Hugh Hewitt interviews Mark Halperin, political director of ABC News. As lengthy as they are, I’ve exerpted only small portions – the exchange lasted 3 hours. It’s a must read for those of you still clinging to the notion that there isn’t an overwhelming left-leaning bias in the news industry – the “default setting”, as some of us call it. This is from one of their own.
Halperin was on the show to discuss his new book on US political strategists, The Way To Win, and throughout the interview, holds fast to the assertion that revealing his own political viewpoint to the audience is inappropriate for someone in his profession. (He also believes that journalists should refrain from voting). Hewitt disagrees;

HH: All right. Now let’s…then let’s put the plumb lines down on issues. Are you pro-choice?
MH: Hugh, it’s the same thing on issues as it is on candidates. I don’t think it’s appropriate, if you’re going to cover these things, to talk about views. I will say this, Hugh. I will say that many people I work with in ABC, and other old media organizations, are liberal on a range of issues. And I think the ability of that, the reality of how that affects media coverage, is outrageous, and that conservatives in this country for forty years have felt that, and that it’s something that must change. But what my views are, are not important, and just like I said on not voting, I think having views and expressing them is a dangerous thing. I have opinions and thoughts, but I think talking about them is only bad for America.
***
HH: Mark, if you’re all left-handed, you’re not going to be able to hit from the right side of the plate, all right? If you’re all left-handed, you’re not going to be able to cover pro-life politics the right way. If you’re all atheists, you’re not going to be able to understand…
MH: That’s why we need to have the newsroom not filled with people who are all atheists, or anti-2nd Amendment.
HH: But if we can’t figure that out, how in the world…
MH: We have to work on it, Hugh. We can’t give up. We have to work on it.
HH: But how do we know you’re working on it when you won’t answer the questions?
MH: Because I’m telling you that my views, to the extent I have them, and I’m very good at pressing them out of my brain, do not impact my attempt to be fair to everyone I cover.
HH: But Mark, was Mary Mapes fair?
MH: No.
HH: Okay. There are more Mary Mapes. Even if we believe for a second…
MH: Hugh, Hugh, Hugh. Stop going back…
HH: …and there’s no reason to believe you…
MH: Stop going back to the stuff we agree on, because we can talk less about the book if you do that. I agree with you that the Mary Mapes’ of the world are ruining it for the rest of us, and they are the dominant majority. We’ve got to fix it.
***
MH: You’re asking me should people be skeptical? I think anyone who’s conservative should be skeptical of anything the old media does. But if they look at what we say in the book about the old media, if they look at the quality of ideas, I think that they’d have no reason to be skeptical, that the book is not a straightforward and honest account of not just the right, but of the left, and of the media.
HH: But the old media is overwhelmingly liberal, correct, Mark Halperin?
MH: Correct, as we say in the book.
HH: And so everyone that you work with, or 95% of people you work with, are old liberals.
MH: I don’t know if it’s 95%, and unfortunately, they’re not all old. There are a lot of young liberals here, too. But it certainly, there are enough in the old media, not just in ABC, but in old media generally, that it tilts the coverage quite frequently, in many issues, in a liberal direction, which is completely improper. And it goes from the big and major like CBS’ outrageous story about President Bush’s draft record right before the 2004 election, to the insidious and small use of language describing Nancy Pelosi’s liberal policies and ideas different than they would Newt Gingrich’s conservative ones.
HH: And that’s what I’m getting at. Inside of ABC News political division, how many people work with you, Mark Halperin, in that division?
MH: You know, it’s hard to quantify it, because you’ve got people involved in a political year like this one, or during a presidential race, you’ve got hundreds of people who are touching our political coverage. There aren’t very many people, just a handful of us, are full-time political reporters.
HH: But with editorial control, a producer, an editor…
MH: It’s literally hundreds…
HH: Okay.
MH: Because again, you’ve got people on Good Morning America, people on World News Tonight, or World News, we call it now. So literally hundreds.
HH: Of those hundreds, what percentage do you think fairly, honestly, are liberal, and would vote Democratic if they voted?
MH: The same as in almost every old media organization I know, which is well over 70%.
HH: Isn’t it…Thomas Edsall, in an interview that I know you read, because you wrote me about it, he said 95…
MH: I think 95’s well overstated…
HH: He said 15-25:1 in the Washington Post, liberal to conservative. Do you think that’s fair?
MH: Absolutely. And again, I mean, look. John and I work for old media organizations. We write things in the book that most people in old media won’t admit. But we’re proud of our organizations, but I don’t want to say it’s singular to ABC. It’s in all these…it’s an endemic problem. And again, it’s the reason why for forty years, conservatives have rightly felt that we did not give them a fair shake.
***
HH: And these liberals…you know, Terry Moran on this program said…Terry Moran on this program from ABC, your colleague…
MH: Right.
HH: …said that the media hates the military, has a deep suspicion of it. Do you agree with that?
MH: I totally agree. It’s one of the huge biases, along with gays, guns, abortion, and many other things.
***
HH: Three books, The Looming Tower, America Alone, and Imperial Grunts by Lawrence Wright, Mark Steyn and Robert Kaplan. Have you read any of them.
MH: Not a one.
HH: Does media read widely?
MH: No. We say in the book that reporters are more likely to write books or steal them from book parties than to read them. And I’m not an exception to that. I’m constantly in the midst of covering a presidential campaign, and for the last year, finishing my book and promoting it. So I tend to not read serious books as much as I should, and that I’m not an exception amongst reporters.
HH: How about…you just answered that. How about in television? Are they even less well read than the print media?
MH: Oh, yeah.
HH: And so…
MH: Though not everybody. Not uniformly. I have plenty of colleagues who read serious books all the time, and sometimes write them. But compared to the responsibility that we have to be informed and help inform, we should read more.
HH: And so, it’s basically a very ill-informed group of very influential people who are driving modern media coverage of politics.
MH: Not to a person, but certainly that’s more true than it should be.
HH: A lot more true than it should be.

Set aside some time to read the whole thing.
It should also be printed out and left on the desk of every editor and reporter in the country, but somehow, I don’t think that’s likely to happen – these aren’t egos naturally suited for speaking truth to self.
Update – a timely item this morning;

An analysis by the Center for Media and Public Affairs of midterm election stories aired on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts Sept. 5-Oct. 22 found that 2006’s coverage has been almost five times as heavy as in the 2002 midterm elections: 167 stories, compared with 35 four years ago.
The study found that three out of four evaluations of Democratic candidates’ chances of winning — such as sound bites — were positive, compared with one out of eight for Republicans. Coverage has been dominated by two major themes: the effects of the Foley scandal, and the impact the Bush presidency is having on the party’s congressional candidates.
The Foley scandal produced 59 stories alone, compared with 33 on Iraq and 31 on terrorism/national security issues. “What’s hurting Republican candidates is the media’s focus on two non-candidates: Mark Foley and George W. Bush,” says center director Robert Lichter.

Editor and Publisher reports grim news in the mainstream media battle against the growing strength of an internet insurgency ;

The Los Angeles Times reported that daily circulation fell 8% to 775,766. Sunday dropped 6% to 1,172,005
The San Francisco Chronicle was down. Daily dropped 5.3% to 373,805 and Sunday fell 7.3% to 432,957.
The New York Times lost 3.5% daily to 1,086,798 and 3.5% on Sunday to 1,623,697. Its sister publication, The Boston Globe, reported decreases in daily circulation, down 6.7% to 386,415 and Sunday, down 9.9% to 587,292.
The Washington Post lost daily circulation, which was down 3.3% to 656,297 while Sunday declined 2.6% to 930,619.
Circulation losses at The Wall Street Journal were average, with daily down 1.9% to 2,043,235. The paper’s Weekend Edition, however, saw its circulation fall 6.7% to 1,945,830.

It’s a quagmire.
And then, there’s the matter of the walking wounded. With staff cuts taking place across the industry, hard questions are being asked.

Of course that you need journalists, but for what?
To re-package the same news from the same sources?
To attend the same boring press conferences?
To publish today the same news that our readers knew YESTERDAY?
To produce pages and pages of commodity information with no value added?

However, there’s one bright bright spot amidst the carnage;

The New York Post today surpassed the Daily News and The Washington Post to become the 5th largest newspaper in America after bucking the national trend and chalking up a whopping 5.1 percent jump in circulation. The Post’s average paid circulation was 704,011 for Monday to Friday in the six-month period ending Sept. 30, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported.

Maybe it’s not the medium, after all.
Maybe it’s the messengers.

Confesses;

“I’m not sure it’s any good for anyone if we end up commenting on each other without actually understanding each other. In this case, I imagine that it would only have informed my story and gotten your points across to a wider audience if I’d we’d actually spoken before I wrote.”

Who’s this “we’d” Panetta speaks of? (Notice the word “I’d” is left orphan in the middle of that sentence – suggesting there was a bit of rewording before it was sent.)
The use of “we” suggests a shared responsibility – if only Kathy Shaidle had the presence of mind to discuss the “news brief” with the CP before the unresearched speculation appeared in print.
Kathy has the full email exchange. Unbelievable, but a useful insight into what goes on behind the scenes.
Just don’t expect to see any retraction or corrections from CP/CTV.
(My own email response to Panetta follows in the extended entry.)

Continue reading →

If one only read the CBC’s account, you’d be led to believe that the controversial remarks of a senior Muslim cleric in Australia occurred in a vacuum;

A senior Muslim cleric in Australia apologized Thursday after he was widely condemned for recently reported comments he made about women and rape, but said he would not step down from his position.
Sheik Taj Aldin al Hilali denied he was condoning rape in a sermon last month when he compared women who don’t wear a headscarf to “uncovered meat,” suggesting they invite sexual attack.
But Hilali apologized to any women he had offended, saying they were free to dress as they wished.
Hilali was quoted in the Australian newspaper as saying in the sermon: “If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside … without cover, and the cats come to eat it … whose fault is it, the cats’ or the uncovered meat’s?”
“The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred,” he was quoted as saying, referring to the headdress worn by some Muslim women.
Hilali issued a statement Thursday saying The Australian had selectively quoted from the sermon, and that he was shocked at the reaction.
“I would like to unequivocally confirm that the presentation related to religious teachings on modesty and not to go to extremes in enticements,” the statement said.
“This does not condone rape; I condemn rape,” he said. “Women in our Australian society have the freedom and right to dress as they choose; the duty of man is to avert his glance or walk away.”

Read the CBC item carefully.
Now,we go to the Sydney Morning Herald for the part they left out;

As well, by revealing so unequivocally his primitive views of women, Hilaly destroyed the claims by cultural relativists that Sydney’s series of gang rapes by Muslim men had nothing to do with culture or religion.
“If you take uncovered meat and put it on the street … without a cover and the cats eat it, is it the fault of the cat or the uncovered meat?” he said in the sermon to 500 people last month at Lakemba mosque. “The uncovered meat is the problem. If the meat was covered, the cats wouldn’t roam around it. If the meat is inside the fridge, they won’t get it … if the woman is in her boudoir, in her house and if she’s wearing the veil and if she shows modesty, disasters don’t happen.”
Then in a clear reference to the gang rape trial of Bilal Skaf, he said: “A woman possesses the weapon of seduction. It is she who takes off her clothes, shortens them, flirts, puts on make-up and powder and takes to the streets, God protect us … then it’s a look, then a smile, then a conversation … then a date, then a meeting, then a crime, then Long Bay jail. Then you get a judge, who has no mercy, and he gives you 65 years.”
The only incitement committed by 18-year-old Ms C, who was raped 25 times by up to 14 men including Skaf in 2000, was being Australian. Sitting on a train, dressed for a job interview in her best suit, and reading The Great Gatsby, she was a slut, an “Aussie pig” as they called her later, while boasting: “I’m going to f— you Leb style.”
“I looked in his eyes. I had never seen such indifference,” she said.
Hilaly was simply echoing what the father of four Pakistani-born gang-rapists from Ashfield once said of the young victims: “What do they expect to happen to them? Girls from Pakistan don’t go out at night.”
Hilaly’s younger, Australian-born counterparts have been saying the same thing for years.
“A victim of rape every minute somewhere in the world,” Sheik Feiz Mohammad told 1000 people at Bankstown Town Hall last year. “Why? No one to blame but herself. She displayed her beauty to the entire world … strapless, backless, sleeveless, nothing but satanic skirts, slit skirts, translucent blouses.”

Like the selective reporting on yesterday’s anti-war rallies, the damning stuff is left on the cutting room floor.