Mark Halperin

Mark Evan Halperin (born January 11, 1965) is an American journalist, television cable host, and commentator for the conservative Newsmax TV.

In 1982, before he began his senior year at Walt Whitman High School, he lived with a family in Japan as part of the Youth for Understanding program.

He received his B.A. from Harvard University in 1987.

In 1988, Halperin began his career as a desk assistant for ABC News and a researcher for World News Tonight.

He then worked as a general assignment reporter in Washington.

In 1992, he worked full-time as an off-air producer covering the presidential campaign of Bill Clinton.

In 1994, Halperin became a producer with ABC's special events unit in New York and later an editorial producer.

In 1997, he was named the political director for ABC News.

In that capacity, Halperin appeared frequently as a correspondent and political analyst for ABC News television and radio programs.

He founded and edited The Note, which appeared daily on ABCNews.com.

In October 2006, Halperin and John F. Harris, published a book together, The Way to Win: Clinton, Bush, Rove, and How to Take the White House in 2008.

Since 2006, Halperin has served as a board member of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, New Hampshire.

In March 2007, Halperin became a political analyst for ABC News and was replaced as political director by David Chalian.

In May 2007, he was hired as a political analyst and editor at large for Time magazine.

He has been on their public advisory board since it was created in 2008.

Halperin previously had worked as the political director for ABC News, where he also served as the editor of the Washington, D.C., newsletter The Note. In 2010, Halperin joined MSNBC, becoming the senior political analyst and a contributor.

Along with John Heilemann, Halperin served as co-managing editor of Bloomberg Politics.

In June 2010, he was hired as a senior political analyst at MSNBC.

Halperin and co-author John Heilemann wrote the 2010 Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime.

In 2011, Time released an iPad app called "Mark Halperin 2012" that contains material from Halperin's "The Page" as well as video, photos, breaking news, and Halperin's take on the news.

On June 30, 2011, Halperin was suspended from his duties at MSNBC for "slurring" President Barack Obama on the program Morning Joe, after commenting said of Obama "I thought he was kind of a dick" " for his performance at the previous day's press conference. His suspension was lifted a month later.

In December 2011, Halperin was listed as number 1 in Salon's 2011 Hack List, his reporting described as "shallow and predictable" as well as "both fixated solely on the horse race and also uniquely bad at analyzing the horse race."

Alex Shephard, writing in The New Republic, criticized his coverage for being "totally fixated" on the horse race and for shallow analysis, and "that he’s wanted to carry Donald Trump's bags for years."

Conversely, Benjamin Wallace-Wells of The New Yorker wrote that Halperin's The Circus is "both an argument for horse-race journalism and a way to see its inner workings, and so to track Heilemann and Halperin in their long traipse across the American interior is to see the media discovering its own vulnerabilities, just as Trump was exploiting them."

Halperin and Heilemann co-wrote Game Change and Double Down: Game Change 2012, were co-hosts of MSNBC and Bloomberg's With All Due Respect, and produced and co-starred with Mark McKinnon in Showtime's The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth, which followed the presidential candidates behind the scenes of their campaigns in the 2016 United States Presidential Election.

Subsequently, the book was made into the HBO movie Game Change, which premiered on March 10, 2012.

Halperin had a cameo role in the movie as a reporter.

Halperin and Heilemann followed in 2012 with a book about that election titled Double Down: Game Change 2012.

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank called Halperin's analysis in the 2016 United States presidential campaign "soulless" and "amoral", citing several instances when Halperin praised Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Milbank noted that Halperin had declared on Morning Joe in March 2016 that Trump was "one of the two most talented presidential candidates any of us have covered."

In November 2016, NBC's Brian Williams said Halperin had "gone out of his way" to give Trump favorable coverage.

"When Donald Trump complains he is not getting favorable coverage in the MSM"—making reference to the mainstream media—"he has not been listening to you this cycle", Williams said to Halperin on Williams' show.

"I think you've gone out of your way to find the path, argue for the path, forge the path for him in an argumentative way with your cohost to the nomination."

In response to more than a dozen allegations of workplace sexual harassment and sexual assault at his prior position at ABC News, Halperin was fired by both Showtime Networks and NBC News towards the end of October 2017.

On October 26, 2017, CNN reported that five women had accused Halperin of sexual harassment.

Since 2020, Halperin has appeared on Newsmax TV as a contributor and is the host of their weekly Sunday show, Mark Halperin's Focus Group.

Halperin was born to a Jewish family, the son of Morton Halperin, a foreign policy expert and staff member of the National Security Council during the presidential administration of Richard Nixon; and Ina Weinstein Halperin Young.

He was born in New York City but raised in Bethesda, Maryland.

Earlier, in January 2020, also on “Morning Joe,” Halperin said Trump’s attacks on the Clintons were “politically brilliant.” In June 2016, on his Bloomberg TV show, With All Due Respect, Milbank noted Halperin asserted that "it's not racial" for Trump to attempt to disqualify an Indiana-born federal judge as a "Mexican" because of his ancestry.

His reason: "Mexico isn't a race."