For several news cycles this campaign season, it’s almost been like old times for Mark Halperin. The veteran political pundit has been hitting the media circuit, slinging opinions about the presidential race on NewsNation, Newsmax, Fox News.com, and Michael Smerconish’s satellite radio program. He’s been on Megyn Kelly’s mega-popular podcast and on Tucker Carlson’s too. When Halperin reported on his video platform in early October that “robust private polling” was showing Kamala Harris’s support fading and Donald Trump’s ascendant, the Trump-friendly mediasphere gobbled it up, treating his comments as if they were delivered from Mt. Olympus.
In all, Halperin hasn’t been noticed this much, or been taken this seriously, since 2017. Back then, he was among the nation’s most prominent political talking heads—an NBC News analyst, a regular panelist on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, and a cohost of Showtime’s The Circus. HBO had turned his best-selling chronicle of the 2008 campaign, Game Change (cowritten with John Heilemann), into a dramatic TV movie starring Julianne Moore and Woody Harrelson. A another book and a TV adaptation of it was in the works.
All of that evaporated in a blink. As the #MeToo movement rumbled across the globe in late 2017, a dozen women accused Halperin of unwanted contact. The allegations included accounts of Halperin pressuring subordinates for sex, masturbating in front of a female colleague, and repeatedly making unwanted physical contact, such as grabbing a colleague’s breasts and pressing his crotch against another’s shoulder. The alleged conduct dated from Halperin’s time as political director at ABC News from 1994 to 2004, during which Halperin oversaw a staff of eager young journalists.
One of his accusers, Dianna May, told me in 2017 that Halperin had asked her to sit on his lap during a routine interaction at the office one day in 1994. May, then a news researcher, approached him, confused and alarmed by his entreaties, and realized he had an erection. Two women also described physical assaults to me—claims Halperin has long disputed.
At the time, Halperin apologized in a statement, in which he acknowledged that his behavior had been “inappropriate and caused others pain” and that he had pursued “relationships with women that I worked with, including some junior to me.” For this, he said, he was “deeply sorry.” He claimed some of the allegations against him were not true, but did not address specifics. His career immediately collapsed; his roster of prestigious employers dropped him.
In the seven years since, Halperin hasn’t recovered fully; none of the mainstream news programs that once gave him a megaphone have invited him to return. But many others have been willing to give him the opportunity. Indeed, the breadth of his media appearances this fall seems to represent one of the more successful comebacks among thenews-media figures felled by #MeToo scandals, a hall of shame that includes Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, and Bill O’Reilly, who, it should be noted, has dipped his toes back into political punditry via NewsNation.
Halperin’s career reassembly reflects today’s fractured media environment, in which the power of traditional media gatekeepers has diminished in recent years as new platforms have flourished. And it speaks to how quickly the collective memory can fade. When his name comes up in news accounts these days, Halperin is often described as a “political analyst,” not by a phrase that once preceded his name: “disgraced journalist.”
Any account of Halperin’s return is obliged to note his own bootstrapping determination and doggedness to regain the microphone. After his banishment, Halperin soldiered on, pumping out hot takes on Twitter and via a blog, awkwardly self-branded as “Mark Halperin’s Wide World of News.” Mark McKinnon, a Vanity Fair contributor and Halperin’s former cohost on The Circus, credits Halperin with “remarkable resiliency.” Halperin, he told me in an email, has “scraped his way back to the surface from the depths of hell featuring public flogging, humiliation, and economic suffocation.”
Others believe that Halperin’s abusive past should be disqualifying. “There seems to be collective memory loss by some in the media about the impact Mark had on multiple women,” May told me in a recent email. “Maybe they don’t remember or care that he was credibly accused of serious misconduct. If I was running a newsroom or booking guests for a podcast, I’d want guests with credibility and character, rather than someone with a tarnished reputation. In my opinion, that person doesn’t deserve a platform of influence.”
Halperin declined multiple requests for an interview for this story through a spokesperson, Paul Wilke. At one point, Wilke issued a vague legal threat, writing in an email, “Our attorney is deeply concerned about your ability and desire to report accurately and fairly about Mark.” He did not cite any inaccuracies in my earlier reporting when offered the opportunity.
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