02
Nov
John Harris begs Mark Halperin to shut up
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.
Indeed. It’s safe to say that when one of the more influential political reporters and pundits in the country goes hat in hand begging for absolution from right-wing hit men, those hit men will recognize that their three decades of relentless pounding on the institutional press has paid off off in spades.
Harris is at pains to to identify points of agreement with Halperin; as he notes, he wouldn’t have agreed to co-author the book absent any common ground. But for the most part, his contribution to the discussion amounts to a public plea for Halperin to shut up and drop his personal quest to prove he’s not part of the “liberal media” problem. And to Harris’s credit, he correctly pegs one large bone press critics on the left have to pick with the institutional press.
The big journalistic failure of recent years is one also shared by numerous other people and institutions. That was the media’s failure—with some prominent exceptions, including several at the Post—to challenge and illuminate the administration’s premises for the Iraq war before the invasion. That is not an ideological statement, or even a criticism of the war. It’s just a statement of fact. The Post’s editor, Len Downie—who is even more scrupulously fair-minded and politically neutral than you are—has acknowledged this publicly.For what it’s worth, I think our failures in campaign and government coverage usually have less to do with ideology and more to do with journalistic conventions. We follow noise, as witnessed by the coverage of the Kerry-Iraq uproar in recent days. (Though please note that this classic freak-show story ran inside the Post today, not on the front page.) And our professional habits and stylebook rules sometimes inhibit us from telling the truth—and from saying that someone is lying—in plain, conversational language. We let it become a matter of controversy whether it is sunny or rainy, when sometimes it’s a matter of fact. This is one area of the liberal critique of Old Media that often is pretty compelling.
Again, indeed. So how about you fix it.
This isn’t to say Harris hasn’t his own weaknesses, including the traditional myopia about the degree to which the press have succumbed to bashing from the right and about his own role in the process, but for the most part they arise from misapprehensions about the nature of success in a mythical political world free of unfettered savagery, and of the genesis of the prevailing political climate.
Halperin, though, clearly has no business representing the national press in a discussion of that institution. At the same time, his high profile going into the elections offers a valuable and rather depressing confirmation of the degree to which a great many journalists are operating with the equivalent of Jack Sparrow’s compass in Pirates of the Caribbean: it points neither east nor west nor north nor south, but only in the direction of the thing you most desire. In Halperin’s case, what he most desires is acceptance from people who have always and will ever find him nothing but contemptible, and his only success is in broadening that demographic.
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Given John Harris’s rank thug dishonesty and weird cognitive dissonance regarding his own morally bankrupt coverage of the Clinton Presidency, his slapping of Halperin’s wrist here is quite illuminating…My guess is that Harris is more concerned with Halperin exposing the Beltway media whore rules to broad scrutiny through his exposed ball licking of Hewitt than any real concern with what is being said, despite his hackneyed gibberish in SLATE…
November 2nd, 2006 at 11:55 amyour server problems might be becuase you got frontpaged at atrios. Hit Duncan up for some $$$ for bandwidth. Just yesterday he was commenting how nice it is to get paid by the internet for just whining in writing.
November 2nd, 2006 at 12:08 pmTypically links out from him aren’t a problem. I think it’s something to do with the comment and referrer spam filters I’m running, so I turned them off. I somehow doubt Duncan will be funding the upgrade, so I guess I’ll just have to kill the stuff manually for a while.
November 2nd, 2006 at 12:16 pmHit Duncan up for some $$$ for bandwidth.
Or, ask him to stop linking here.
November 2nd, 2006 at 12:20 pmThe Post’s editor, Len Downie—who is even more scrupulously fair-minded and politically neutral than you are…
Zing!
November 2nd, 2006 at 12:21 pmThumb, trust me, I have absolutely no problem with links from Duncan, as he’ll be happy to tell anyone who asks.
Melior … yeah, the exchange was so full of subtextual and overt commentary and crap that it was hard to limit the highlighted ones to just those few.
November 2nd, 2006 at 12:26 pmBTC–you always have excellent finds and analyses–everytime I get here I vow to return, sometimes forgetting for awhile to add you to my blog hopping route. Thanks, A-Man, for highlighting this really good blog. And thanks, BTC writers, for your insights and good writing.
November 2nd, 2006 at 12:54 pm“we tend to dismiss the howlers as nutcases even when they might have a decent point”
Did it ever occur to them that having a decent point might also be a decent reason to howl? Even if you don’t like howling, you dismiss their points even if they’re decent?
What a bunch of arrogant assholes these media whores are.
November 2nd, 2006 at 12:54 pmJawbone, thanks very much. It’s always great to hear that.
The Fool: To steal Duncan’s “simple answers to simple questions,” the answer to yours is “No.”
November 2nd, 2006 at 1:00 pmHere’s what I wrote about this elsewhere:
Conservative blowhard Hugh Hewitt interviewed Mark Halperin of ABC.
http://www.tristram-shandy.com/2006/10/mark-halperin-mary- mapes-of-world-are.html
Hugh Hewitt is full of it, and so is Mark Halperin and the rest of the so-called liberal media (read Eric Alterman’s excellent book).
Hewitt seems to think that only uneducated people who live in the woods should be journalists. Halperin seems to think that only the unopinionated (Read: the stupid) can be journalists.
Also, for Mark Halperin of ABC to accept interns from Bob Jones University shows a SERIOUS lack of judgment for two reasons.
First of all, by any objective measure (SATs, quality of faculty, etc.), it’s a crappy school, so it’s unlikely that you will find good candidates there.
Secondly, students attend it b/c they have an ideological bias and an ax to grind! So he’s just guaranteeing that he gets rabidly partisan right-wing interns who want to move ABC to the right. Far cry from his ridiculous views on being totally non-biased. No one from Bob Jones U is going to live up to those standards.
Also, do they believe in evolution? Interracial dating? Equality? Separation of church and state? These are bedrock scientific facts and constitutional values. If you don’t believe in them, you aren’t qualified to work at ABC or any other serious news organization. PERIOD, FULL STOP.
That’s what happens when you throw your lot in with the idiot horde on media bias. You become an idiot appeaser like Mark Halperin.
November 2nd, 2006 at 1:21 pmTo call the Media whores (re the time-honored line) is to denigrate whores, who actually give the buyer something for his money, whereas the media takes the power money, and pisses on it’s clients…those who watch this crap.
I can hardly watch any cable news these days…the News Sluts are breathless and peeing in their pants over the miss-statement by Kerry and ignoring the bigger picture (as usual).
The people are more sensible…by a great margin they point to Iraq as the single subject which bothers them the most.
MSM….get with the people you a**holes!
November 2nd, 2006 at 1:26 pmIs it too much to ask for at least one of the people associated with this fiasco not have a name that starts with ‘H’. I’m royally confused by who is who here.
November 2nd, 2006 at 1:32 pmI threw in $10 ’cause I could afford to. Great post, it was worth it.
If we’re going to make anything lasting out of these beginnings of an end-around of the MSM, we’re gonna have to put our cash where our eyeballs are.
Duncan Black is doing OK by Eschaton, but, keep in mind, he ain’t makin’ Woodward money.
November 2nd, 2006 at 1:34 pmKid Charles: Take it alphabetically. Halperin is highly respected (among people lacking in perspective) institutional press maven who is in the middle of a very public meltdown. Harris is his co-author and an almost equally revered but much more self-composed political journalist. Hewitt is a third-string right-wing demagogue to whom Halperin is desperately sucking up.
Aaron: Thank you very, very much. It helps me out a lot and it’s gratifying on the validation front as well.
November 2nd, 2006 at 1:38 pmThe thing is, Halperin (much like Evan Thomas in 2004) is right.
November 2nd, 2006 at 1:48 pmBrian: right about what?
November 2nd, 2006 at 1:50 pmthumb, trust me, i have absolutely no problem with links from duncan, as he’ll be happy to tell anyone who asks.
i do! he never links to me anymore! that’s the problem!!
to call the media whores (re the time-honored line) is to denigrate whores, who actually give the buyer something for his money, whereas the media takes the power money, and pisses on it’s clients…those who watch this crap.
actually, i think the metaphor, at least in its usage by the late great blog media whores online (someone who did link to skippy!) is designed to imply that the political power elite are the clients, and the media are down on their knees servicing those clients instead of investigating them as their original job description would warrant.
i believe that the audience who watches the media are not included in any way in that metaphor, and i never meta 4 i didn’t rate (it’s an old school dkos joke).
.
.
November 2nd, 2006 at 2:35 pmHarris and Halperin are cock-sucking pieces of shit who richly deserve each other.
November 2nd, 2006 at 2:44 pm[…] Funny. […]
November 2nd, 2006 at 2:44 pmI dealt with Hugh Hewitt about 15 years ago when he was a lawyer in southern California representing land developers. He was just a intellectually dishonest then as he is now. And just as big a jerk.
November 2nd, 2006 at 2:47 pmHey, Mike, I cock-sucking was a good thing.
If only the the 3-H club were worth as much as a decent blow-job, life might be a little more pleasant.
November 2nd, 2006 at 3:50 pmDemographic Correctness.
This is the true media disease.
November 2nd, 2006 at 3:56 pmHarris is being a dishonest jag off too. It was he, shortly after the 2000 election, who wrote a mea culpa piece in the Washington Post explaiing that the reason the press screwed over Al Gore was because conservative bothc harder than liberals do. [No more, of coure. But at the time, yes].
In other words, because they “worked the ref.”
November 2nd, 2006 at 5:06 pmHesiod, yeah, but that was six years ago and the institutional press memory extends back roughly 1/300th of that period.
Skippy, I use the patented Halperin method only not in public. I threatened to sue him once, but that didn’t work.
Avedon, hi. This story is indexed in Google News under the unfortunate headline “Permanent Link.” Which has some merit but only if you already know what it’s about.
November 2nd, 2006 at 5:38 pmYou 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?
Oh, oh, me! me! I know! The conservative complaints are 99% bullshit. Do I get a gold star?
November 2nd, 2006 at 5:48 pmDrBB: yeah, there should be some sort of weighting system, beginning with three decades of freebies for criticism from “liberals.”
November 2nd, 2006 at 6:49 pmBTC, other people who have been using the same webhost have had the same problems. On the industry board, webhostintalk.com, there have been several long threads complaining of it. thread 1, thread 2, thread 3.
Also, this site isn’t using mod_gzip. In the future, tell your host to gzip the page. It cuts down bandwidth by about 3/4, at the expense of CPU time.
I’d recommed that whichever host you decide to go with, you do a thorough search of the forums.
November 2nd, 2006 at 7:46 pmHi, Dave. Thanks for the heads up. When I looked at the server logs, the culprit turned out to be the plugin I use to kill comment spam. When I turned it off everything was back to normal, although I immediately started getting swamped with spam again. Anyway, I went with another spam killer which seems to be working and doesn’t involve any javascript, so we’ll see how that goes. Thanks for the tip about the gzip, too: I had no idea what that was for.
November 2nd, 2006 at 8:51 pmDid it ever occur to them that having a decent point might also be a decent reason to howl?
The conservatives in the audience might think about this the next time they’re railing against the evils of college students rallying against globalization, and dismissing them out of hand because they are, effectively, howling. (Which isn’t to say all globalization protests are howling, but some get to that point).
November 3rd, 2006 at 4:29 amBTW, on the other side, all y’all who say the media has little or no bias need to spend a month watching nothing but CSPAN for news and then try again. That’s not to say that the bias is nearly as monolitic as the biased right wing media outlets would like us to believe (someone needs to buy them a mirror), but it certainly isn’t a simple objective reportage of the facts.
November 3rd, 2006 at 4:31 amElmegil: I don’t have a television so I don’t watch CSPAN, but my impression is that most of their programming doesn’t represent itself as news. Is that incorrect? I have been to what are commonly called anti-globalization protests and some of them have included people who get out of hand, but most of them don’t and most of them aren’t even protesting globalization: they’re protesting the lack of environmental and worker rights protections in the trade agreements.
November 3rd, 2006 at 8:20 amI can’t speak to Harris’ coverage of the Clintons, but I’ve been reading The Washington Post quite closely for about 3-4 years now. While I’ve at times I’ve seen Harris make mistakes, I’ve also seen him admit them, and give some very thoughtful responses in his installments of the WaPo’s daily political chat. Halperin really admires Rove’s political acumen, and apparently really wants to be liked by him. It’s sad, pathetic, and even infuriating, especially when it obviously influences The Note and other Halperin efforts. In contrast, Harris currently gets the benefit of the doubt in my book. I think he’s really trying to do a good job, screws up at times, but has owned up to at least some of those. He is a human being, after all. Evidenced further by the passages above, he’s also pretty aware of the merits, flaws and challenges of reporting.
I also keep in mind that Howard Kurtz quoted Hinderaker in his Thursday column and agreed with Hinderaker that the WaPo should have put the Kerry gaffe on the front page – even though Kurtz knew it was just a gaffe! I’m still astounded and incensed by that (I believe Kurtz believes he’s unbiased, and he occasionally makes good points, but he definitely leans to the right). Harris wisely judged the Kerry story was not worthy of front page status – let’s be honest, the entire story is “GOP Tries to Make Political Hay of Kerry Gaffe,” and any reporter or editor that recognizes that realizes that to put the story on the front page is to propagate a baseless GOP attack and to promote the “Freak Show.” I believe one of the reasons many outlets ran with this silly story was they were eager to show they weren’t just bashing Republicans – since we all know, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.” In any case, shame on Kurtz and Halperin for promoting the Freak Show (Halperin was gleefully Kerry-bashing on Charlie Rose; I had to change the channel). Meanwhile, Harris had enough sound judgment not to spotlight the story. Sadly, I think Halperin may be a lost cause, but with Harris I think polite, thoughtful appeals to reason can prevail.
November 3rd, 2006 at 9:42 amBatocchio: I liked that Harris explicitly acknowledged the “he said/she said” disease, and I have seen some Post political reporters try to avoid it in specific stories — Dana Milbank in a story about Bush’s troubled relationship with facts comes to mind — but the problem with such admissions is that they arrive after the fact. Every December members of the press gather on Kurz’s show and other forums to confess their sins: stories they missed or misrepresented, stories they overplayed — missing white women, for instance — to the detriment of other, much more important stories, stories in which they accepted spin as reality, etc. And then they absolve themselves and go on to another year of the same shoddy work.
That’s not a blanket indictment. There are exceptions; Knight-Ridder’s Washington bureau (now McClatchy’s) did a very good job of reporting before, during and after the Iraq invasion, and their Iraq correspondents have been stellar as well. But they really were exceptions. It’d be really nice if reporters did work that doesn’t necessitate the post-train wreck mea culpas.
November 3rd, 2006 at 10:06 amheads up
if dunc’s link was a source of bandwidth issues, well, Markos has now linked …
November 3rd, 2006 at 11:57 amHi, wystler. The problem yesterday was with a script my spam killer was running. Today it just seems to be the Kos-related traffic (plus Crooks and Liars, plus Altercation), all of which I am very pleased to get, mind you, not complaining a bit, since nothing unusual was showing up in the server logs. I’m just going to have to bite the bullet and go for a stronger server. I’m also moving from Hawaii to the mainland, so it comes at an awkward moment.
November 3rd, 2006 at 12:06 pmI have not read Halperin’s and Harris’ book, but I did hear Mark Halperin being interviewed on one of the conservative radio talk shows. (I think that it was the Don Krogh’s show on Salem Radio). Halperin did sound very conservative. Perhaps he was being agreeable with the host to help the book sales. However, I suppose one factor in the mainstream media’s poor coverage of politics and other matters is its heavy reliance on official sources. I spoke with a retired Washington columnist about something during the Clinton Administration. He said that many reporters and columnists have to be careful or they may lose their sources if they write something too controversial or contrary to the conventional wisdom. I suppose that is the case all over the country, not just in Washington. One of the attractions of reading some of the blogs is that many of the blog writers live and work outside of Washington, D.C. They are not necessarily dependent on speaking with government officials, lobbyists, etc. to make a living. So, there seems to be more diversion from the conventional wisdom one reads and hears in the mainstream press.
November 3rd, 2006 at 3:45 pmJeff, the fear of losing sources is real, but at least in Washington the sources to be lost are most often the least informative and most mendacious. When a “senior administration official” leaks something, you can generally assume he or she did so with the full knowledge and permission of his or her boss. The real scoops come from people down the line, as with whoever blew the whistle on the NSA surveillance program and innumerable other scandals large and small. Among the reasons I think the Knight Ridder guys were so successful at accurately reporting the runup to the Iraq invasion and the events following it is that their sources were smaller fish: they were working majors and colonels, one-star generals and mid-level bureaucrats at the Pentagon instead of three-star generals and Wolfowitz, Feith and Rumsfeld.
I remember a couple of years ago when reporters were complaining about pointlessly anonymous briefings from “senior administration officials,” where the official would brief reporters on something completely innocuous that in no way warranted anonymity. I don’t remember now who it was, but one of the reporters tried to organize a boycott of that sort of briefing. His colleagues were in general agreement that that might be a good idea, so one day he stood up before one of those briefings began and walked out. And found himself standing in the hallway alone.
That’s what’s so irritating about the fear of losing sources. It’s not as though administration officials are going to clam up: they want to get their message out. They get annoyed with individual reporters and maybe stop gossiping off the record to them for a while — and reporters love gossip — but eventually officials have to start talking again because they want their spin on TV and in the Times or the Post and all of the chains. It isn’t isolation from the news that scares reporters at the top of the food chain: it’s social ostracism.
A good example is the recent flurry of “senior administration officials” leaking about possible changes in the administration’s Iraq strategy. That was an election-related effort, and those officials had to talk with reporters in order to get that story in the papers and on TV. They weren’t going to spite any of the big league reporters just because one or another had written something nasty about them or had been mean to Tony Snow in a briefing.
So what we have is, I think, a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of the press about 1) what their jobs are and 2) where the actual balance of power between them and the administration — any administration — lies.
November 3rd, 2006 at 4:35 pmComment by Weldon Berger — 11/3/2006 @ 10:06 am
I definitely agree an admission of guilt after the fact can’t compare to actually getting it right the first time, or at least the next time. I do like to distinguish between hacks and earnest-if-flawed journalists, however. I’ve been fairly impressed with Peter Baker and Dan Balz at the Post, for example, and there are many genuinely great reporters out there (Charlie Savage, Murray Waas, Seymour Hersh, Dana Priest, many others), and you’re dead on about Knight-Ridder/McClatchy.
One of the huge hurdles I still see for the legitimate media is how they deal with lying. The media’s reluctant to call someone a “liar,” or more generally to flatly state that a public figure’s assertion is false. I suspect for “liar” it’s because it ascribes motive, and there may be a legal issue of libel as well. Skilled journalists can still raise the issue when it’s pertinent, but it seems even good reporters often sort of dance around the issue (I’m thinking of Peter Baker covering Bush’s parade of straw men last month, or Dana Milbank coming to the very brink of calling Bush a liar a couple years ago - perhaps the same article you’re thinking of). The easiest way to raise the issue when relevant would be with a direct quotation from a political opponent, but most politicians and pundits seem to avoid the word as well (meanwhile, the blogosphere can and will be more frank, but some bloggers may be a bit too quick to throw out the term). I’m sympathetic to the plight of straight journalists (versus op-ed writers, who have more leeway to sound off), but it seems the current principles of press conferences and talk shows allows liars to game the system, “win the half hour” as Dan Froomkin put it, and slip away relatively unscathed. The fact-checking, when it even occurs, is often buried deep in the paper or overlooked (other than perhaps by bloggers).
Anyway, thanks for a good post on an important subject.
November 3rd, 2006 at 11:32 pmBatocchio, thanks for the kind words, and for reminding me it’s a good idea to stroke reporters who do well when they do well.
November 4th, 2006 at 9:28 am