Time Magazine Editor Admits that Time-Warner-CNN-HBO Has Failed

Yes, of course — but allow me to narrow things down a bit.

We already mentioned Time magazine’s cover story titled “Broken Promise” earlier today; on the O’Reilly Factor tonight, as Mary Katharine Ham notes at Hot Air, Laura Ingraham interviewed Mark Halperin, Time magazine editor-at-large, and also the co-author of Game Change and Double-Down, on the 2008 and 2012 elections, to explore the story’s ramifications:

INGRAHAM: The President always seems to see things in terms of political solutions or political responses. So the response here is we have got to rebrand. We have got to sell it differently. We have to have a new ad, have to have the website have more colors, whatever it is. Isn’t it more of a branding problem? This is a technical problem. It’s a policy problem. It’s a substantive problem. It’s not just about whether Obama’s big legacy is intact or progressive ideas in the future are doing well. These are real concerns that were expressed frankly back in 2008, 2009, and into 2010. Forgive me, but I don’t think Time Magazine was doing cover stories on a lot of concerns that were raised back then that were routinely dismissed by many in the media, ideological, as just mean-spirited, turns out most of the Republican concerns about Obamacare were right.

HALPERIN: Laura, there is no doubt that the press failed to scrutinize this program at the time of passage and during the context of the president’s re-election. Any reporter who would argue otherwise would be putting their head in the sand. As we write in “Double Down,” the problem for the Republicans in the re-election context was you nominated, Republicans nominated Mitt Romney, a guy who was not very well positioned, to say the least, to make the case against Obamacare because he passed the healthcare plan in Massachusetts.

Wow, that’s some magical power that Romney has. He didn’t clinch the GOP’s nomination until May of 2012, and yet somehow, according to Halperin, looking for any excuse possible to pass the buck, Romney singlehandedly prevented the media from not scrutinizing Obamacare before and when it was passed in March of 2010. Who knew Bain was building a time machine?

Halperin goes on to tell Ingraham:

HALPERIN: Barack Obama knew he wasn’t going to run for re-election defending the program. Part of the flaws of the way the media works. If the candidates aren’t talking about it gets less coverage. No doubt a disservice was done to the country and to liberals. It didn’t get scrutiny on passage and then again when the president was running for re-election. Our cover story in the magazine lays all this out just how deep the president’s predicament is now politically and substantively.

That’s…nice…I suppose, after the fact. But during the run-up to Obamacare’s passage, when a dissenting old media voice might have had some impact, Katie Couric, then with CBS, was reading poetry on the air on its behalf, ABC was running infomercials on its behalf, and HBO and CNN, both owned by the same conglomerate as Halperin’s Time magazine were doing the DNC’s bidding by insulting any of its detractors as racists, and CNN was inviting high school kids into the studio to sing pro-Obamacare propaganda, when they weren’t baking cakes to promote the “Stimulus” program:

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Mary Katharine adds, “I’m always amazed how detached someone like Halperin can be while criticizing the media for an historic dereliction of duty.” I’m not — the news media’s transformation from at least feigning to be objective, to hardcore cheerleaders for President Obama and his programs was a stunning demise in their reputation, and anything now to salvage their well-deserved lack of trust is far too little, and far too late.

Update: After Halperin’s admission that Time magazine failed to vet the president’s signature program, their new cover cries out to be Photoshopped:

Related: “In the meantime, we must accept that we, the press, have been enablers.” Admitting the problem is merely first step in coming to terms with your addiction. The road to recovery is a long and slow one, MSM.

Flashback: Time Magazine’s latest cover: “Broken Promise.” Time magazine’s cover in 2009, when it could have had actually made a difference? “Paging Dr. Obama.” complete with Obama wearing a lab coat and stethoscope, just the sort of image the administration would have asked for.