March 28, 2024

Apologies and Scorn Greet News of a Book by Mark Halperin

“By answering Halperin’s questions, I did not in any way mean to excuse his past, egregious behavior,” Mr. Axelrod said in a Twitter post on Sunday.

Donna Brazile, Al Gore’s campaign manager in 2000, condemned his purported conduct in a statement to The Daily Beast but defended having shared her insights for the planned book.

Other political strategists, including James Carville, said that their participation in the book came out of a desire to defeat President Trump, rather than an endorsement of Mr. Halperin.

Mr. Halperin rose to prominence as the co-author, with his fellow political journalist John Heilemann, of “Game Change” and its sequel, “Double Down: Game Change 2012.” The first was made into an HBO film, and the success of the two collaborators propelled them to contracts at Bloomberg News said to be around $1 million. The program Mr. Halperin and Mr. Heilemann came up with for Bloomberg, the dishy political talk show “With All Due Respect,” failed to attract a wide viewership; it ended after the 2016 election.

In the fall of 2017, in a detailed online article, CNN reported that five women said Mr. Halperin had made inappropriate and unwelcome sexual advances while he was director of political coverage at ABC News 10 years earlier. Soon afterward, like the Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, the film mogul Harvey Weinstein, the CBS anchor Charlie Rose and other powerful figures in media and entertainment, Mr. Halperin became one of the prominent gatekeepers to lose his position because of accusations of sexual misconduct.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/business/media/mark-halperin-book-deal-backlash.html?emc=rss&partner=rss

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