Jay Carney White House Press Secretary Date of Birth: 22.05.1965 Country: USA

Biography of Jay Carney

James "Jay" Carney was born on May 22, 1965, in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Virginia. He completed his high school education in Lawrenceville, New Jersey in 1983. Carney obtained his higher education at Yale University, where he was the author of the university's student journal, The New Journal. In the summer of 1986, he interned at Time magazine and spent the second half of the year studying on a student exchange program in Leningrad (according to one biography, at Leningrad State University). It was reported that Carney was fluent in Russian.

Carney graduated from Yale in 1987 with a bachelor's degree, specializing in the study of Russia and Eastern Europe. He began his career as a reporter for the Miami Herald in 1988. A year later, Carney became the bureau chief for Time magazine in Miami, covering Mikhail Gorbachev's visit to Cuba and the U.S. invasion of Panama. In 1990, he was appointed as Time's correspondent in Moscow, where he reported on the collapse of the Soviet Union and Boris Yeltsin's reforms. After returning to the United States in 1993, Carney joined the White House press pool, covering the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Carney received the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation's journalism award in 2003 and was appointed as Time's deputy bureau chief. In 2005, he became the bureau chief of Time's Washington office and provided political commentary on CNN. He also maintained a political blog, Swampland, on Time's website.

In 2008, Carney led a group of Time correspondents covering the presidential campaign of Democratic candidate Barack Obama. After Obama's victory in November, Carney was appointed as the press secretary for Vice President Joseph Biden. On January 5, 2011, it was announced that White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs would be resigning. Later that month, President Obama, on the recommendation of Biden, appointed Carney as the new head of his press office. The press noted that unlike Gibbs, Carney had never been close to Obama.

Carney is married to Claire Shipman, a correspondent for ABC News. They have a son, Hugo James (born in 2001), and a daughter, Della Claire (born in 2005).