Time's Halperin Scolds Press for 'Extreme Pro-Obama Bias'

The Politico reported on November 22 that Time Magazine's Mark Halperin scolded the media for it's sycophantic treatment of Barack Obama during this election cycle calling the favorable treatment "the most disgusting failure" of the press he's seen for years. "It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage," Halperin said at a Politico/USC conference held on Friday.

It's all pretty amusing, though, to see Mark Helprin complain that his fellow journalists didn't do a good job reporting on Obama's record because back in March, NewsBusters reported on how Halperin himself was claiming that Obama represented a "centrist" politician despite the fact that Obama has the most liberal voting record in the Senate! What happened to being tough on The One then?

Halperin cited two specific instances of pro-Obama media bias seen in The New York Times.

"The example that I use, at the end of the campaign, was the two profiles that The New York Times ran of the potential first ladies," Halperin said. "The story about Cindy McCain was vicious. It looked for every negative thing they could find about her and it case her in an extraordinarily negative light. It didn't talk about her work, for instance, as a mother for her children, and they cherry-picked every negative thing that's ever been written about her."

The story about Michelle Obama, by contrast, was "like a front-page endorsement of what a great person Michelle Obama is," according to Halperin.

A few of the other panelists disputed Halperin's claims, but Politico reports that his media bias point "met with little resistance" for the most part.

OK, so the media realizes it went ga ga for Obama and won't fight too hard when someone like Halperin mentions the patently obvious fact at a conference. But, here is the question: is the media just shrugging its shoulders at the fact? Or is it shamed and determined to correct its utter failure to report the truth in favor of promulgating a gauzy Obama mythos?

I would have to say the former because we are still getting absurd Obama's-like-Lincoln or FDR or JFK stories all over the place. We are still getting daily reports on what that wonderful Michelle is wearing today. We are still seeing the media comment lovingly on the private schools that Obama's kids are going to as it ignores the hypocrisy that as a candidate Obama claimed we needed to shore up our failing public schools.

Despite the fact that Halperin is disappointed with the Obama tanked media, and despite the fact that they all seem to accept that Halperin has a valid point, the realization that they failed to follow the basic precepts of journalism doesn't seem to have deterred them one bit from continuing down that road.

Throw on top of the Obama sycophancy the continued bald-faced attacks against Governor Sarah Palin and we can see that the media isn't just incidentally in the tank for Obama, but going out of its way to push Obama's agenda as opposed to merely reporting the news.

In essence, to the charge of pro-Obama bias, the media is shrugging its collective shoulders and saying, "Yeah, well so what?" And we should all realize that the media has no intentions at all to mend its ways.

(Photo credit: The New York Times)