I don't find it disturbing as Fox News and the other "conservative" media outlets were already full of ex-Bush era public sector employees. Both sides have an aggressively pro-intelligence agency bend, even if there are partisan differences.

There's a sizeable difference between judges and cabinet officials who have long been media pundits (though I do mostly agree that it's disturbing) and folks whose primary experience is in intelligence and counter-intelligence.

The era of rampant, selective intelligence leaks to the media started when these very same people were in administration.

Intelligence was always this leaky, there just wasn't social media and modern-day yellow journalism to twist it and spread it around. And we didn't have outrage culture, which provides a very blunt and dangerous mechanism for leakers to leverage.

The only real secret intelligence is tactical (military or otherwise), because we aren't quite that craven, exceptions notwithstanding. Everything else is intrinsically political and has a very short half-life as a secret. Work for a few years inside the Beltway, especially with or near people who are connected (e.g. lobbyists, think tank scholars, appointees, Pentagon staffers, international orgs, etc), and this becomes obvious immediately. Secrets are social currency more important than money and maybe even title. Everybody shares secrets, albeit usually in an obnoxious, obfuscated, pretentious way; even the interns.

As the other poster notes, selective intelligence leaking has been going on forever. And if there is a lack of Ex-Bush intelligence community members in the press, it is because the whole torture thing made then step away from the public eye.

I find I want to reply, but I don't know how to do that without getting wrapped up in a discussion that's too easy to be misinterpreted or dismissed here as political.

I think you are conflating a few issues.

On the one hand there is the bipartisan surveillance issue that Snowden shined a light on.

More recently we have a bunch of Trump and anti-Trump narratives and sometimes conspiracy theories.

I suspect some people on the thread have squished those into one. But the intelligence community is likely complicated, motivations multi-faceted, people holding diverse opinions. I don't think these things are the same, or you can dismiss or endorse one cause for the other.

CNN and NBC are not partisan entities, contrary to Republican smears. If they have any faults, it is in how desperately they bend over backwards to maintain the appearance of nonpartisanship amidst bad-faith attacks from the right, to the point that CNN just this week hired an alt-right conspiracy theorist as a full time contributor.

1) I'm a progressive and I'm saying this.

2) CNN and MSNBC absolutely are partisan entities, though CNN does try hard to appear less so. As long as MSNBC keeps employing Maddow and she keeps pushing debunked conspiracy theories, they will absolutely be seen as partisan. Her coverage as of late has been absolutely disgraceful and a huge stain on that network, IMO.

3) None of what you said addresses the very alarming fact that the heads of our intelligence agencies are taking senior posts in these media organizations.