This. Greenwald comments:
Apparently, the most traumatizing and horrifying thing that could ever happen to Mark Halperin is for Bush followers like Hugh Hewitt to think he's a liberal. It is self-evidently very important to Halperin -- on an emotional and deeply personal level -- to demonstrate that he is one of them, or at least not one of those liberals. To achieve this, he made an extraordinary vow to Sean Hannity when trying to win Hannity's approval, in which he pledged that the media would spend the next two weeks compensating for all of their anti-conservative sins over the past decades, and now he is engaged in a truly debased and highly emotional crusade to obtain Hugh Hewitt's affection.
I really question whether someone who has obviously made it such a high priority to obtain a very personal form of right-wing absolution can possibly exercise appropriate news judgment. If Halperin is willing to expend this much time and energy and shower Hewitt with such gushing praise -- and if he's willing to make such a public spectacle of himself when doing so -- all in order to convince Hewitt that he isn't liberal, won't that goal rather obviously affect Halperin's news coverage? Isn't there something extremely unseemly about the political director of ABC News engaging in such an intense campaign to win the approval of one of the most blindly partisan, extremist Bush followers in the country?
It's not just unseemly, it's unprofessional. The point of journalism, of punditry, of analysis, is that it's independent. That doesn't mean it's not ideological, or even totally non-partisan, but that it's not written to attract external approval. If I were always writing to please the DCCC, or the AFL-CIO, or my editor Harold Meyerson, or my libertarian friends, or my hawkish family members, or my readers, anyone else, my work would be useless. It wouldn't be honest. It couldn't be interesting. It shouldn't be trusted.
That's a tough line to walk. For many in the liberal media, they did it by attacking the very actors and constituencies they would be assumed to support. They publicly distanced themselves, degrading the fairness of their coverage in the process, but retaining a sense of their own independence. It is now a matter of public record, however, that Mark Halperin is writing with an eye towards Hugh Hewitt's approval. Everything he writes must be judged through that lens. Much of it must be discarded for that reason. He's no longer a journalist, can no longer protect his pretensions of intellectual independence. He's no longer, if he ever was, worth reading.
