http://www.btcnews.com/btcnews/1491 — Weldon Berger @ 10:54 am
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Mark Halperin and John Harris, co-authors of The Way to Win, are participating this week in Slate’s “Breakfast Club” feature. Halperin is the political director at ABC News; Harris is his opposite number at the Washington Post. The “Breakfast Club” is a feature in which two or more luminaries in one field or another politely agree or disagree with one another on, with few exceptions, various irrelevancies. This week’s edition is mildly exceptional in that they’re discussing an issue of some import — the impact of the national political press on elections — and that Harris keeps telling Halperin, politely, to shut up about their book.
The reason Harris wants Halperin to shut up is that during the course of his promotion tour for the book, Halperin has courted right-wing talk and radio hosts and in so doing has disintegrated into a 10-year-old boy begging the bullies to like him. Glenn Greenwald has the awful details of Halperin’s behavior with right-wing talker Hugh Hewitt — the worst example to date, but not the only — which Billmon likens to the desperate self-criticism sessions common in Soviet Russia and vividly described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
It isn’t just Halperin’s character or his ability to provide rational coverage of politics in this country that his courtship of Hewitt, and Sean Hannity before, calls into question: it’s his mental acuity. At one point he tells Hewitt that “I am beginning to think you are intellectually dishonest on a few points.” He is, mind you, writing to a man whose very trade is intellectual dishonesty and demagoguery. Maybe Hewitt is capable of intellectual honesty off the clock, but when he’s on duty it has no part in his performance.
The public disintegration of Halperin’s character, in both the critical and psychological senses, is extremely unpleasant to watch. Harris is clearly uncomfortable with it: throughout his exchanges with Halperin he hints at that discomfort, telling Halperin in regard to “freak show” politics that “you know my view of the freak show, because I learned it from you. It should be marginalized. What incentives induced you to not follow your own advice?” When Halperin doesn’t respond, Harris gets more specific.
These are chaotic days for political reporters and editors, and you have made them more so for me by your sensible but inflammatorily stated comments on various conservative television and radio platforms. I’ve been getting tons of e-mails from the liberal side of the spectrum, all quite upset with my famous co-author and wondering if I share his views.
As a general proposition: I do. On specific points of emphasis: not always.
In particular, people get lathered up by the way you describe point No. 3 in the Halperin (and Harris) journalistic canon. You said we should be scrupulously fair and “conscious of conservative complaints about media bias and liberal complaints about media softness on George W. Bush.”
What could be wrong with that? My problem with the way you state it is that it tends to give credence to a popular view among ideologues of all stripes that the key to dealing with Old Media is “working the ref.” Partisans, disguised as media critics, believe that by howling loudly enough, they can intimidate us into pulling punches. As a practical matter, I should say, I just don’t think the “work the ref” strategy works, since in most Old Media newsrooms, we tend to dismiss the howlers as nut cases, even when they might have decent points. Beyond that, I fear that your injunction to be conscious of conservative complaints inadvertently creates the impression that coverage is a negotiation and critics should feel free to come to the table with loudspeaker in hand.
<more at link>
<Hat tip to Atrios for leading me to this>
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