Mark Halperin was fired by NBC and MSNBC today. This follows on the bad news from last week.
Political analyst Mark Halperin has lost a book deal and an HBO project based on it in the wake of sexual-harassment allegations by at least five women.
Late Thursday, Penguin Press announced it would cancel a book by Halperin and longtime collaborator John Heilemann about the 2016 presidential election.
“In light of the recent news regarding Mark Halperin, the Penguin Press has decided to cancel our plans to publish a book he was co-authoring on the 2016 election,” the publisher said in a statement.
HBO said it was ““no longer proceeding with the project tied to the untitled book. HBO has no tolerance for sexual harassment within the company or its productions.”
That project was going to be the upcoming season of the highly-rated Game Change program. You don’t want to know the details of why this has happened to Halperin, but I’ll provide some anyway:
CNN’s Oliver Darcy reported Wednesday night that women described Halperin as having a “dark side” that ranged from “propositioning employees for sex to kissing and grabbing one’s breasts against her will.” Three of the women described “Halperin as, without consent, pressing an erection against their bodies while he was clothed,” Darcy wrote. Halperin denied “grabbing a woman’s breasts and pressing his genitals against the three women,” according to the report.
If I were to write an epitaph of Halperin’s career, or carve something on his gravestone, I’d definitely mention that Dana Milbank said that his political analysis was “soulless” and “amoral.”
His treatment of women, unfortunately, has been even worse.
I know that Donald Trump only hires “the best people,” so I suppose there’s a chance that Halperin could fall up into the White House. Ordinarily, I’d predict that he’d land at the Fox News land of misfit toys with other spectacular washouts like Oliver North, Mark Fuhrman, Howard Kurtz, and Geraldo Rivera. But Fox News probably doesn’t need one more sexual harassment rehabilitation project at the moment, so maybe a better bet is that Halperin will follow Larry King and Michael Flynn to Vladimir Putin’s RT network. I doubt his father is proud.
Remember when he called Obama a dick?
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/30/mark-halperin-calls-obama-a-dick_n_887604.html
well who’s the dick now
. . . -in-Chief . . .
Ezra Klein’s comments on Halperin are worth reading
Political journalism has been profoundly shaped by men like Leon Wieseltier and Mark Halperin
“Halperin (Harvard ’87) went on to say that “normal people won’t care about that answer.”
First O’Reilly goes down. Now Halperin. If we rounded out a trifecta with someone like Hannity or Limbaugh, I could just begin to wonder if there really might be a God.
O’Reilly and Halperin will end up on the new Sinclair network.
Hannity and Limbaugh wouldn’t be knocked out by this sort of thing. It would just make them more popular with the demographic that listens to them.
Apropos of the season, there truly is a zombie media/entertainment world of undead, right-wing commentators. No matter how many times they are shamed or fired, they cannot be eliminated. Wooden stakes, silver bullets, garlic – none of it works.
Watching my older relatives and friends, I see there is something energizing for them to feel mad all the time. That’s why Fox News is always blaring in their houses. I try to give them love and attention, and some positive interaction with other human beings. I tell them “I have a bit of a hearing problem, do you mind if we turn off the TV so I can hear you?”
That’s my tactic for getting them to shut off the hate spewing from their radio and TV, at least for a little while.
I don’t have a link, but I was listening to some NPR yesterday. Someone was interviewing a US comedian about his work.
He made a sort of off-hand comment about how difficult it is right now to be a stand up comedian in the USA (he said he found it better to work overseas or in Canada right now).
His comment went something like: the liberals are overly-sensitive and lacking in humor, but conservatives are just so angry all the time. I want to say to them: Dudes! You WON. Why are you angry????
Really. Good question at this point.
However, we (here) know why they’re so angry 24/7/365. It’s mainly due to Fox/Hate Radio/ Sinclair Broadcasting which all churn “let’s get totally riled up and spitting mad ANGRY!!!!1111 alla the time.”
It’s clearly a reliable propaganda/brainwashing technique. But so exhausting.
The seeming need for perpetual anger and grievance is something I don’t quite know how to deal with around these people, particularly family. When I have been around them and they get animated about something which is largely a fabrication of the right wing echo chamber, I will often feel compelled to point out that what they are angry about is something that is not actually true. As we all know, for these people, whether or not something is actually true has no bearing at all on their beliefs about it.
It is a truly bizarre thing to witness firsthand, especially in someone you have known all your life.
Yes, and sadly, many of us have experienced this first hand with family and long-time friends.
The notion that one can “talk nicely” to conservatives to attempt to have a congenial and productive discussion about whatever the issue is happens to be specious. There’s simply no “talking” to these people.
They either get even more angry – sometimes AT me – or they just change the subject to yet another rightwing talking point.
Anymore, I seek to avoid most political discussions with known conservatives bc I simply don’t see the point. They’re NOT interested in any other POV. They could give a stuff about whatever real facts you may bring to the convo bc they’ll just chalk it up to “fake news.”
It’s depressing, frankly.
Well, you’re certainly correct that having productive conversations on political subjects is impossible when one’s interlocutor has been brainwashed by right wing TV and radio.
However, my religious tradition commands me to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and visit the prisoners. To my mind, these poor souls are prisoners of their own mind, prisoners of the brainwashing you correctly diagnosed. So, I must visit them.
With friends and family, my tactic is to get them talking about their garden, their cooking, their latest fishing trip, or other mundane subjects. This maintains human connection, and allows me to convey concern and love.
Of course, I often get mad when they spout some impossibly stupid conspiracy theory or talking point. But if I let their disease provoke me, then I’m perpetuating the same cycle of anger and hatred.
That’s what I try to do, anyway. Some days I just want to throw a brick through their TV and pee on their garden. Hate and anger are so seductive, and most days I feel weak in the face of it.
When you are in pain – physical, emotional or existential – anger can be seductive. With someone or somewhat to blame and be angry at you can lash out and get to be angry instead of sad. Plus there is a community of likeminded angry people, which is helpful if you feel lonely.
I don’t know if this fits with your elder relatives and friends, but if it does then your approach of visiting them in their prisons might in time lessen the pain and loneliness.
Limbaugh got caught with a suitcase filled with illegal Viagra on his way back from the DR, which is a HUGE child sex destination.
If that didn’t dislodge the turd, nothing will except a heart attack.
Finally, someone suffers some real consequences for his bad behavior. Losing a book and TV deal at the same time has got to hurt.
only because he didn’t work at Fox News, so he’s therefore a liberal who actually has to face consequences
Mark Halperin’s father, Morton Halperin’s career shows how far to the right US politics have moved. Far from being nominated for senior Government positions, Morton would be jailed in today’s political climate. Unless he was a republican, of course.
I won’t miss this “Republican suck-up”. He had such an arrogance about him, too.
“Halperin, while not a Republican, is the next best thing: Someone so cowed by accusations of ‘liberal media bias’ that he will bend over backwards and fold himself into some kind of geometrically-improbable shape to give the G.O.P. the right to define the story.”
http://gawker.com/256341/time-hires-republican-suck-up-mark-halperin
I’ve despised Halperin ever since the Valerie Plame scandal days. Would it be too mean to hope that Mike Allen and Jim Vanderhei suffer the same fate?
I can’t help but see all these guys, and Carter Page, and Papadopoulis, through the prism of Veep. I mean … that Chris Hayes interview, I imagine the interviewee being Jonah Ryan.