Mark Halperin, Glenn Kessler and the Presumption of Grace

And so shines a good deed in a weary world

Mark Halperin always opens the 2Way show with “Peace, love, and understanding” and the “presumption of grace,” along with the necessary preadmonition, “No smack in the chat.” In his solo gig, Next Up, he offers longer commentary, along with interviews and recently hosted none other than Mr. Pinocchio himself, Glenn Kessler.

The idea was to ask someone from inside the belly of the beast what they thought about media bias in the Trump era. Did the legacy press have it in for Trump? Did they work for the Democrats? Did they slant the news? Each time the question came up, Kessler stonewalled. NO, he said emphatically. It didn’t happen, and if it did, it was all in your head.

Halperin kept going at the question in different ways from different angles, and every time, Kessler gave the same answer. He believed the Washington Post had been fair to Trump and treated all presidents more or less the same way. Trump was uniquely terrible, according to Kessler, because he called the press the “enemy of the people,” among other things.

To Kessler, it’s all part of the job. They reported the news. They never talked about taking down Trump. There was no conspiracy to get Trump. They didn’t alienate large swaths of readers and tarnish the legacy of the once mighty newspaper that made its name on Watergate. It never happened.

I wanted to mock Glenn Kessler or call him out or chide him or Tweet at him or something to shake him out of it. But the truth is, I gave him the presumption of grace, and by the end of the interview, I could see that this is how he genuinely sees the Washington Post, his work there, and reality itself.

That might have been true once upon a time. Social media changed the media, Twitter especially. It wasn’t just that reporters were called out and bullied if they got a story wrong, as we saw after the Tom Cotton affair at the New York Times.

Most people I know who are in the bubble of the Left don’t realize they are in a bubble. It’s impossible to explain it to them. They are offended just by the question and will shut down the conversation. We have to just accept that each of us has a separate reality and try not to talk about it too much.

There isn’t any way to break that pattern unless you do what I did — cut off all incoming news from various outlets, your social media feeds, the headlines, and cable news. Once you do that, it is possible to be able to not only see the bubble on the Left but also see things the way the other half of the country does.

Otherwise, it’s impossible to see the media bias, even when it is as overt as the ongoing war on Donald Trump. We don’t talk much about the effects of this brand-new technology we have at our fingertips, but one of the biggest is how it shapes our perception of reality.

Before I escaped the bubble of the Left shaped by legacy media, the only thing I saw about Trump was the selective clips and images that depicted him as a frothing, angry, offensive tyrant. I was shocked to find that it wasn’t true, not even a little bit. Trump can be those things, but he is also many other things - funny, humble, warm, kind. Most people on the Left don’t even know he has a sense of humor. That is the true failure of the media and Trump: they portrayed him as someone he isn’t.

I noticed things changed dramatically after Trump’s first win, when everyone had the same warning not to “normalize” Trump. From that moment on, the legacy media was always under threat that any kindness shown to Trump or any criticism of the Democrats would be “normalizing a fascist.”

I blame the legacy media for the ongoing mass delusions on the Left that have torn this country apart. I resent them for not taking more responsibility for everything they’ve done that got us to this point. I blame them for not caring much about the America that exists outside the rarified air of the Left.

But I can’t blame Glenn Kessler.

At the end of the interview, he talks about being out of his newsroom job of three decades for just three days and how much he hated working from home. I saw him differently then. I saw a guy who loved his job and loved the Washington Post. Every day, he showed up and worked in that bustling newsroom. How could anyone ask him to throw that newspaper or his work under the bus?

That’s what makes Halperin a good journalist. I could see things from Kessler’s point of view, and I understood him better. Halperin didn’t back off the tough questions, but he treated him with kindness and decency. He humanized him.

“And so shines a good deed in a weary world.”

Here is the full episode: