Monday, October 30, 2006

Driving home tonight, I listened to Hugh Hewitt inerviewing Mark Halperin, political director of ABC News. Since then, I've reviewed the entire transcript here. I would urge you to read the interview, or track down Hugh's podcast of it when it appears at TownHall. It was one of the most remarkable interviews I've listened to in a long time. Remarkable, in part, because Halperin came across very well. He was promoting a book, The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008. But the conversation ranged far beyond the usual book-plugging discourse, and Halperin was much more than a reluctant foil for Hugh's questions.

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As I say, I found Halperin likable and intend to buy his book. Check out the entire interview; it is fascinating and intelligent. The latter quality is especially welcome in the last days of what has mostly been a dispiriting campaign season.

IS THE ESTABLISHMENT MEDIA BIASED against conservatives? Dan Rather remains in the anchor chair at the CBS Evening News despite his involvement in recent news stories based on dishonest reporting, fabricated documents and even Internet gossip falsely alleging that President George W. Bush secretly intends to begin the military conscription of students. These stories were obviously designed to damage Mr. Bush in the final weeks before a national election.

And now ABC News has left in place its Political Director Mark Halperin. ABC has done this despite the network’s acknowledgement that Halperin wrote a memo that to many seems to direct ABC reporters, anchors and producers to slant its coverage by downplaying the misstatements of Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry and by viewing negatively any misstatements by Republican candidate Bush.

Halperin’s directive reached ABC people on October 8, the very day that ABC “Good Morning America” co-host Charlie Gibson would be selecting questions for and moderating the second presidential debate between Bush and Kerry. Did Halperin intend to influence Gibson’s decisions in this debate?

Who is Mark Halperin, and does his memo reflect leftwing bias in his shaping of the news at ABC? To find answers to these questions, we need to consider the details of this memo-gate controversy in the light of Halperin’s past and of the famous radical left-wing father who shaped his political values. As we shall discover, Halperin has veered Left and crossed the line of ethical journalism many times...