Poseur Alert...Have Brown Bag Handy

Today's Winner is Mark Halperin, who spoke of "extreme pro-Obama media bias" in this year's election coverage at a recent journalism conference at USC. See below:

Media bias was more intense in the 2008 election than in any other national campaign in recent history, Time magazine's Mark Halperin said Friday at the Politico/USC conference on the 2008 election. "It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war," Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. "It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage."

"I think it's incumbent upon people in our business to make sure that we're being fair," he said. "The daily output was the most disparate of any campaign I've ever covered, by far."

McCain ran a shallow, dishonest, content-free campaign filled with little more than indefensible attacks on his opponent and paeans to a guy not named Joe who wasn't really a plumber. What the hell kind of coverage should he get?

Take one example: When the McCain campaign decided that Obama's use of the phrase "lipstick on a pig" to describe McCain's economic plans was actually a sexist insult directed at Sarah Palin. This was complete bullshit, and every single member of the political and media classes knew it. They knew it was a lie, and they knew that the entire McCain campaign knew it was a lie. Yet they covered it as though it was a legitimate point of view for the McCain campaign to take! We were treated to a few DAYS of "lipstick on a pig" and the McCain demand for Obama to apologize.

Here is what one skeptical journalist had to say about it on September 9th on CNN:

"It is a low point in the day ... and one of the low days of our collective coverage of this campaign. Stop the madness. I mean, this is, I think -- with all due respect to the program's focus on this and to what [CNN senior political analyst] David [Gergen] just said -- I think this is the press just absolutely playing into the McCain campaign's crocodile tears. They know exactly what he was saying. It's an expression. And this is a victory for the McCain campaign, in the sense that, every day, they can make this a pig fight in the mud. It's good for them, because it's reducing Barack Obama's message even more."

Who was that journalist? Drum roll...yeah, you guessed it...Mark Halperin! Quite the media critic, ain't he?

Thus, we see that Halperin is actually a poseur...a superficial contrarian who jumps to whatever side makes him stand apart.

Media has many biases. Partisanship is one of the least common.