Editor&Publisher: Halperin Charges 'Extreme Bias' By Media Against McCain
By Greg Mitchell
(November 24, 2008) -- Mark Halperin, the Time.com "The Page" blogger, has gotten a lot of Web attention since Friday when, at a forum in Los Angeles, he called media bias in favor of Barack Obama "extreme" and "disgusting," the worst display of media malfeasance since the run-up to the Iraq war (which Halperin himself was a part of, he neglects to say). Here's Halperin's full quote: "It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war. It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage."
Asked at the forum to name the #1 reason the media boosted Obama, Halperin replied that it was the desire to see him simultaneously "etched in glass" and "on Mount Rushmore." Getting much less notice was the response from Mark Barabak, political writer for the L.A. Times, at the same affair: "Look at it in it's totality, at the end of the day did the media serve its function, to inform people about who these two men are? Yes they did."...
Halperin himself couldn't be biased, could he? One recalls his remarkable letter to far right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt last year when he declared, "I really enjoyed our radio talk and I appreciated the opportunity to appear with someone I respect so much....As I said on the show, you and I agree on almost everything we discussed." Halperin co-authored a book with John Harris of Politico last year, in which they titled one chapter "Matt Drudge Rules Our World." They explained that Drudge "is the gatekeeper...he is the Walter Cronkite of his era."...
Halperin is so terrified of offending McCain's team that he recently gave each of them an overall grade of "B" or higher for their campaign work -- even though they led him to defeat (in a rout), helped him make the disastrous Palin pick, left much of his reputation in tatters and took much of his party down with him....
It's the old false equivalency problem. In his "disgusting" remarks at the forum, Halperin cited as one of the most obvious flaws the New York Times' late profiles of Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama. Why, the McCain profile was more negative! But, come to think of it, Michelle did not have an affair with Barack while he was married to another, did not steal money from her own charity and barely avoid jail, did not become a drug addict, did not lie about the the circumstances of adopting a baby abroad, and so on....
This year, one of the most revealing high-profile measures of how the media often bent over backwards to be kind to McCain surrounded the four presidential and veep debates. In every case, most of the TV network anchors and analysts declared when the debates ended that the Republican had tied or won narrowly. Then the post-debate polls of voters came in, showing that in every case, Obama or Biden won easily....
(M)ost of the claims for the media favoring Obama have come in tallies of "favorable" stories about him. This, of course, is absurd since (as reports also show) the "horse race" dominated the media's coverage and Obama led that race easily by every measure: polls, fundraising, drawing crowds, online activity, key endorsements, and more. Halperin would do better to rail against "horse race" coverage -- but then he wouldn't do that, since he practices it more often than nearly anyone....
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003896181 
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