WhatFinger


He gave rise to much of the shallow nonsense that passes for political reporting today.

Liberal D.C. writer explains how Mark Halperin's assault on our politics was even worse than the perv stuff



Liberal D.C. writer explains how Mark Halperin's assault on our politics was even worse than the perv stuff What made the revelation of Mark Halperin's perviness somewhat surprising is that he always came across as a fairly dull, straightlaced guy. We now know he was anything but that, his on-air persona suggested he was something of a "voice of reason" when it came to discussing politics. Former New Republic writer Eve Fairbanks has a very different perspective on that, and I want to share it with you because she's speaking to an issue that has bothered me for a very long time. It's about how so much of what passes as reporting in the political world is in fact little more than trivia and gossip - things presented as monumentally important when in fact they are nothing of the sort.
Regular readers know that I refer to Politico as the Worst Web Site in the World. There's a reason I do that, and it's not just because they're liberal fools. I call Politico the Worst Web Site in the World because it is built on this type of reporting, and has elevated it to such a level of prestige in journalistic circles that a whole generation of budding political reporters is more interested in Marco Rubio's water sip or Barack Obama's hair appointment than with taxes, health care or national security. These things don't matter in the slightest, yet the world of political journalism presents them to us as fascinating and deeply meaningful. And Fairbanks makes a very convincing case that, in his role as editor of ABC's The Note, Halperin started this whole thing by selling an entire city on the complete fraud that he was in the know, and that the real news was happening in the mysterious halls of power to which people like him controlled access:
The Note purported to reveal Washington’s secrets. In fact, its purpose was the exact opposite: to make the city, and US politics, appear impossible to understand. It replaced normal words with jargon. It coined the phrase "Gang of 500," the clubby network of lobbyists, aides, pols, and hangers-on who supposedly, like the Vatican's cardinals, secretly ran DC. That wasn't true — power is so diffuse. But Halperin claimed he knew so much more than we did, and we began to believe it. Once you believe that, it’s not hard to be convinced that politics is only comprehensible, like nuclear science, to a select few. There were those chosen ones — the people who'd flattered Halperin to get a friendly mention in his newsletter, the ones he declared to be in the know — and the rest of us. Halperin wrote about Washington like it was an intriguing game, the kind that masked aristocrats played to entertain themselves at 19th-century parties: Everyone was both pawn and player, engaged in a set of arcane maneuvers to win an empty jackpot that ultimately meant nothing of true importance.

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At the same time, The Note made it seem that tiny events — a cough at a press conference, a hush-hush convo between Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell in a corridor — held apocalyptic importance. Cloaked in seriousness, with the imprimatur of Peter Jennings' ABC News, in reality The Note was not news but simple gossip. Gossip: The word comes from the old English for "baptismal sponsor” — a godparent — and Halperin positioned himself as the priest who stood between the layman and the sacred mysteries of Washington, only letting a person through in exchange for the corrupting coin of accepting your own personal idiocy. It required acknowledging, like a cult initiate, that you had to learn the Master's arcane knowledge before claiming to know anything at all. The Note was a cult. Between bits of knowledge in each mailer, Halperin inserted birthday wishes to his gang, cementing the impression of Washington as a place where people are much more interested in buttering each other up than they are in the lives of the kind of Americans whose names Mark Halperin did not know.
I suspect Fairbanks and I would disagree on a good many policy matters, but I also think the importance of that fact would pale in comparison to our agreement on the issue she's presenting here. An awful lot of people have been taken in by the Bolshevik that Halperin and his imitators have sold to the political class. These are people who love the idea that they're among the rare insiders who really know what's going on, and can really understand the mysterious codes and signals that simply fly over the heads of average Americans.

That has resulted in a way of thinking and talking about government that is far afield from both reality and relevance. We talked a few months back about one of the worst perpetrators of this type of journalism, CNN's Chris Cillizza. His sin that day was to hype up and completely misrepresent a sequence of handshakes between President and Mrs. Trump and their Polish counterparts, making it look like there had been a diss of epic proportions when in fact no such thing had happened. What Cillizza did that day was irresponsible in the extreme, and yet it was parrotted by many other like-minded political reporter types who were jumping on the very type of thing that passes for news in our present age. I don't know if Halperin is as singularly responsible for this as Fairbanks suggests, but she makes a pretty good case that his running of The Note at ABC was so influential - even if it was totally fraudulent - that it set the standard for the way the D.C. press operate today. This is not good for the country, which is the most important thing, but it's also not good for journalism or commentary. At this site, we prefer to stay focused on real news and policy substance. Yet the world of online commentary thrives on clicks, and the consumers of political news and commentary have become conditioned to look for the sort of stuff that Halperin pioneered, and that Politico has locked in as the standard. So it's harder for the people who want to bring you real news to make money doing so, and that can only be detrimental to the goal of a well-informed public. Maybe it's not surprising that a guy who felt the need to present himself as some sort of sanctified insider would also be the guy pushing himself sexually on women. People who need to feel important and influential often need to have their importance affirmed - and one way to do that is to help yourself to sexual gratification that you obtain simply because of who you are. At least that's how you want to believe it works. Halperin's sexual misdeeds were eventually exposed. Now, thanks to Eve Fairbanks, the rest of his fraud has been exposed as well.


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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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