”It’s going to take citizens, whether they have strong ideological views or not, to appreciate the necessity, in a free democracy, of a powerful, responsible, unbiased press,” Halperin continued. “If the country doesn’t care if we have that, if the view of the people of America is, ‘We want irresponsible, partisan, niche media,’ that’s what we’ll have. It’s going to take consumers of news, voting through their subscriptions and their eyeballs, to have an unbiased press. Most of the trend lines are bad.”
Halperin was offering one of his occasional admissions of liberal media bias that so frustrate the left-wing blogosphere. (Typical was Salon.com's Alex Pareene, with the headline "Mark Halperin now paid to be wrong about everything on MSNBC." He contrasts him as far inferior to MSNBC's other recent addition, David Weigel.) Halperin argued in 2006 that conservative new media was dominating the discussion (which, er, made Obama's election impossible?):
"We've gone from a system with major national news organizations strong enough to umpire, but who did it in a way that Republicans saw as liberally biased and in important ways was liberally biased," he said. "That system has been replaced by one that favors conservatives through the new media, which masquerades as a referee but is simply part of the partisan shouting on one side or the other. The old system favored liberals but was a better referee. The new system favors conservatives but is no referee at all. Best would be if we could strengthen national news organizations and eliminate liberal bias."
So perhaps Halperin meant that only conservatives are responsible for creating "irresponsible, partisan niche media." That would make him a nice match with Bill Press, who thinks only the conservatives engage in "toxic talk." He may want to avoid Olbermann in the hallway with that talk of how it would be "best" to eliminate liberal bias.
