Is CNS Editor Promoting Ted Cruz Because His Daughter Is A Cruz Staffer?

A while back, CNSNews.com editor Terry Jeffrey let it slip that his daughter works in the office of Republican Sen. Ted Cruz — something he had not previously disclosed. That connection is worth looking into, since it seems to be skewing CNS’ news coverage. The daughter in question appears to be Maria Jeffrey Reynolds, who has worked for Cruz since 2018; she was promoted to speechwriter in 2020, and she now serves as director of speechwriting and strategic communications and has been quoted in the media as his spokesperson.

CNS’ parent, the Media Research Center, typically frowns on newspeople who have relatives working in partisan politics. For instance, it loves to complain about the wife of NBC host Chuck Todd working as a Democratic consultant; one writer huffed that “While Todd claims to be all for sunshine,he has refused to discuss his wife’s firm’s work with Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign even while he interviewed Sanders on his shows,” and another groused that Todd’s wife “is active in Democratic Party campaigns and co-founded a PR firm that worked with Bernie Sanders. Since Jeffrey his hidden his daughter’s involvement in partisan politics until now, you can bet that the MRC won’t talk about it ether.

There is at least a circumstantial link between Jeffrey’s daughter working as a Cruz staffer and the large amount of favorable press Cruz receives at CNS. We’ve documented how CNS devoted 46 articles to the musings of Cruz in the final nine months of 2020, then 72 Cruz-centric articles in 2021. In the first three months of this year, Cruz was given 17 articles. That’s a pace of one article every five days. It’s highly unlikely that every single one of those articles are newsworthy; it’s more likely that Jeffrey published at least some of those articles as a favor to his daughter.

CNS also generally avoids reporting anything negative about Cruz. As we noted, CNS devoted no story to Cruz’s little trip to Cancun while his Texas constituents were freezing to death after a freak snow and ice storm that knocked out power in much of the state, instead limiting the story to brief mentions in other articles.

It seems that Jeffrey needs to justify CNS’ obsessive focus on giving good press to Cruz and explain the link it appears to have to his daughter’s employment. Otherwise, CNS shouldn’t be considered any more credible than the news operations the MRC spends millions of dollars a year to attack and smear for doing the exact same thing.