In a recent townhall meeting, Bloomberg Businessweek editor-in-chief talked about the company’s new acquisition of political reporters and “Game Change” authors John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, and then bragged that, “One of our biggest advantages in politics is we are not ideological, we are not a sewer.”
Anyone even somewhat familiar with the work of Halperin and Heilemann knows how laughably dishonest that statement is.
Heilemann is by far the worst of the two. While Halperin has his better moments, Heilemann has defended Secretary of State John Kerry’s reprehensible remark about the possibility of Israel becoming an apartheid state, told Rand Paul to “stick” his thoughts on the unemployed “where they belong,” and warned readers that should Romney lose to Obama, the “ferocity of the reaction of many of his supporters — those who despise Obama with a passion so raw and burning it’s hard to comprehend –will be breathtaking, and perhaps not a little scary.”
Heilemann has also compared opponents of gay marriage to racists, has never hid his love for ObamaCare on “Morning Joe,” and is curiously selective when it comes to reporting and making issue of the tax rates paid by wealthy presidential candidates.
Moreover, if Heilemann has ever used an ounce of his oh-so legendary reportorial skills to dig into even one of the many scandals dogging President Obama, Google can’t find it. Why here’s Heilemann admitting he did not dig into Obama’s Solyndra scandal right before agreeing there is no scandal.
Oh, and here’s Heilemann making a gay joke about engaging in “a three-way” with Republican Rick Santorum. Oddly enough, Heilemann has been much more charitable towards serial child rapist Jerry Sandusky than Santorum and us scary, ferocious Republicans.
I’m not sure “ideological” and “sewer” means what Bloomberg thinks it means.
Halperin is the more quiet and thoughtful of the duo, but when he senses Obama might be in real danger, he can literally and very publicly freak out. Halperin’s meltdown during the 2012 election when Drudge teased video of Obama’s “other race speech,” was one of the media’s 2012 lowlights in an election filled with them.
To his credit, Halperin has castigated the media plenty of times over their glaring pro-Obama biases. But he’s also been caught talking out both sides of his mouth.
On Fox News, after the disastrous rollout of ObamCare in late 2013, Halperin criticized the media for not vetting ObamaCare “at the time of passage” (but also dishonestly blamed Romney for the media’s failings). But at that particular time of passage in 2010, in Time Magazine, Halperin boasted about how the media wouldn’t vet ObamaCare and by doing so, Halperin encouraged them not to.
One big reason to remain skeptical about the duo is a suspicion that rather than report what is happening in real time, they save juicy political stories up for later in order to sell more books.
Reports say both will be paid more than $1 million a year by Bloomberg. History suggests that, in front of cameras manned by those making a fraction of what they do, they will praise any candidate who seeks to exploit income inequality for votes.
If past is prologue, Halperin and Heilemann’s new Bloomberg television show will also be filled with little to no actual reporting and a whole lot of conventional wisdom, elite opinion, elite talking head and guests, and rhetoric disguised as analysis in favor of empowering the federal government.
In other words, “Morning Joe: After Dark.”
Then, sometime in early 2017 after Hillary is safely sworn in, the duo will release yet another page-turner about the presidential election, this one titled, “Sex Change: What We Were Too Greedy And Biased To Tell You During The Campaign.”
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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