John wrote a post last week about Mark Halperin's hissy fit over election coverage. The guy who gets paid by Time Magazine to call Obama the "Land of Lincolner" thought media coverage was biased towards Obama. Halperin thinks if he says something that it is somehow true. He's just too painful.
So it gives me great glee to link to two posts by Jed Lewison on the subject of Mark Halperin. Jed took a look at the references to other political pundits from Halperin's cartoonish site, "The Page." He referred to Rush Limbaugh 113 times but Keith Olbermann got only 14 mentions. Sean Hannity and Drudge did pretty well, too. We see who really does shape the thinking of Halperin. (And as someone who writes on a political website, I tend to refer a lot to people, like Jed, who share my views.)
Then, Jed reviewed 92 articles about Obama from the New York Times to see if the pro-Obama bias existed. Jed didn't find it:
I'm not saying the articles prove any sort of systematic anti-Obama bias. But they do invalidate Halperin's claim about the NYT, in the process exposing his claim that coverage of the 2008 campaign represents "the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war" as totally unsubstantiated.So Jed looked at the facts, but it seems Halperin had a gut feeling about the bias. But, that's because Halperin is under the influence of Rush/Drudge/Hannity.
Seriously, can't we have better pundits? Just because Mark Halperin thinks he defines the conventional wisdom, doesn't mean it's true. Can anyone who uses the phrase "Land of Lincolner" really be taken seriously? I know Jason Linkins doesn't think so.
