Halperin’s mea culpa?

November 25, 2007

When it comes to the elite political media, Mark Halperin’s the kind of guy who gets invited to all the cool kids’ parties. ABC News’ “The Note” was his creation; he’s a regular on all the talking heads’ shows, and earlier this year, Halperin became the editor at large and senior political analyst for Time magazine. If David Broder is the Dean, Mark Halperin has to be a leading contender for Vice Dean.

So when Halperin pens an op-ed for the NYT on the fundamental problem with the way reporters cover a presidential campaign, it stands to reason that it’ll be an important piece.

The premise is easy enough to grasp: most media coverage of a presidential campaign is predicated on the notion that candidates should be “evaluated by their ability to survive the grueling quadrennial coast-to-coast test of endurance required to win the office.” What does this have to do with the kind of president a candidate might become? Not much, which is precisely the problem.

Our political and media culture reflects and drives an obsession with who is going to win, rather than who should win.

For most of my time covering presidential elections, I shared the view that there was a direct correlation between the skills needed to be a great candidate and a great president. The chaotic and demanding requirements of running for president, I felt, were a perfect test for the toughest job in the world.

But now I think I was wrong. The “campaigner equals leader” formula that inspired me and so many others in the news media is flawed.

OK, so Halperin seems to now realize that there’s more to a presidential campaign than a horserace. This is … painfully obvious to anyone who’s followed any recent presidential campaign. Halperin has stumbled onto a problem that’s been documented repeatedly for a couple of decades.

I’m not annoyed by Halperin’s conclusion, so much as I’m baffled by what took him so long. Today he storms through an open door.

Worse, he’s sloppy about it. To bolster his already-tired thesis, Halperin points to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as examples.

Our two most recent presidents, both of whom I covered while they were governors seeking the White House. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are wildly talented politicians. Both claimed two presidential victories, in all four cases arguably as underdogs.

I don’t think that’s right at all. In 1996, Clinton was the heavy favorite all year, and several credible Republican challengers skipped the race because they didn’t want to lose. Bob Dole never led, and was never considered the favorite. Likewise, in 2004, Bush was vulnerable, but like Clinton in ’96, he led from wire to wire. To call him an “underdog” seems misguided.

But their success came not because they convinced the news media (and much of the public) that they would be the best president, but because they dominated the campaign narrative that portrayed them as the best candidate in a world-class political competition. In the end, both men were better presidential candidates than they were presidents.

Again, this may reflect the view of the media elite, but Clinton was a very successful president. As Robert Farley explained quite nicely, “I know we all know this, but it bears repeating; Bill Clinton was a remarkably popular President, and his term in office bears no meaningful resemblance to that of his successor, except in the minds of elite journalists. Clinton irritated the Village by getting a blowjob; Bush irritated the world by blowing up a country. Tragic flaws, indeed.”

When George W. Bush ran in 2000, many voters liked his straightforward, uncomplicated mean-what-I-say-and-say-what-I-mean certainty. He came across as a man of principle who did not lust for the White House; he was surrounded by disciplined loyalists who created a cheerful cult of personality about their candidate.

Actually, that was the approach embraced by lazy political reporters taken in by a weak and manufactured pitch to prop up a scarily unqualified candidate, but media figures who cared more about what Bush said and less about his campaign’s handlers knew better.

In the face of polls and horse-race maneuvering, we can try to keep from getting sucked in by it all. We should examine a candidate’s public record and full life as opposed to his or her campaign performance.

Well, yes, of course reporters should. This, one would like to think, is Journalism 101.

Yglesias concludes, “[W]hatever, if Halperin wants to come over to the side of light, I think we should take him.” That’s fair, I suppose. Factual errors aside, Halperin’s op-ed is something of a mea culpa — he doesn’t literally apologize for years of shallow, vacuous campaign coverage, but he implicitly concedes that he, and most of his colleagues, have been doing it wrong for far too many campaign cycles.

If Halperin wants to help make the process more meaningful and substantive, I suppose the appropriate response it, “It’s about time.”

Well, reporters are part of the problem but not the whole problem. If they clean up their act and do explore the capabilities, accomplishments, and background of candidates, we’d all hurrah!

But the media outlets have a lot to do with the amount and kind of exposure candidates receive. In no way is it equal time for each candidate, nor are candidates often allowed to lay out their platforms. Instead, the top dogs are given exposure, yes, but it’s the kind of exposure with idiots asking questions hardly related to the issues that people want to know about.

Maybe reporters can commit themselves to fair reporting, and I’m glad Mark Halperin has come to see the error of his ways. Will the news media controlled by giant commercial interests do the same?

  • I’m always impressed that, even when they are trying to admit they have made mistakes in their journalism, these media “stars” still insist on making the substantive mistake of seeking balance when none exists. It is that need for “balanced coverage” that drives many of the media’s failings.

    It IS good that Halperin admits mistakes. Now we want to see him come all the way into the light of day and fully embrace the blogosphere’s push for accurate coverage.

  • It’s this line, and the utter, utter BS “Nuthin’ ta do wid me. pal, I just work here” revisionism that underpins it, that really gets my goat.

    “But their success came not because they convinced the news media (and much of the public) that they would be the best president, but because they dominated the campaign narrative that portrayed them as the best candidate in a world-class political competition.”

    Bush was able to get within stealing distance of the White House back in 2000 not because he ‘dominated the campaign narrative’, but because the American MSM took a deliberate decision to throw their support behind him and sabotage his opponent’s campaign.

    On issue after issue, where the Gore Campaign told the truth and the Bush Campaign lied, the MSM played “he said, she said” with the truth, giving pro-Bush mouthpieces airtime to catapult their propaganda, while repeating the lies as unquestionable facts. Then they happily turned it around by saying that it was Gore who “now appears to have a problem with ‘honesty’ issues” over and over and over again.

    Election 2000 was a coup made possible by the wholesale conservative bias of the American MSM, and now one of the chief offenders wants to pretend that he and his fellow stenographers were just fooled by a masterful political genius – oh, and anyway, Clinton did it first, so there’s no comebacks.

    Get well and truly fu##ed, Mr Halperin.

  • Why are the “elite” media “elite”? If they are as vacuous as you say and if they seem to fail J-101, then what contributes to their “elitism”?

    I don’t question your premise that the media has failed miserably, but when they are not held to any standards of integrity, either by their peers or by their readership, what can you expect?

    In bloggery there are some who may call the bluff of the MSM, but bloggery is not where most people get their “news”. The “elite” command the attention of the masses. But just how did they achieve their pinnacles of success? And where are the “reporters” that were left in the dust of the opiners and the investigators? Some of us have read James Fallows and Doug Underwood and we have divined that money rules the newsrooms. The mad dog attacks of the vicious opiners sells. News doesn’t. And ad revenue is the measuring stick of news.

    So, how many thoughtful people will really try to dig and find the news that puts to shame the “elite”? Not many, I suppose. Too difficult.

    It may be that “news” is passe. Opinion governs. And opinion is far distant from news! Never the twain shall meet.

  • Halperin has a long way to go to understanding what is wrong with the media’s coverage of presidential elections. A long way.

    He still doesn’t understand that it is so much more than just getting sucked into the horse race; it’s about trying to fix that race. It’s about deciding who the front-runners should be and then structuring the coverage to make it happen. It’s the only thing that explains the media’s consistent and persistent failure to adequately examine the records of Giuliani and Romney and McCain, for example, and their failure to cover the candidate who led in Iowa for months – John Edwards – at all, in favor of making this a Clinton-Obama death-cage match. With Edwards, it seems like whenever he begins to get a little coverage, generally around the time of a debate, they print or report something to kick him down a couple of steps on the ladder. Why? Why should the media care who is ahead or behind? This isn’t supposed to be about ratings, nor is it supposed to be a contest to decide which media outlet or which pundit or talking head is the winner.

    Halperin doesn’t see that yet, and I kind of doubt that he will be having an epiphany on it anytime soon. It seems to me that he is saying that the candidates have been leading the media around by the nose – are you kidding me? It seems to me that the candidates and the people are working their asses off just trying to get the media to pay attention to the real issues, and to give them something approaching equal time, and as we’ve seen in debates like the one on CNN, the media seem bound and determined to control and manipulate the discussion so that the post-game show can have them delivering the results they wanted.

    Halperin just proves that he still fails to understand that electing a president is not about the media – it’s about us – the people – being able to have all the information we need, delivered in the most unfiltered way possible, so that when people go to the polls, they are voting on substance and fact, not media-manufactured and manipulated factors. Yes, I know there will never be a completely unbiased way to elect anyone, and while Halperin shows some glimmer of realization that something is wrong, at the moment, he does not seem ready to be as honest as he needs to be in order to accept his own role in just how bad it’s become.

    When he writes an op-ed that discusses that, I might be convinced that he gets it.

  • It started with Gary Hart. Got worse with OJ.
    They are looking for the big thrill. The big gotcha.
    Everything else is too much work.

  • Before I go make myself some tasty food, I’ll point out another example of MSM standard practice in covering for the GOP that I just read on the Wa-Po’s Editorial Page. Jim Hoagland is busy bigging up McCain as the obvious GOP candidate because of his record of opposing every bad thing the Bush regime has done in the last 4 years (no, I don’t remember that episode either). And after engaging in a little pre-emptive Dem bashing (to give the appearance of ‘balance’) he comes up with this revisionist corker.

    “McCain is determined to criticize Hillary Clinton’s positions without showing disrespect.”

    So if anyone tells you that McCain should be in trouble for responding to the question “How do we beat the bitch?” at a campaign rally, not with something like “I don’t think we need to hear that language and I’d prefer it if you left now”, but with a rather more than disrespectful laugh and “That’s a good question”, you can tell them that, on the contrary, the Washington Post says that McCain wouldn’t do anything of the kind, and so you must be a liar.

    Problem for a GOP politician? Didn’t happen, here’s a bare-faced lie tucked into the tail of a pro-McCain, anti-Democrat puff-piece, let’s move on.

    Your unbiased MSM in action.

  • The current practices of running for office, particularly at the presidential level, tends to favor the very rich or those backed by immense wealth. Both of which tend to produce flawed contenders, giving rise to the question: should wealth (and more recently corporatism) be the determinant of our presidential contenders?

    I would propose a different method of obtaining presidential contenders. One that would by-pass the wealth test and would tend to eliminate the influence of special interests.

    1) A national test open to all interested eligible parties. The test would have questions about economics, the constitution and bill of rights, polical science, history, current affairs, global warming etc. The test would include one 2 page essay on one of these topics to ensure that the contenders can write, spell and formulate ideas.

    2) The top 25 test takers would then go on to a battery of physical and mental health exams…to ensure fitness in both categories.

    3) Those reamining after the health tests, would then go before the American people in a weekly national televised program x 6 weeks, similar to American Idol, offering their ideas and introducing themselves each week. Telephone voting would whittle the numbers down each week until we have only 4 contenders remaining.

    4) At this point the 4 contenders will be offered public campaign financing to continue to bring their views to the American Public…(no other funding allowed). But….The major media TV stations (non cable) must also take turns at hosting (at least once/month) discussions between the 4, up until it is time to vote. The discussions must ensure equal air time for each contender and must address the leading problems that face us as a nation and a world.

    5) After voting at the polls: The top vote gatherer will be elected president and he will then select which of the 3 runners up to choose as vice president.

  • He fails to address the effect of media consolidation leading to a more than obvious political agenda which leans far right. Even when stories have been debunked as smears these ‘journalists’ continue to report it. They accept military releases as fact without even checking, and push campaign matches based on funding and anticipated profits.

    You can read how many points each contender has in Iowa and who matches up against who but seldom read a word on the candidate’s stand on the issues. If Halperin is serious then he should report on the issues before he associates names to it. What candidates are saying rather than how well they are received. So far there’s been too much ambush journalism rather than journalistic scrutiny.

    My god, how does somebody like Guiliani keep getting a pass on his lies and exaggerations as well as his record. The press has to know how biased they act. So much of their reporting is to the point of irresponsible propaganda and acting like stenographers in their coverage. Look at what happened to the soldier’s op-ed before the Petraeus report. Much like what happens to anything Kucinich says or does…the press is absent.

    It is the internet and the blogs that are forcing the MSM to even take a look at itself. It is here that journalistic hope flourishes.

  • It should be mentioned that the “Village” always hated Clinton. It wasn’t the BJ. It was that he was “Bubba” and didn’t belong in the Village. Just as it was with the wingnuts, the BJ was the offense they focused on, but it wasn’t the cause of the offensiveness. The real problem was just that he wasn’t part of their clique, and so they were in a power struggle to ruin him; and thus maintain the strength of the clique.

  • I just read Halperin’s piece and I think it is a self-serving piece of tripe. I do not find it to be a mea culpa; I think it is a big, fat excuse. Or perhaps it is Halperin’s attempt to be the first one of his crowd to come out of the box with the “we were taken in by the narrative” new narrative. Halperin and many of his pals practice journalistic incest. As others have noted they are interested in perpetuating and embroidering their little impressions of candidates and making those impressions into the foundation upon which the rest of their reporting is based. It is a heckuva lot easier to report on impressions and silly-assed observations than it is to actually dig in to policies and try to draw comparisons for the hoi poloi whom they all think are clamoring open-mouthed for the “I’d rather have a beer with George Bush than Al Gore” pap that they churn out. They get paid big bucks whether they inform a single voter or make sure that Hillary Clinton is asked whether she prefers diamonds or pearls, or find a million and one worthless anecdotes to titter about.

    Oh, but Mark Halperin is now going to try to “resist” the powerful siren songs of the lazy narratives that he and so many of his brethren create. I will follow his example and work very hard not to be taken in by the lies I tell.

    Finally, Halperin really takes the cake by equating the relative effectiveness of Bill Clinton with George W. Bush. He notes that “… being all things to all people worked wonderfully well for Bill Clinton the candidate, but when his presidency ran into trouble, this trait was disastrous, particularly in the bumpy early years of his presidency and in the events leading up to his impeachment. The fun-loving campaigner with big appetites and an undisciplined manner squandered a good deal of the majesty and power of the presidency, and undermined his effectiveness as a leader. What much of the country found endearing in a candidate was troubling in a president.” I have to say that I think he is simply (and once again) substituting his own impressions for those of “much of the country.” He fails to mention that Clinton (a) had high approval ratings (and was very popular in the world) as he was subjected to a ridiculous impeachment and (b) was the target of powerful interests seeking “undermine his effectiveness as a leader” by dredging for and making the most of every possible rumor and ultimately insisting upon his impeachment. Yep. That is SO on a par with the fundementally FUBAR administration of George W. Hail-Fellow-Well-Met Bush.

    Mark Halperin is not seeking to pursue substance in his political commentary. He wants to ease his conscience and side-step blame. He does this by copping a plea to a much lesser crime than the one for which he feels guilt.

  • Halperin may have seen the light, but in order to rejoin that light, he’s going to have to get a lot closer to the end of the tunnel. As it is, he seems to be stuck somewhere around the middle.

    And in most non-Bu$hylvanian circles, “50-some percent” is still a failing grade….

  • Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are wildly talented politicians

    Anyone who can use the phrase “wildly talented” to describe Bush without dying of shame needs to be watched because there’s no limit to what he might try.

    When George W. Bush ran in 2000, many voters liked his straightforward, uncomplicated mean-what-I-say-and-say-what-I-mean certainty.

    Again, “mean what I say/say what I mean” can’t apply to BushBrat because half the time you couldn’t tell what the hell he was trying to say. Does this guy have a criminal record? Confidence scams, mail fraud, that sort of thing?

    Both claimed two presidential victories, in all four cases arguably as underdogs.

    Arguably, by who? The voices in Halpo’s head? And I like the way he fails to mention all the dirty tricks involved in getting Bush in and then back in the White House.

    The man is either crazy, high or dishonest, but he isn’t sorry.

  • How about taking this from an entirely different perspective — what is the purpose of a news program? Predicting the future (horserace) or providing the public with information?

    I think it’s always been this way, but it’s hard to understand. We can be at war with a country for years, yet never see any news coverage that gives us any background information about that country. Information can be provided in small bites, but there never seems to be any interest in the news media in providing it.

  • Hmmm. I suppose that Mark Halprin’s somewhat rosy assessment of Bob Dole’s chances in ’96 could have something to do with the fact that he worked on Dole’s presidential campaign as a speechwriter and foreign policy advisor (???).

    Anyway not to worry, having duly genuflected at the altar of “Big Think” (as he likes to say) in decrying the propensity of American political journalism to focus only the horse race dimension of political campaigns, I have no doubt whatsoever that Halprin will be back at the track bright and early tomorrow morning, racing form in hand, “tick-tocking” the ponies as they line up for another day at the races. He may whine about it occasionally but where the rubber meets the road, Halprin has rarely actually demonstrated any particular desire to change the tone of political reporting in the USA. After reading his stuff off and on for seven or eight years now, I would have to say that he tends to be more, how shall I say, the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with political reporting in the USA.

  • Halperin’s just another member of America’s traditional criminal class, getting it wrong once again, just like the previous 218 years. Outside of maybe 15-20 of these guys in the whole time – 5 of them 50 years ago – these people have been properly termed “wretches.” They have been utterly useless when it came to getting things right, always for sale to the highest bidder.

    When we get that set of facts right, we can consign these fools to the dumpster they belong in.

  • Hey CalD, could you warn us when you’re going to link to porn?

    After Glen’s description of the first HH B&D session with Not-Liberal Slave Marky Mark, I was afraid to keep reading because I didn’t want to know what else Hal2000 would do to win Huge Spewitt’s approval.

    And I’m still waiting for the offer to appear again on the show. Thanks so much, Mark Halperin.”

    OK, that’s enough. I just know a casting room couch scene follows complete with two wet suits and a goat. Yucgk.

  • Halperin’s mea culpa is much more a lame excuse for Bush than anything else. Trying to spin that there is any similarity between the Bush failures and the Clinton failures is what this piece of garbage is all about. Anybody that can so blithely compare Bush and Clinton still has his head firmly lodged where the sun doesn’t shine. There is absolutely no comparison. Sorry Mark, this load of Bush$hit won’t sell. Bush’s legacy is what it is – a complete and total disaster.

  • LOL! Sorry, TIAO. My bad.

    Speaking of yucky, I just flipped over to CSPAN and Halperin is on right now. This is why you should also never speak the devil’s name out loud.

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  • What glen said in #21.

    The cool kids think they can make up for the shit they helped elect.

    Nice try, but you are way too late to get on the boat, asshole.

  • I’m surprised no one has yert mentioned that one reason for Halperin flogging this particular thesis–that running an efficient and well-disciplined campaign is not a qualification to be Prez–is that HRC happens to be running quite an efficient and well-disciplined campaign.

  • I get uneasy whenever I see this debate. “What should responsible journalists be doing” is a subject that any side who has LOST an election inevitably raises. If a good message loses it must have been the biased or incompetant messenger. Our “MSM” must have been suckered by a slick campaign, because the American people would NEVER have voted the way they did if the facts had been presented “correctly”.

    I see a great deal of cyncial self interest in this debate form both sides of the political spectrum, though on balance the political right has done more to raise media-bashing to an art form. But I also see something else; a reluctance to place blame where blame so obviously belongs. In a democracy there is an understandable reluctance to criticize the voters themselves for making poor, myopic choices. But they often do. The American people on average are willfully ignorant of even the most basic political and economic facts. They demand that our political leaders resemble our celebrities. They demand solutions that can be explained in sentences short than this one; and if those sentence can rhyme, all the better! And they get it, from our politicians and the journalists who cover them.

    Sure there are ways that presidential coverage can be improved. Sure we can focus more on issues and less on personalities. Journalists could treat our elections more as serious business and less as soap operas. But compare the TV ratings of soap operas vs that of the evening news and you will find out why this is not going to happen.

    In struggling democracies all over the world, opposition parties dream of being able to communicate clear, unbiased facts to the people. Here in America such facts are yet another luxury so common that we take them for granted. As a political junkie I can honestly say there is no fact about a presidential candidate in recent memory I was not able to learn quickly and easily. Every vote I have ever cast has been an informed one; informed with minimal effort. As long as this is possible, the MSM is doing just fine.

    The real issue here is not with “Main Stream Media” that make theater of our politics but “Main Stream Morons” out there who demand one.

  • Ewww, U R like so like totally NOT FUN when U talk about how reporters should cover the BOOOOO-RING issues instead of fun stuff like haircuts and restaurant tips and who’s the biggest hunka-hunka burnin’ love in the Presidential race. That’s why we think our BFF Mo Dowd is just the kewlest thing in two shoes! She can write a whole article about a debate and never bore us with what the candidates actually said, just make all kinds of really kewl snarky remarks about how Hillary is a dominatrix and Obama is a weak little sissy,
    ’cause that’s how she reads their body language, which is way easier than listening to them, plus there’s no pesky old transcript to trip you up if you get it wrong.

    Hey, this is a Presidential election! It’s all about entertainment. How else is it supposed to compete with American Idol, and news stories about missing white women?

  • So, Mark Halperin is now declaring that the American Press corps does a lazy and superficial job of covering American Presidential Elections.

    Exactly how is that any different from the job they did on the run up to war in Iraq, the involvement of the Bush White House in ruining the career of a covert CIA agent, an obviously politically written report on the status of President Bush’s “Surge” in Iraq by General Petraeus, the current plans for George W. Bush to launch a new war against Iran, or any other matter affecting the lives, wealth or security of the American people?

    Did he expect that the jellyfish of the White house reporters would suddenly develop a spine when confronted with George W. Bush himself in a Press Conference?

    Did he think that the dilatants of our media elite would skip a Kennedy Center concert in order to actually research articles they were writing?

    Did he actually believe that our newspaper publishers would risk the loss of millions of dollars in federal advertisement money by printing something that actually accused a member of the White House staff of lying, even if the statement were demonstratably false?

    Now who’s living “in a bubble”?

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