First there was Bryant Gumbel. But has one of our own Olympic athletes also politicized this installment of the Winter Games? In an NBC profile of U.S. champion figure skater Johnny Weir this past week, the flamboyant athlete is shown lying on a couch wearing a red sweatjacket with the decoration of CCCP, the Cyrillic Russian initials of the old USSR [link to video at gawker.com, see note below]. Yes, we have now seen the day when an Olympic athlete, representing the United States, is seen casually wearing a sweatjacket symbolizing the old Soviet Union.

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Neal Gabler's gotta take outlandish swipes at the Bush administration on Fox Media Watch. And, perhaps in a form of childish defiance, Gabler also has a penchant for biting the Fox hand that feeds him.

On tonight's episode, Gabler:

• Claimed that Vice-President Cheney "doesn't believe in a free press."
• Described the shooting accident as "idiocy" on the VP's part.
• Accused Brit Hume of not asking the 'major question' in his interview of Cheney [having to do with the timing of notification].
• Seconded the notion that the shooting might have been a 'conspiracy' and 'good PR' for purposes distracting attention from the latest Abu Ghraib photo release and other administration problems. Cal Thomas had floated the notion as a joke, but Gabler seemed to pick up on it seriously.
• Mocked Fox's objectivity, saying "when the Vice-President shoots somebody in the face, it's big news. I don't care where you live, even on Fox News, it's a big story."

Alright Neal, you've met your quota for the night. See you next week.

Just when you thought the media had closed the book on the Cheney hunting accident, the Associated Press fired one last salvo at the Vice President today.  In their article, VP Accident Tale Filled with Discrepancies, Calvin Woodward and Nancy Benac rehash the same litany of talking points that flooded the media this week. Woodward and Benac revisit the shifting blame, belated acknowledgment of beer consumption, discrepancies in the shooting, the aftermath and how it was reported.

Scott McClellan was cited for promoting the "blame the victim" defense when he repeated Katherine Armstrong's comments on the accident. Cheney's first public comment on the accident amounted to an "about face" according to the AP.

National Public Radio provided publicity to the leftist website Salon.com on three shows Thursday for their release of previously unseen (if not notably different) pictures of American abuses at Abu Ghraib. Nowhere in their three dollops of publicity did NPR label Salon as liberal or left-wing, or explain that they oppose President Bush and the war in Iraq. They did not mention how Salon compared Abu Ghraib’s humiliations of prisoners to the killings of civilians at My Lai during the Vietnam war, as former Time reporter and USA Today columnist Walter Shapiro argued in explaining why the leftist website published the new photos.

Shapiro saw only torture condoned at the highest levels of the administration:

The Huffington Post has a video clip of the introduction to Friday’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” on HBO. In it is a satirical advertisement for a new rap album by Dick Cheney, the real “ODP.” Predictably, the piece lampoons Cheney’s recent hunting accident, while bringing up some old favorites including his infamous expletive directed at a member of Congress, as well as some not-so-nice words for a member of the press.

The lyrics (not suitable for children) as transcribed from the video follow. To see the video, go here.  

The Programme Complaints Committee of the BBC looked into charges that one of its news reports was unfair towards the Conservative Party. Almost a year after the broadcast, the committee has ruled that the story did indeed breach "the guidelines on accuracy and impartiality."

According to a Friday BBC story, "Governors said rules were broken when Harri said the then Conservative leader was booed, but did not mention the same thing had happened to Tony Blair."

The reporter in question is Guto Harri, who now peddles his fair and balanced reporting as BBC's North American correspondent.