Ann Coulter has a new book out called GLORBAHLF: LIBERAL TERROR DEATH and she was going to go sell this book on Today but then NBC woke up and remembered that its not 2002.

Over at The Corner, Victor Davis Hanson is positive that now that Patrick Fitzgerald has arrested Democratic governor Rod Blagojevich and is looking at Tony Rezko, "Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is just about on the verge on losing his near mythic status among the Washington-New York media." The fact that this hasn't happened yet, and that there is no evidence that this will happen, and the fact that a large number of the "Washington-New York media" (as opposed to liberal bloggers) were outraged at Fitz for trying to get journalists to reveal their sources in the Plamegate case? None of that changes the fact that the elite liberal media will refuse to report on ths thing they're already going nuts over. (Attached: another classic example of the preemptive bias complaint, from your day editor's inbox. It arrived shortly after the second of today's predicted 500 Blago posts ran. Keep 'em coming, America!) [The Corner]

Back when we were all convinced for some reason that it mattered, it was big news that Oprah Winfrey, the most powerful woman on television, refused to let Sarah Palin, the governor of Culture Warkansas, on her popular television program. Because Oprah is a liberal elitist who supported Barack Obama, you see. Also because Oprah didn't have any candidates on her show after her endorsement of Barack Obama. "I would love to have her on after the campaign is over," Oprah said. Conservatives would surely have jumped all over her if she'd continued to refuse to invite Sarah Palin on, so we're happy to announce that Sarah Palin has herself refused to do Oprah.

Let's check in with famous and successful media critic Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post. What is Mr. Kurtz writing about today? The Monday after John McCain's much-discussed appearance on Saturday Night Live, his second of the general election campaign and coming just weeks after his running mate Sarah Palin's well-publicized cameo, Kurtz's column is, of course, about how Obama is on TV all the time, and all the television talk shows are In The Tank for Barack Obama.

It's probably safe to say that Howard Kurtz is the most prominent member of his disreputable clan, the media critics. He analyzes the press full-time for the Washington Post, one of the few national papers left, while the Times has no one regular press critic. Kurtz also has a tv show of his very own! How did he swing such a cushy job? By regularly producing the kind of trenchant media analysis on display in today's column, about a magical fantasy world in which Barack Obama is losing. In this bizarro universe, the Obama campaign is poorly managed, beset by gaffes, and the candidate is a national joke. It's really useful thought exercise, if you're into thinking about things that don't relate to reality. This is his thesis:

Did you wonder who your favorite Slate contributor is voting for? Good news: now you know! Michael Kinsley instituted the quadrennial endorsement list in 2000—go back and read how wrong all the Bush people were!—and it's been a beloved feature ever since, the two more times they've done it, because everyone cares how a Slate copy-editor is voting (spoiler alert: for Obama). There is one McCain vote, a half-hearted endorsement from the conservative editor and Slate lady-blog contributor Rachael Larimore. But there are fewer third-party votes and abstentions than in either of the two previous iterations of the feature, even in divided anyone-but-Bush 2004. Because, duh, people like Obama more than Kerry. But one man, press critic Jack Shafer, remains relentlessly devoted to his utterly wrong-headed principles. Shafer, once again, is voting for the Libertarians! Shafer in 2000:

Former NBC news correspondent and possible "Next Katie" Campbell Brown somehow ended up a serious anchor on CNN, and... she's quite good? Brown (married to GOP strategist Dan Senor, because lol DC media) has become a convert to the popular new "hey, we are allowed to call bullshit" school of television reporting, which is quite heartening and will probably last until the Republicans reorganize and mount another offensive against the media. Anyway! She was on The Daily Show. They talked about Tucker Bounds, the poor McCain surrogate abused by Campbell, starting a national trend. She's had a good election!

Dear Project For Excellence in Journalism: please just stop. Stop doing these studies or just stop releasing your so-called "empirical" findings to the press. Because Howard Kurtz "reporting" that the press is so mean to John McCain and so nice to Barack Obama all the time is not "excellent journalism." It is more like "the Project for No Context and More Bullshit in Journalism." Christ, PEJ, how does it further excellent journalism, learning this factoid:

Hey, here's one of the many fundamental secrets of LIBERAL MEDIA BIAS: you know what plays on television? Novelty and conflict. If you're a Democrat who likes McCain, you get to be on CNN! If you're a Republican who's turned against his party, you get to be on Colbert! The corollary is if you're a staunch party line conservative, you'll always have a seat at a table that also features a staunch party line Democrat. So the National Review twits currently experiencing head trauma trying to figure out why their colleagues who dislike Sarah Palin keep getting on TV should probably make note of Ramesh Ponnuru's startling claim that some producers cut him from their roundtables for not being conservative enough. (And if we were a bit crankier we might note that the spectrum of opinions regularly entertained as serious on television ranges from Pat Buchanan's to, representing the left, Paul Begala. But Olbermann has that smug guy from The Nation on every so often so it's all ok and the world is fair.)

NBC political correspondent Andrea Mitchell is one of the network's news stars, so it's only natural that we've been seeing a lot of her lately. Even when the topic turns to the government's and the candidates' responses to the current financial crisis. But you will not see her, supposedly, when the discussion turns to "past economic decisions" that led up to the crisis. Because Mitchell is married to Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve Chairman who many say is basically responsible for the housing bubble. And that is their conflict of interest compromise: Mitchell will report as usual until the reasons we got to this point are discussed, at which point she'll quietly disappear from your television without explanation. Unethical! Or, you know, the standard way of doing business in political journalism. DC is an incestuous town and everyone knows and is basically friends with everyone else. The media-political complex has lots and lots of intermarried "journalists" and "operatives" and everyone has politely agreed to assume that everyone else is totally professional about it. So they get a bit tetchy when the Columbia Journalism Review is all "disclose your relationships or just be more independent or something" because what do those kids know? If Tom Brokaw wants to play golf with John McCain that is his business (note: we don't know if John McCain can play golf but the two are still definitely probably friends). The standard argument is that one has to find concrete evidence of "bias" before one can claim these chummy relationships are no good, but honestly the "bias" is so ingrained in the process that it's a useless task and one is best served by appyling a gimlet-eyed suspicion to everyone one sees on the TV and then voting for Ron Paul.

So Tom Brokaw is still chugging over at Meet the Press. The NBC Sunday morning institution has been hosted by the former nightly news anchor since the untimely and unexpected death of Tim Russert earlier this year. The network is probably going to permanently hand off the show to smart analyst Chuck Todd and serviceable anchor David Gregory, but Brokaw will remain at NBC News, by necessity, for a long time. Because he is now their resident grown-up. Which is why he's so irritating. As we all know, NBC news, because of MSNBC, has been taken over by lunatics. Left-wing fanatics like Keith Olbermann and, uh, Rachel Maddow, and just-plain-crazy people like Chris Matthews. The Olbermann-Matthews ticket briefly covered the conventions as if they were real newsanchors and not circus sideshows! This outraged everyone, because they are intemperate and say what they think too much (especially Matthews, who says literally every thought he has, out loud). And no one was more outraged than Brokaw, who politely pulled rank and made his bosses give the serious news back to the serious people. He had to! John McCain and the Republicans were in open revolt against NBC (and the rest of the media, as always, but "NBC" was what they chanted when they called for media blood). And Brokaw is friends with John McCain! Well, not "friends." It's complicated!

You'd think Fox News would be thrilled with the idea of an Obama presidency! Though they made their most important mark as the propaganda arm of the post-9/11 Bush presidency, they began as a channel in opposition to the status quo. Remember Clinton? The one who was president? The modern conservative movement is built around aggrieved victimhood, and Obama in the White House should mean the return of great Fox television. But they seem more concerned, right now, about getting that John McCain guy (who they never even really liked!) elected. They're actually maybe scared that their moment is over? That Rachel Maddow really is the future? How else to explain dumb stunts like erasing an AP report on Sarah Palin from their website after it showed up in search engines. The story was on how prominent conservatives like Kathleen Parker are all terrified that the McCain is sending a genial idiot into the White House based purely on her attractiveness to the base. Not revolutionary stuff. But too hot for Fox, apparently. (Though they did report on Frank Luntz's focus group proclaiming an Obama victory in the debate. No one referenced the group's decision again that night, as far as we know, but the Fox website is still highlighting the video.) Click to view

The New York Times ran a huge (huge!) A1 investigative piece on John McCain and his weird gambling obsession and ties to the Indian Casino industry and Vegas and lobbyists and ten thousand other things yesterday. It was well-reported, historical in focus, and fair. It ran on the front page of the Sunday edition, which reaches almost half a million more readers than the weekday edition. But, you know, no one is talking about it. It didn't really stick! Did anyone read the whole thing? Were there bombshells? Who knows! What happened? The Times sabotaged itself, either intentionally or through ineptitude. Allow us to explain. Times editor Bill Keller complains a lot these days about how no one pays enough attention to the Times and their big stories. He blames the internet and a million competing voices for distracting people from the Important Work of Times journalists. He's sorta right! Gone are the days when the Times set the agenda for the national press. Though the slow death of newspapers across the nation has been beneficial to the Times in one important way: they're the only national paper, effectively. A Times investigation reaches more of the country than a Washington Post investigation. So one would expect a story of this size and seeming heft would make a big splash. But it didn't! Drudge didn't play it up—though as we move closer to the election, he regresses even more to his natural Republican hackdom, so they shouldn't have expected a push from him. And the liberals have no one coherent answer to Drudge, just a million sites trying desperately to push their own often competing agendas. Kos, Talking Points Memo, and the Huffington Post all share an elitist coastal liberal bias and huge audiences, but very different methods of achieving their goals and working the media refs. But on the other hand... the way the Times dropped the story seems self-defeating. Front page of the Sunday edition, sure. But it went online Saturday night. So by the time Monday morning rolls around, it seems ancient, even though no one actually talked about it over the weekend. Furthermore, it came right after a presidential debate, right before a hugely anticipated vice presidential debate, and right in the midst of a gigantic economic crisis and a desperate attempt by Congress to prevent another Great Depression. The Times should've had the story go live online on Thursday night (in time for it to be an issue in the debates!), they should've leaked salient details to Drudge beforehand, or they should've waited until the bailout negotiations collapsed or succeeded. The fact that they did none of those things indicates to us that they didn't actually want this story to blow up. Maybe there's nothing actually to it (though the bit where McCain helped take down Jack Abramoff because he was the competition to McCain's preferred lobbyists seems a bit juicy, right?) or maybe they've actually been cowed by the McCain campaigns attacks on their credibility, or maybe they just don't know what the hell they're doing. Now, for your edification, some interesting bits from the 100-page Times piece on John McCain's gambling addiction:

Haha we were going to write about this and then John McCain flew back to Washington DC to solve this economic crisis himself. Before that happened? People were talking about how either John McCain lied to us about his campaign manager's link to Freddie Mac, or that campaign manager lied to John McCain about those ties, or both. How to respond to that charge? Hah. They didn't really know! Twice today—twice—McCain surrogates responded not by denying any of it, but rather by... comparing the New York Times to the Huffington Post. Ok, what? Nancy Pfotenhauer tried this line first on MSNBC this afternoon. Then spokesman Michael Goldfarb tried it later in an press release. That's right, they are saying you can't believe the Times because it's just like the stupid HuffPo with its Nora Ephron blogs and so on. What? Does this argument resonate with anyone who doesn't live online?? Man, the Washington Post is like the "Pink is the New Blog" of newspapers, right?? That MSNBC is pretty much the MediaBistro of television! Nonsensical zing! One understands why they decided to quickly shift gears this afternoon.

Whenever the media say anything about John McCain that isn't "he is the coolest hero ever and sooo dreamy" his campaign accuses every journalist in the country of being "in the tank" for Barack Obama. And whenever the press goes a day or two without talking exclusively about John McCain, the McCain campaign accuses the media of ignoring him. Kind of a biased-if-you-do, biased-if-you-don't situation. But we'll give the McCain campaign credit: they're consistent. In their attacks on the media, anyway. The enemy seems to shift a bit. Like, this week, apparently the media is ignoring John McCain in favor of... the rapidly growing financial crisis and the government's unprecedented plan to end it. Seriously, the McCain campaign is totally upset that no one will write about his "commission of technicians" but they all find time to talk about Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson! McCain economic advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin—the guy who said McCain invented the BlackBerry and yet somehow retained his position as McCain's least bad economic advisor—sent a snippy email to like a thousand financial reporters yelling at them for not covering John McCain's secret plan to end the war on banks. "I cannot believe the absence of recognition of the policy substance," Holtz-Eakin wrote, followed by a list of all of McCain's fantastic vague ideas that he can't implement until January. Financial reporters who received the email were like, ok? What? Old man, there are more important things to talk about right now, like the end of capitalism!

So the press was entirely shut out of Sarah Palin's magical journey through the UN today. They are making up for it by being quietly bitchy. The headlines: "Palin meets her first world leaders in New York." (You know, from first world countries like Afghanistan!) And here is the most sarcastic Associated Press lead sentence ever:

When John McCain goes to war, he goes to war to win. When he got shot down in Nam it was because he went back to make goddamn sure that civilian power plant got bombed. Even after the war, he was pretty sure that a few thousand more bombs would've defeated those commies. So when he went to war against the New York Times and every single major network, we were confident he wouldn't rest until 30 Rock was reduced to rubble and CNN renounced their anti-American ways. But no, he's cutting and running. Before, it was was reported that not a single reporter was going to be allowed to cover Sarah Palin's crazy UN meetings. Now, though? Oh look, CNN gets to send in one producer for a pool report. That's not change we can believe in! What's next, cooperating with the hated New York Times? Funny you should ask! John McCain's war on the Times was going very very well, for him. His campaign was trashing the New York Times and accusing Politico reporters of being "in the tank" and all that, but then some Politico people kept writing about how McCain's campaign kept lying about everything in the world. Then they wrote a story about how McCain actually pretty much lurves everyone at the hated New York Times. Like all of them!

On the whole, the journalists who've TURNED AGAINST their former boyfriend John McCain are some of our least favorite journalists in the nation, embodying as they do everything insular and adolescent about the Washington Press Corps. They loved John McCain when he could convince them that he was only bullshitting to the voters, not to them. Now, he won't speak to them! And hey, he's lying about shit, too, but whatever. Today, another media person handed McCain back his class ring and ran home, weeping. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, explain yourself!

Ron Fournier, the new Associated Press Washington Bureau Chief? Definitely a tool, possibly a Republican. Some of the AP campaign coverage this season? Annoying at best, misleading at worst. But recently liberals (led by the usually serious Talking Points Memo) have all but declared the Associated Press an arm of the John McCain communications office. Well we can seek out and link to only the AP dispatches that fit our preferred spin too, guys! Today the wire sent out a remarkable analysis piece on how the McCain campaign just lies, all the time, about everything. And everyone calls them on their lies, and "fact checks" them, but it doesn't matter, because they don't care. And the AP under Fournier has actually done a better job with this fact-checking than lots of other outlets. The AP has no compunction about explicitly reporting that a statement is deliberately misleading, even if they sometimes shy away from the word "lie." Take a look:

"Back in 2000, after John McCain lost his mostly honorable campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, he went about apologizing to journalists—including me—for his most obvious mis-step: his support for keeping the confederate flag on the state house." That is Joe Klein, an exceptionally annoying Time columnist. He sorta gets why that is ridiculous, now, but in case he isn't all the way there, let's try to break it down for him: