The Sniveling Hackitude of Mark Halperin
By As more than one person has said, my favorite part of Eric Boehlert’s Lapdogs is Chapter 3, his fierce and detailed takedown of The Note. Between its endless pro-Republican spin, vacuous obsession with mind-numbing personality trivia, and smug insularity, it represents everything wrong with political media in concentrated form. Given the sad-but-funny spectacle of Mark Halperin prostrating himself before third-rate Republican shill Hugh Hewitt, it’s worth revisiting one of the Note’s most feeble examples of right-wing hackery, it’s ongoing attempt to create a new pseudo-scandal in the Whitewater vein by pumping up the trial of a Hillary Clinton fundraiser. As Boehlert explains:
Taking the lead in trumpeting the importance of the Rosen trial was ABC’s The Note. An inside-baseball daily tip sheet for a readership it has dubbed the “Gang of 500” (politicians, lobbyists, consultants, and journalists who help shape the Beltway’s public agenda), The Note is posted online every weekday morning and is widely viewed as the agenda-setter for the political class. On 14 different days between May 2 and 27, The Note posted cumulatively nearly forty links to Rosen-related articles, calling them “must-read.” A typical Note entry came on May 10, highlighting “The opening and closing paragraphs in Dick Morris’ New York Post column–perfectly explaining why the David Rosen story is going to be with us for a while.”
On the day before the Rosen verdict, The Note listed “Waiting for the Rosen verdict” as the number-one priority among the Gang of 500. The next day, a federal jury acquitted Rosen of any wrongdoing. How did The Note handle this news about the trial it had hyped? By ignoring it. The next edition of The Note included a long round-up of must-reads from the Memorial Day weekend. Rosen’s not-guilty verdict was not among them.
The abrupt disappearance of the story shouldn’t have surprised close readers of The Note, which ABC’s website has posted publicly since January 2002. In theory, what drives The Note is anything that’s generating Beltway buzz. “We try to channel what the chattering class is chattering about, and to capture the sensibility, ethos, and rituals of the Gang of 500,” Mark Halperin, ABC’s political director and founder of The Note, once explained. Too often, though, The Note’s definition of buzz has been whatever Beltway Republicans are chattering about. The Note has been nourished on an era of total Republican rule. It shows.
Halperin has always been an embarrassment; his abjection before the shrine of Hewitt is just the latest example.