Time-Warner-CNN-HBO's Journalistic Catch-22

Mark Halperin of Time magazine, having admitted in the past week that both he and his fellow MSM journalists (read: Obama cheerleaders) screwed the pooch on covering Obamacare, and that the bill does indeed contain “death panels,” which his publication routinely excoriated Sarah Palin and other conservatives for pointing out, is, as Ace writes, “now offering two rules to explain away the media’s refusal to pursue any story that hurts Obama or the Democrats:”

1. If the Republicans talk about it too much, the media should be forgiven for refraining to cover it themselves, as they wouldn’t want to be seen as taking their talking points from the Republican Attack Machine.

2. If the Republicans talk about it too little, as Halperin says Romney did in 2012, then the media should be once again excused from covering stories that hurt Obama and the Democrats, because they only take their talking points from the Republican Attack Machine.

Nifty little pair of rules, huh? I’d like to know what Halperin has in mind as the “Goldilocks Scenario” where Republicans don’t talk about the issue too much, but also not too little, thus enabling the press to actually do its alleged job.

As Mary Katharine Ham asks:

WHAT IS THE POINT OF YOU, MARK HALPERIN?

Why, it’s almost as if Halperin, while holding himself out as an “objective” journalist, has a repeated tradition of having two sets of standards, one for each party. Or to put it another way:

An internal memo written by ABCNEWS Political Director Mark Halperin admonishes ABC staff: During coverage of Democrat Kerry and Republican Bush not to “reflexively and artificially hold both sides ‘equally’ accountable.”

The controversial internal memo obtained by DRUDGE, captures Halperin stating how “Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and mistakes all the time, but these are not central to his efforts to win.”

But Halperin claims that Bush is hoping to “win the election by destroying Senator Kerry at least partly through distortions.”

“The current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done,” Halperin writes.

Halperin’s claim that ABCNEWS will not “reflexively and artificially hold both sides ‘equally’ accountable” set off sparks in St. Louis where media players gathered to cover the second presidential debate.

Halperin states the responsibilities of the ABCNEWS staff have “become quite grave.”

In August, Halperin declared online: “This is now John Kerry’s contest to lose.”

— The Drudge Report, “ABC News Political Director Memo Sparks Controversy: Both Sides Not ‘Equally Accountable,’” October 8th, 2004.

Glad to see that Halperin has taken the worldview of ABC, aka, the House of Stephanopoulos along with him to Time-Warner-CNN-HBO, the past home of Jay Carney, now the president’s Baghdad Bob, press secretary.