Chris Matthews, host of Hardball, appeared on the February 25 edition of NBC’s Today. Co-host Lester Holt began the segment, airing at 8:11AM EST, by asking Matthews about Iraq. He responded:

"The President, of course, got us to go to war in Iraq with the argument that someday down the road, that country over there on the other side of the world might someday help out the terrorists, and we've lost 3000 guys fighting that argument."

That statistic, of course, is not correct. The actual number, as of February 26, is 2294. The death of every soldier is tragic and their sacrifice should be remembered and honored. But the fact that Matthews rounded up by over 700 shows the grisly fascination that media members have with these milestones. Holt then asked the MSNBC host what options the United States had in a potential Iraqi civil war. Matthews then suggested a bleak and dire scenario:

USA Today media writer Peter Johnson reports that CBS News is not about to give up investigative journalism despite the increasing sceptism that genre endures.

CBS News' "48 Hours" recently had to apologize to a Missouri newspaper for changing a front page photo onscreen and claiming it came from the Columbia Daily Tribune.

Peter Johnson says that CBS has taken more hits than any other network.

Yet a week from today, Armen Keteyian, an eight-time Emmy-winning journalist, joins the Evening News as chief investigative correspondent. It's one of the boldest moves yet by CBS News chief Sean McManus, who was charged last October with overhauling the newscast.

CBS News president Sean McManus admits that journalists "in all forms of media have been burned," but that "doesn't mean you say, 'Well, I'm going to focus on human-interest stories exclusively instead of investigative journalism.'" He says to "run away" from investigative reporting because of events in the "recent past," would be "foolish."

Last Wednesday, sports columnist Harvey Araton wrote about the Olympian feud between U.S. speedskaters Chad Hedrick and Shani Davis, with Hedrick starring as Bush and Davis as John Kerry:

“…at the root of the conflict is Davis's belief that Hedrick has been attempting to swift boat him here at the Olympics, use him as a prop as he wraps himself, Texas-style, in the flag, for the purpose of increasing his commercial appeal, while claiming that the feud has elevated their skating and is good for the sport.”

Araton, of course, took Davis’s side.

Araton, who posts his email address with his column, relies on an unexpected surge in reader feedback to fill his Saturday follow-up on the Hedrick-Davis imbroglio.

Ken Herman of Cox Newspapers, quoted in The New York Times today about cameras in the White House briefing room:

"I don't like them seeing me do my job; I want them to see the end result," he said of the public's looking over his shoulder in the briefing room. "It's perfectly possible to be obnoxious and contentious in there and produce an objective print story, but the image is so overwhelmingly negative, and some of our TV brethren are very good at the in-your-face product."

Yes, it's perfectly possible, it's just not probable, from my years of analyzing media bias. Terry Moran and David Gregory, for example, are just as biased in the finished product as their belligerent barrages of questioning in press briefings would suggest. And for the life of me I cannot recall a single instance where Helen Thomas has tried to elicit information from Ari Fleischer or Scott McClellan that was relevant to reporting a news story.

I also have a hard time believing that minority leaders Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) orSen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) would face the same intense questions from the press were congressional news conferences as widely televised as the White House briefings.

If you look in the dictionary next to 'disgruntled', expect to find a photo of former FEMA Director Michael Brown. As the Today show graphic read, "Michael Brown Blames White House," and NBC Nightly News host Brian Williams was there to record every embittered word, with nary a nuanced question that might have probed Brown's account of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina.

In the interview excerpt shown on this morning's Today, Brown sought to exculpate himself by describing a conference call he had held with the President and top administration officials in which Brown informed them that 90% of New Orleans' population had been displaced.

Claimed Brown: "I am screaming that we need to do these things. We need all this stuff. It's like the old ketchup commercial. I just could not get the stuff to come out of the bottle."

In his Monday "Media Notes" column, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz first reports on one of Jack Abramoff's friends in the media. His second item -- on CNN's Jack Cafferty -- used several quotes outlined by Brent Baker in CyberAlerts and several NewsBusters bloggers.

Cafferty's cutting remarks have made him a hero to some on the left. Liberal radio host Cenk Uygur called for Cafferty to get his own prime-time show, saying on http://HuffingtonPost.com that "he is a rare truth-teller on cable news." But Tim Graham of the conservative Media Research Center writes that Cafferty "has created a little career as a gruff anti-Bush commentator" in "an attempt to be the anti-Bill O'Reilly."

The most transparently obvious way of displaying liberal bias is to take an issue like an abortion, and suggest the conservative side is extreme, while describing the liberal, abortion-on-demand side without a label, as reasonable, almost non-ideological. Newsweek's that obvious in this week's issue, carrying the headline:

Reality Check for 'Roe'

With the hard right hoping for reversal, the black-and-white war over abortion finds itself immersed in shades of gray.

But where is the "hard left" that's so extreme they would abort a baby that was mistakenly born alive? Even as they claim the abortion debate is more ambiguous than either side would like, reporters Evan Thomas and Martha Brant are still displaying their labeling imbalance:

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At the very end of this post on January 27, I asked this question about Air America Radio (AAR), which at the time was surviving by the good graces of one rich guy's wallet:

Are Al Franken’s ridiculously outsized earnings (including a LOT of money up-front) from a network that is funded by one guy a “clever” way of circumventing campaign-finance law and underwriting a possible Franken run for the US Senate in Minnesota?

My question only concerned Franken. But now that The Democracy Alliance (no working web site; an April 2005 article about the organization's plans is here), a far-left liberal group that includes billionaire George Soros, Peter "the Progressive" (Insurance) Lewis, and Rob "Meathead" Reiner as prominent members, has, according to Radio Equalizer Brian Maloney, promised to underwrite up to $8 million of Air America Radio's future losses, the scope of the question has expanded, and others are asking it, including Bill O'Reilly at Fox News. In an interview on O'Reilly's TV show (transcript here), Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who specializes in campaign finance law, called AAR's financial maneuvers "money laundering."

Brian also makes an important point for those who thought that AAR would actually compete with the rest of Talk Radio as we currently know it:

A particularly dour report on the situation in Iraq aired on this evening's NBC Nightly News (Sunday, February 26, 2006) (link with video). This is nothing new, but the last 20 seconds of the report featured remarks from a man named Nir Rosen, whom NBC innocently identified as an "Iraq analyst." Not surprisingly, Rosen is far from an impartial observer.

The Weekly Standard investigated Rosen's agenda months ago. In a "Scrapbook" article a few months back, the Standard noted that Rosen authored a September 2005 piece for UPI called, "Outside View: The Small, Daily Abu Ghraibs." The thrust of the article (emphasis mine),

"In Iraq, America is attacked because it is a brutal occupier, humiliating Iraqis, destroying villages, arresting, beating and killing countless innocent men, women and children.

On CNN’s “Reliable Sources” Sunday (hat tip to Expose the Left), Salon’s Washington bureau chief Walter Shapiro attributed the current media frenzy surrounding the transfer of management of a number of American ports to DP World of the United Arab Emirates to an Associated Press article first published on February 11. Speaking with host Howard Kurtz, Shapiro stated:

“Well, I think to some extent the entire parameters of the story were set by the initial AP story that Glenn Reynolds [of “Instapundit”] linked to on February 12. And what that was, was very simply an AP story that said the ports are being taken over by a Dubai company -- a Dubai-based company and that in the lead it said that two members of the -- two of the 9/11 hijackers had United Arab Emirates passports. And the same AP story had the attacks on the deal from Chuck Schumer.”

Kurtz then asked: “So you're saying that that was a loaded piece of journalism by The Associated Press?”

Shapiro answered: “Well, I admire The Associated Press. What I am saying is it certainly set the bumper sticker -- the print set the bumper sticker standards that television then emulated, as did the blogosphere.”

Looking back in hindsight at the AP article in question written by Ted Bridis, it is easy to see Shapiro’s point. Here’s the lead: