That is certainly the story of national media performance in Tuesday’s wild midterm elections anyway.

I can’t wait to hear all the political insiders who worship at the altar of Nate Silver explain how he could have been so wrong about Maryland’s gubernatorial race.

I really like the edgy humor of Kathy Griffin, but her annual CNN New Year's Eve show with Andersoon Cooper this past Monday night was simply embarrassing. And speaking as someone who's probably had way more than his fair share of maybe-too-good times in New Year's Eves past, I'm generally not one who's easily embarrassed.

I mean, speaking also from personal experience, it's one thing for two good friends to act that crudely in the privacy of a New Year's Eve party in select and limited company (which further depends, of course, on the type...]]> Sun, 12 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0500 Following the lead of Time magazine, CNN Friday suspended Sunday morning show host and international affairs analyst Fareed Zakaria for plagiarism.  The magazine said its suspension was for a month "pending further review," while CNN put no time limit on its removal of Zakaria from its airwaves.  Plagiarism used to be a deadly journalistic sin from which there often was no redemption.  Given the lack of values and ethics is journalism today, however, who knows what will happen to Zakaria.

79° F

Rush to be first meets lack of concern for the reputations of those we cover met in this misguided Brian Ross report (July 21, 2012)

6:06 p.m. EDT, July 21, 2012

Journalistic mistakes are easy to make in the immediate wake of events like the horrific shootings last week in a movie theater in Colorado.

Bits and bites of information explode across myriad media. Meanwhile, revulsion at the violence mixes with adrenaline, leaving some reporters...]]> Wed, 25 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0500 Tuesday night, there was a two-hour report by "Frontline" that explained better than anything I have ever seen on TV how the middle-class got shredded by Wall Street and sold-out by our elected leaders in Washintgon -- and that includes Democrats in the White House.

There were also presidential primaries that made Mitt Romney all but official as the GOP candidate.

But all anyone will be talking about this morning is President Barack Obama slow jamming the news with latenight host Jimmy Fallon at the University of North Carolina.

But first, he hops into San Francisco on Air Force One to pick up a cool million at a campaign fund raiser.

The first is yet another reminder of how wrong conventional wisdom can be especially when it involves major media change, such as the generally unexamined bromide that TV is a dinosaur.

My modest proposal: Let's just try and be fair. Let's do a little self-ethnography from time to time and ask why we feel like it is open season on this guy and his campaign -- and it is OK to drop some of the usual standards of fairness in trying to bring him down.

Here's video of the interview. Wallace used a quote from me on the way in which Stewart is almost never held accountable for his flawed media criticism -- and the way he claims to be only a comedian when his media attacks go awry. Check it out at 7 minutes and 20 seconds into the tape, and tell me what you think.

I would like you to also consider his shifty effort Monday night to quickly pivot away from Weiner's bombshell confession earlier in the day by attacking John Edwards.

Here is what's so appalling to me: The ad makes the totally unsubstantiated charge that the Chamber of Commerce is taking money from foreign interests and using it to "steal our democracy."

I say disastrous because the acting communications director, Anita Dunn, who sounded the call to arms on Howard kurtz's "Reliable Sources" show would resign within weeks, and the president and his innermost circle after going on every major non-Fox news show to attack the highest-rated cable news channel as "not really being a news channel," were in full retreat.

Sherri Shepherd brought up the Sherrod incident within the first 15 minutes of Thursday's interview and ended her question by asking Obama: "Do you think American is still racist?"

And I caught holy heck from some readers and far too many of my colleagues who were still deep in a post-election swoon with this man they kept referring to as so "elegant and cool." Read that column titled "Time for Press to quit being used by Obama" here. It is the first of several columns and posts that I wrote on that theme.

Well, the 24 hours are up, and here I come to write once again about what a reckless TV figure Keith Olbermann is -- and how irresponsible MSNBC and NBC News management are for giving him a national platform and the network's credibility to spread his innuendo, invective and smears. Olbermann tries to talk like he's Edward R. Murrow, but he operates in the dirty tradition of Joe McCarthy.

But there was Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff, essentially making the same bad argument in an appearance Sunday on CNN's John King's "State of the Union" that the White House is righteous in trying to ostracize Fox because Fox is not a "news network" -- it's an "arm" of the Republican Party, to quote Dunn.