NBC's Katie Couric and Tim Russert managed on Friday morning to cover just about everything in the news -- except Democratic Senator Dick Durbin's incendiary comments equating Guantanamo with the Nazi regime and the Soviet gulags. Couric raised with Russert how the "House introduced a resolution that would require President Bush to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq beginning next year," how "according to the latest Gallup Poll, 56 percent of Americans say now the war was not worth it, almost 60 percent say the Pentagon should pull some or all of the troops out of Iraq," how "some senior Democrats on Capitol Hill are calling for a full investigation of the so-called Downing Street Memo," and she concluded with how "in a rare display of bipartisanship, we saw Bill Frist and Hillary Clinton appear on this program yesterday talking about some legislation that they're pushing in terms of health care." Ignored by Couric: Durbin's charge: "If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others."

If the present-day news media were around in the 1770s, the United States of America never could have won the Revolutionary War, author/historian David McCullough charged in a taped interview to plug his new book, 1776. Appearing on CNBC's Tim Russert aired Saturday night, McCullough asserted that if the Continental Army efforts led by George Washington "had been covered by the media, and the country had seen now horrible the conditions were, how badly things were being run by the officers, and what a very serious soup we were in, I think that would have been it" for the colonialists and the British would have won.