofit news organization dedicated to education reporting. Brown got her start covering the news for CNN and NBC News.

Prior to founding The Seventy Four, Brown started the Partnership for Educational Justice, which pushes for better public schools through advocacy and legal action.

   

Brown has become a rare voice of reason in the media, providing balanced reporting and fairness to conservatives. She has also called out the hypocrisy of the left.

Since she began pushing for education reform, she has become a target of the left.





Kirsten Powers wrote of the left’s attacks on Brown in her book The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech.
After Brown wrote a Wall Street Journal article critical of teachers unions, “the illiberal left began a delegitimization campaign,” Powers wrote.

As Brown’s voice gained prominence, so grew the left’s fears and attacks.

  



“The more liberal elements of the media have gotten the union memo about attacking Brown personally and disingenuously implying she has a hidden agenda,” wrote Mark Hemingway of the Weekly Standard.

Brown has called out liberal hypocrisy in several cases. When Valerie Jarrett called Fox News biased, Brown asked Jarrett to also recognize MSNBC’s biases. Jarrett backed off her statement and said, “I don’t want to just generalize that all Fox is biased or another station is biased, I think what we want to do is look at it on a case by case basis.”

She called out Hollywood liberals who campaign against gun violence and write checks to Democrats while also profiting off violence in movies and television shows.

During the 2016 presidential election, Brown provided a platform for GOP candidates to voice their opinions on how to reform the U.S. education system. The forum gave voters an insight into the candidates’ views without a combative moderator.

Conservatives have also found themselves in Brown’s crosshairs.

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