MarketWatch.com reports :

Moody's Investors Service on Friday placed New York Times Co.'s A2 senior unsecured long term debt, and P-1 commercial paper ratings on review for possible downgrade.

Moody's is one of the world's most respected financial rating companies.

But as regards the Times, Moody's very late to the game.

Informed readers and bloggers have been downgrading the Times for years.

Hat Tip: Michellemalkin.com

I used to really enjoy Tim Russett, but as I continue to watch his Sunday program, it is becoming more evident, that he too is caught up in the hate Bush rethoric. And for Gregory he is just amazing beyond his capacity as a neutral reporter..he really needs to be replaced in the White House..he has lost his credibility, I think. These two so-called journalist are always on Imus Show.  Gregory is on all most every day with the Imus..and of course, Imus has really gone sour on the President and company.  It is amazing to me that the news media acts so irresponsibly during the war crisis.  Questioning is one thing, but the news media in general is way off balance. Somebody needs to remind them of this country efforts.

Larry T. Doughty

Brewer, Maine

On Friday afternoon’s The Situation Room, CNN senior political analyst Bill Schneider touted Senator Russ Feingold’s motion to censure President Bush as his choice for this week’s "political play of the week," heaping this praise upon him: "Spines, backbones, they help you stand up for what you believe. Of course it’s risky, that’s what a play of the week is all about. Senator Feingold did not choose an easy issue to confront the President on, like allowing an Arab government-owned company to operate U.S. ports. He chose wiretapping conversations with suspected terrorists and that’s a tough one." Earlier in his piece, Schneider played a soundbite of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid suggesting Feingold was displaying "principle." That prompted Schneider to recall Ronald Reagan: "Imagine that. Acting on principle need not be political suicide. Ronald Reagan gave Republicans a healthy injection of principle just when they needed it, after Watergate." (Transcript follows.)

Nudity. Perhaps that's NBC's strategy for maintaining high ratings if Katie Couric departs the network. The March 17 edition of Today featured a segment on a artist who seeks to "challenge the taboo issue of women’s bodies." The vehicle for such change? Why, topless women, of course. NBC was only too happy to oblige. The story, airing at 7:49AM EST, featured no less then 22 screen shots of pixilated nudity, including a seven second clip of a woman skating topless. Additionally, the photographer, Jordan Matter, is a well known liberal who stated on his website that the goal of his art project is:

Matter: "Challenging this inequity between the sexes is the purpose of my work. There has been a recent shift in America towards a socially conservative philosophy, so right after Janet Jackson's breast was exposed at the Super Bowl, I started asking women to appear topless in New York City." 

In this week's Live Chat on the Newsweek website, Howard Fineman came online to chat about the pro-life trend in South Dakota and how that might affect the Republicans. (Their answer: it will hurt them.) Fineman seemed to be having a fine time, claiming "I'm glad to be doing one again. I always learn a lot doing them. As Newsweek's chief political correspondent, I can't do my job by hunkering down inside the Beltway, either literally or digitally." But it wasn't long before the hunkering down occurred:

Hudson, OH: Given the majority of the media is liberal and pro-choice do you expect the media including Newsweek to cover this issue objectively and without personal bias?

Another day, another thread. WRT comments, we've gone back to the expanded thread version. Registered users can change your own settings by using the controls at the top of the comment block.

How's your favorite team doing in the NCAA tournament?

During yesterday's White House briefing, NBC White House correspondent David Gregory, believing Howard Kurtz's recent article that he is the Sam Donaldson of the Bush administration, asked whether the president launched an offensive in Iraq to help his poll numbers.

"Support for the President is at rock bottom; support for this war is at rock bottom in this country. Does the President think it's important as a show of U.S. and Iraqi force to mount these kinds of operations, to try to change public opinion in this country?"

Press secretary Scott McClellan said the decision to launch the largest air offensive since 2003 was not made by the president.

ABC News' Internet site yesterday reported on summaries of four Iraqi documents from Saddam Hussein's government that were released by the U.S. government Wednesday. The first is an Iraqi intelligence service document tracing a relationship between Osama bin Laden and Hussein's government. ABC News then added an "Editor's Note," which in part states:

"While the assertions contained in this document clearly support the claim (of a bin Laden-Hussein connection), the sourcing is questionable — i.e. an unnamed Afghan 'informant' reporting on a conversation with another Afghan 'consul.' The date of the document — four days after 9/11 — is worth noting but without further corroboration, this document is of limited evidentiary value."

First Isaac Hayes, the voice actor for its Chef character left "South Park" over an episode that poked fun of his scientology beliefs. Now it seems the popular animated series has been dealt another blow by Hayes's fellow scientologist, Tom Cruise. The New York Post reports:

Hollywood bully Tom Cruise got Comedy Central to cancel Wednesday night's cablecast of a controversial "South Park" episode about scientology by warning that he'd refuse to promote "Mission Impossible 3," insiders say.

Since Paramount is banking on "MI3" to rake in blockbuster profits this summer, and Paramount is owned by Viacom, which also owns Comedy Central, the tactic worked.

A new book by veteran New York Times economics reporter Louis Uchitelle calls for a doubling of the minimum wage. “The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences" goes on sale next week, but judging by the early reviews and official description, it will be faithful to Uchitelle’s liberal reporting on economics and business:

“The award-winning New York Times economics writer Louis Uchitelle explains how, in the mid-1970s, the first major layoffs, initiated as a limited response to the inroads of foreign competition, spread and multiplied, in time destroying the notion of job security and the dignity of work.”

A Chevy Chase, Maryland family sit on the edge of bankruptcy, thanks in no small part to the complaints of a few liberal journalists.

The March 17 Washington Times reports that Marianne and Marc Duffy, a suburban Washington couple, have been told by Montgomery County officials that the permits granted them to renovate their 82-year-old house were granted in error, and consequently they will have to tear down their home.

Apparently the Duffy home renovation raised the ire of neighbors, including William Hamilton "an editor at The Washington Post, and his wife, Jane Mayer, a staff writer for the New Yorker" as well as ABC correspondent Jackie Judd, the Times's Tarron Lively reported.

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On Thursday's ER, a leading character on the NBC drama set in a Chicago hospital, declared in reference to her husband being deployed to Iraq: “My duty is to be a good doctor and to be a good wife, not to be brainwashed into falling in line with some pseudo-patriotic delusion." The blast from “Dr. Neela Rasgotra,” played by Parminder Nagra, came at the end of a scene of a gathering of spouses of deployed soldiers. When one woman, whose husband would not be home for the impending birth of their child, proclaimed that “our loved ones are serving our country, and it's a small price to pay,” Dr. Rasgotra replied: "I think it's a huge price to pay, especially under the circumstances." The woman wondered: “What circumstances?" Dr. Rasgotra explained: "Well, the way the whole thing's been handled, how we got into it, how it's been managed....I still haven't seen any weapons of mass destruction, have you?" As they all sat in a home's living room, Dr. Rasgotra pleaded with the group: "You can't tell me that you believe 100 percent in your heart that we should be in Iraq, can any of you?" (Transcript follows, as well as other instances of left-wing activism on ER.)

Video excerpt (1:28): Real (2.6 MB) or Windows Media (2.9MB). Plus MP3 audio (400 KB)

When does healthy reportorial reserve cross the line into cynicism? Today's coverage this morning of Operation Swarmer, the counter-insurgency offensive in the Samarra region of Iraq, illustrates the issue.

NBC's skepticism was as clear as the legend that appeared on-screen throughout the segment: "Were Iraqi Targets Hit?" Surely it is appropriate to ask and try to answer how effective a military operation has been. But in openly wondering whether any targets were hit, Today perhaps comes close to labelling the operation a sham.

Questions about NBC's motives were only heightened when immediately following the Samarra segment, Today ran a piece, narrated by White House antagonist-in-chief David Gregory, which posed the question: "Politics of War: Can Bush Overcome Iraq?"

Over at TimesWatch on Thursday, Clay Waters tackled a controversy over a postponed play celebrating the life and activism of Rachel Corrie, an American-flag-burning activist for Israel-hating Palestinian terrorism. The third anniversary of Corrie’s death by standing in front of an Israeli bulldozer drew Jesse McKinley to write in the Times about how a Manhattan theatre company was delaying its staging of a British Corrie-celebrating play drawn from her life and writings. As Clay reported:

McKinley presents a false choice on how to take Corrie's activism: "Given the sharply divided opinions of Ms. Corrie -- idealistic or recklessly naive, depending on one's political point of view -- Mr. Nicola said on Monday that the workshop needed ‘more time to learn more and figure a way to proceed.’"

On Thursday night's Countdown show, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann characterized the logic of the White House's newly released National Security Strategy as insane by comparing its architects to individuals who fail the sanity test: "Does the individual continue to take action A and continue to get result B, while insisting that next time he will get result Z?" Referring to the Bush administration as "the forces that got us into Iraq," Olbermann declared that they are "still expecting to get result Z." After reading from the strategy, the Countdown host snidely quipped, "Actually finding WMD, result Z, is apparently beside the point."

Olbermann, who routinely signs off his Countdown show on an anti-war note by recounting the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq "since the declaration of mission accomplished," teased Thursday's show by summarizing the Bush policy of preemptive war as: "We can start it in order to keep somebody else from starting it." While showing footage of the aftermath of a bombing in Iraq, he sarcastically added, "Well, after all, it has worked so well in Iraq." Notably, while Olbermann later interviewed Time magazine's Michael Duffy, someone thought it was a good idea to display the words "The Empire Strikes Back" at the bottom of the screen, presumably referring to America's airstrikes in Iraq, during their discussion. (Transcript follows.)

The New Republic has a "by the editors" editorial in the March 20 issue calling on the government to provide "universal health care." No surprise there.

What should be a surprise in a mainstream policy journal is that the New Republic was not honest enough to describe conservative health care proposals accurately, preferring to mislead readers into believing conservative proposals are intentionally designed to leave people of modest income with a history of cancer or diabetes (and presumably other serious preconditions) without medical insurance:

Insurance works best when large numbers of people share risk, so that modest premiums from a large number of healthy people cover the very high medical costs incurred, at any one time, by just a few. Enacting the conservative agenda would unravel such arrangements, shifting the burden of paying for care back from the healthy to the sick... Beat cancer? Have your diabetes under control? Well, no matter. The commercial insurance industry still wants nothing to do with you -- at least not at a price you can bear.

A day after leading with how a NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll put President Bush's approval at a low 37 percent (see this NewsBusters item), Thursday's NBC Nightly News again emphasized the negative for Bush and ignored how its own survey found public support for Bush policies which the media have derided, such as majority support for the NSA wiretapping program, the Patriot Act and making Bush's tax cuts permanent. From the White House, David Gregory asserted that "they're clearly shaken, as you might understand, politically, by the President's eroding support in the country." Gregory suggested that "at his lowest level yet in the polls, the President is left to wonder: Which way is up? Iraq, says Republican pollster Bill McInturff, has enveloped the Bush presidency." Ironically, Gregory relayed how "Republican leaders have said they're worried that the President's strengths, like tax cuts or tough anti-terror measures, have been overlooked." Indeed they have been by Gregory and NBC News. While Tim Russert on Wednesday night gave a sentence to how "voters still say they prefer Republicans to manage the war in Iraq and to deal with homeland security," like with the terrorist surveillance issue, neither NBC Nightly News nor Today have yet to mention how 56 percent "strongly" or "somewhat" support "making the tax cuts of the past few years permanent." (Transcript follows.)

Click here for instructions on running Gaggle daily on your own site. There's also an archive of previous toons available here.

Citing a Thursday column from Baghdad by David Ignatius of the Washington Post, Fred Barnes, during the panel segment on FNC's Special Report with Brit Hume, scolded the news media for delivering a “daily diet” of news about explosions while missing progress on the political front. Ignatius began his column: “There has been so much bad news out of Iraq lately that you have to pinch yourself when good things seem to be happening. But there are unmistakable signs here this week that Iraq's political leaders are taking the first tentative steps toward forming a broad government of national unity that could reverse the country's downward slide.” He concluded: “Pessimism isn't necessarily the right bet for Iraq.”

Barnes, Executive Editor of the Weekly Standard, observed, “Here's what struck me about it: David Ignatius reported about a lot of top level private meetings of Sunnis, Shia and Kurds of the number of meetings over, what, the last couple of weeks, I think. Where were the reporters? Why did David Ignatius, a columnist for the Washington Post, have to go over there and reveal that to us? I mean, the reporters ought to know about that. These are major figures politically in Iraq and we get nothing from them except word of explosions. From the other reporters -- that's the daily diet." (More from Barnes, and an excerpt from the Ignatius column, follow.)