Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center used to hate ABC's Mark Halperin. He was a favorite target during the 2004 election:
- An Oct. 1, 2004, "Media Reality Check" groused that Halperin "panned Bush’s reaction to [John] Kerry’s attacks [during a debate]: 'The President was remarkably angry-seeming a lot of the time...It’s usually not a very becoming posture for a candidate.' "
- An Oct. 6, 2004, "Media Reality Check" singled out Halperin for calling Vice President Dick Cheney “gratuitously mean” during a debate with John Edwards when Cheney chastised Edwards’ weak Senate attendance record.
- An Oct. 9, 2004, CyberAlert feared that a memo by Halperin noting that "the current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done" would mean that ABC would "deliberately correct Bush more often than Kerry." An Oct. 13, 2004, CyberAlert complained that ABC had fact-checked Bush twice as often as Kerry following the issuance of the memo.
All water under the bridge. Now that Halperin is using conservative terms like "old media" and making charges of liberal media bias, Halperin is the MRC's new BFF.
An Oct. 25 NewsBusters post by Matthew Sheffield lovingly detailed how Halperin "provided a resounding endorsement of the idea that the elite American media needs to stop being liberally biased." NewsBusters' Noel Sheppard similarly drooled over Halperin, noting in an Oct. 25 post his "stunning statements about liberal media bias," a follow-up to an Oct. 19 post that repeated claims in The Note, the ABC News political newsletter that Halperin edits, that the "(libeal) Old Media" took daily conference calls with Howard Dean and George Soros as undeniable "proof that the press are colluding with Democrats." (You know, the stuff that NewsMax's James Hirsen took deadly seriously.)
It's the reverse of the treatment that MRC has given to Chris Matthews (as we've detailed). Does this mean that the MRC will concede that maybe Halperin had a valid point in his 2004 memo?
