Chelsea Clinton Joins NBC News Team
NBC has announced that it hired Bill and Hillary Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, to work on a variety of its NBC News projects.
As a full-time special correspondent, Clinton will work on stories for NBC’s “Making a Difference” series—a feature that is currently run on “NBC Nightly News” and may soon be run on the network’s new prime-time program, “Rock Center with Brian Williams.”
Clinton, 31, said that she was inspired by stories of people making personal contributions during her mother’s 2008 presidential campaign.
“I hope telling stories through ‘Making a difference’—as in my academic work and nonprofit work—will help me to live my grandmother’s adage of ‘Life is not about what happens to you, but about what you do with what happens to you,’” Clinton said in a statement.
Clinton is not the first daughter of a president to be hired by the network—in 2009, NBC hired Jenna Bush Hager as a correspondent for the Today show. The daughter of presidential candidate John McCain, Meghan McCain, contributes to MSNBC.
NBC has emphasized that these hires are not ratings grabs. NBC News President Steve Capus, who was approached by a Clinton intermediary in July, told the New York Times that Clinton “made it very clear that this is not going to be a surface-deep relationship.”
“We both want to see how this goes,” Capus said. “It will be full-time for the near-term future. But I hope it’s the beginning of a nice, long-term relationship.”
