(CNSNews.com) – An ABC News spokesperson told CNSNews.com that George Stephanopoulos does not advise White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in regular phone conversations but speaks to him “as a friend and as a source.”  

The statement comes after Politico reported that Stephanopoulos, ABC News’ chief Washington correspondent and the anchor of “This Week,” speaks regularly with Emanuel, and the influential Democratic pundits and political advisors James Carville and Paul Begala. All four men worked on Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. 
Stephanopoulos and Emanuel worked in the White House together during President Clinton’s first term.  
 
ABC News spokeswoman Emily A. Lenzner said the initial Politico report by John Harris gave the wrong impression about the nature of the conversations.
 
“George Stephanopoulos has never advised Rahm Emanuel nor anyone else in the administration,” Lenzner said in a statement to CNSNews.com on Jan. 30. “He speaks to Rahm as a friend and as a source.  He speaks to several sources from both sides of the political aisle every day. And no, there is no conflict.”
 
The Media Research Center, the parent organization of CNSNews.com, criticized Stephanopoulos for the phone calls in a Jan. 29 press release. Then, in a Feb. 4 letter, the MRC called on ABC News President David Westin to “address and resolve what appears to be a clear violation of journalistic ethics” by Stephanopoulos.  
 
As a journalist, Stephanopoulos is expected to not be an active participant in any policy- making decisions, but rather a detached observer.
 
In the Politico article, Stephanopoulos said he does not surrender his role as an objective observer.  “We are all good friends,” he was quoted as saying. “We just like talking to each other and I learn a lot from it … and that’s why we’ve been doing it for so long.”
 
The story’s author, John Harris, wrote in the piece, “And in any given news cycle, it is quite likely that Washington’s prevailing political and media interpretation — at least on the Democratic side — is being hatched on these calls.”
 
Lenzner disputed parts of the Jan. 29 MRC release, specifically the following: “Tuesday’s Politico broke the news that ABC News' Chief Washington Correspondent and the host of ABC's Sunday morning news show This Week, George Stephanopoulos has daily phone discussions with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel during which he helps formulate and shape the thoughts of and messaging for Emanuel and the Barack Obama Administration. And that he has had these conversations with Emanuel throughout his tenure at ABC.”
 
Lenzer told CNSNews.com, “To say he helps formulate policy, that is absolutely not true.”
 
MRC President L. Brent Bozell III said he does not believe the Jan. 30 ABC statement from Lenzner.
 
“The story says diametrically the opposite from ABC,” Bozell said in an interview with CNSNews.com Friday. “If the story is not true, one would expect George Stephanopoulos and ABC to loudly, unequivocally, immediately and unrelentingly denounce Politico for running an untrue story. Instead, they’re attacking me for simply repeating what Politico said. No, I don’t believe them.”
 
Politico reported that “Begala said he often can’t remember the originator of any particular insight: ‘We talk so much — was this my idea that James changed, or was this George’s observation that Rahm tweaked?’”
 
Politico also quoted Begala as saying, “George is really a big-systems thinker. As a journalist, he is half of a political scientist, and because he’s not in the partisan battles anymore, he sees things differently.”
 
Bozell questioned Stephanopoulos’s ability to cover the administration fairly.
 
“Will Stephanopoulos be critical of the White House’s plans when he spends every morning helping to craft them? Not likely,” Bozell said in a Jan. 29 press release. “He must from this point forward recuse himself from any reporting involving the Obama Administration.”
 
On Jan. 30, Politico blogger Ben Smith quoted John Harris, who wrote the article about the four men having regular conversations, as saying, “The calls are certainly a fascinating Washington ritual, but by no means do I think George Stephanopoulos is participating in strategy sessions. To my mind, he established his journalistic bona fides more than a decade ago, even as the Clinton administration was still underway, when he showed his willingness to report aggressively on Democrats as well as Republicans.”
 
Bozell, on Friday, Feb. 6, questioned Harris as well.
 
“I want to hear Mr. Harris say, 'What I wrote was false,'” Bozell said in the interview. “And when I read those words, I’ll consider the matter closed. He needs to stop playing games too. What he wrote is crystal clear and can be interpreted only one way. So either he stands by what he wrote or he recants what he wrote.”
 
In a Feb. 4 letter to ABC's David Westin, Bozell said, “In a public statement on Thursday, we called on Mr. Stephanopoulos to give an explanation and to recuse himself from coverage of the Obama Administration if the Politico story is true. And we were clearly not alone in our indignation; we subsequently learned that your phone banks were shut down that same Thursday by who knows how many people who called to register their outrage over the report and this obvious breach of integrity.”
 
“With each passing day, ABC’s failure to speak to and about this issue tarnishes further your network’s reputation as a legitimate news entity,” Bozell’s letter reads. “We are calling on you now, as President of ABC News, to publicly address and resolve this issue. If the charges are false, provide the evidence. We will gladly accept it and consider the matter closed. If the charges are correct, then ABC News must address this publicly and comprehensively.”
 
In a Feb. 5 letter to Bozell, Kerry Smith, ABC’s senior vice president for editorial quality, said ABC has not been silent on the matter.
 
“From the moment you issued your first press release on the Politico story last week -- and numerous times since -- we have made it clear to you and your staff that your assertions regarding Mr. Stephanopoulos and ABC News are false and based on a willful and knowing distortion of John Harris' original story,” Smith said in the letter.
 
The ABC letter also noted that CNSNews.com, as part of its own reporting on the issue, had been in contact with the network’s media relations staff. Smith said ABC “cooperated immediately” with an “on the record response,” but had “since learned from your reporter that his story was killed.”
 
Terry Jeffrey, editor-in-chief of CNSNews.com, said in a statement Friday, Feb. 6, why a CNSNews.com story on the ABC statement did not run earlier.
 
“I decided on Friday, January 30, that I did not want to run a story about a dispute between CNSNews.com’s parent organization and ABC News because it presented a conflict of interest for us,” Jeffrey said. “I made the decision in consultation with our managing editor.”
 
“I did not discuss this decision with MRC President Brent Bozell, nor did I inform him about the fact that we had considered running a story and not done so, or of the substance of the statement ABC provided to reporter Fred Lucas until the afternoon of Thursday, February 5,” Jeffrey said.
 
Bozell told CNSNews.com that Stephanopoulos could clear the matter up.
 
“In all this back and forth, with all the smoke, why can’t we get to the bottom of it by having George Stephanopoulos deny it and provide evidence of his denial, which could be done by denials from Paul Begala, Rahm Emanuel, James Carville -- except two of them were quoted in the story,” said Bozell.