TV Newser is collating the latest Katie Couric news:

In Tuesday's New York Times, Bill Carter writes: "Any such announcement" about Katie Couric's move "will not be accompanied by a news conference at CBS, however, several people close to Ms. Couric said. Some reports this week have suggested that CBS was reserving space at its news headquarters for a formal introduction of Ms. Couric. But her associates said they believe that there is no possibility that that will happen this week. The reason, they explained, is that Ms. Couric will remain at NBC News through May 31, the full duration of her contract, and would not consent to appear at a CBS event, out of deference to her NBC employers."

NBC and MSNBC have a penchant for gulling viewers into believing they are presenting balanced panels by pairing a partisan Democrat with Pat Buchanan. The sleight-of-hand recently reached an apex when the Today show mislabeled Buchanan a "Republican strategist." Buchanan - the fellow who quit the GOP in 1999 to run for president against W as the candidate of the Reform Party. See report with revealing screen shot here.

Any pretense that Buchanan is anything but a Bush administration critic often more in synch with the Democrats than the GOP was stripped away on this evening's Hardball, when a partisan Democrat let the cat out of the bag.

During The Chris Matthews Show, Joe Klein not only labelled certain Christian conservatives charlatans, as Noel Sheppard pointed out, but then he widely claimed that Christian conservatives didn't give a hoot about abortion and same-sex marriage. Here's what Klein claimed about half-way through the show:

"If you look at actual polls of Christian conservatives, abortion is way down there, homosexuality is practically non-existent but 75 to 85 percent say that the thing that concerns them the most is the impact of the culture on their children and they’re absolutely right."

Laura Ingraham of course pasted Klein for his charlatan comment but one wonders where in the world did Klein get these facts? He didn't say but our own Tim Graham guessed it came from following poll of questionable merit here.

Immigration has been the hot topic as of late and it was no different on Sunday’s edition of "Face the Nation" with Bob Schieffer. In the second segment of the program, Schieffer interviewed "New York Times" David Brooks. Schieffer introduced Brooks as a "proud conservative," and while Brooks may be conservative for "The New York Times"staff, to many conservatives he is reminiscent of John McCain in that he will be critical of conservatives to open doors to liberal media outlets.

Brooks railed against conservative Republicans who want a tough immigration bill accusing them of an unwillingness to "talk reasonably." To back up his point, Brooks points to comments apparently made by Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA):

David Brooks: "I was up at a press conference this week where a House Republican said, `You know, we've got to have some people to pick lettuce in this country, so we're not going to have immigrants. Let's make the prisoners do it.’ You want to hit the guy on the head with a baseball bat. We're going to take a largely minority population, forced labor, picking lettuce and cotton. Is this ringing any bells here?"

Is Hello Kitty the next Joe Camel? In the hands of Visa or MasterCard, it may well be, warns a Washington Post columnist.

The Washington Post's Michelle Singletary launched a broadside at the country's financial sector in her April 2 column "Credit Cards for Kids? Not in My House."

The Post finance columnist extracted a sinister motive for credit card companies marketing pre-paid debit cards for parents to issue their children in lieu of cash allowances or birthday presents. "They are not the same as gift cards because the intent is to emulate the credit-using experience," Singletary wrote.

But rather than seeing pre-paid debit cards as a money management tool, Singletary likened the "plastice devil" to gateway drugs.

A follow-up on Howard Kurtz's profile of Keith Olbermann: in his weekly "Media Notes" online chat at washingtonpost.com, Kurtz tries to declare that he has no opinion on the question of Olbermann's ideological bias:

Washington, D.C. : Can you tell me what is the upside in Keith Olbermann denying he has an agenda? I mean, you didn't buy that line. Who would?

Howard Kurtz: I'm agnostic. It is true that he was on every night in 1998 dealing with the Clinton scandal. And even most opinionated anchors don't want to be seen as aligned with one party or another (although Sean Hannity talks openly about raising money for Republican candidates). The true test will come the next time there's a Democratic president.

Even I'm surprised at this little exchange Barone reports he had:

I remember a conversation I had with a broadcast news executive many years ago.

"Doesn't the fact that 90 percent of your people are Democrats affect your work product?" I asked.

"Oh, no, no," he said. "Our people are professional. They have standards of objectivity and professionalism, so that their own views don't affect the news."

"So what you're saying," I said, "is that your work product would be identical if 90 percent of your people were Republicans."

He quickly replied, "No, then it would be biased."

I have been closely acquainted with newsroom cultures for more than 30 years, and I recognize the attitude. Only liberals can see the world clearly. Conservatives are prevented by their warped and ungenerous views from recognizing the world as it is.

Neela Banerjee’s Monday political memo, "The Abortion-Rights Side Invokes God, Too," certainly helps the pro-abortion lobby Planned Parenthood portray itself as just as religious as any pro-life organization.

"In any given week, if you walked into one of Washington's big corporate hotels early in the morning, you would find a community of the faithful, quite often conservative Christians, rallying the troops, offering solace and denouncing the opposition at a prayer breakfast.

"So you might be forgiven for thinking that such a group was in attendance on Friday in a ballroom of the Washington Hilton. People wearing clerical collars and small crucifixes were wedged at tables laden with muffins, bowing their heads in prayer. Seminarians were welcomed. Scripture was cited. But the name of the sponsor cast everything in a new light: the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. To its critics, Planned Parenthood is the godless super-merchant of abortion. To its supporters, it is the dependably secular defender of abortion rights. But at this breakfast, God was everywhere, easily invoked by believers of various stripes."

When a conservative book comes out, the author usually spends some time talking about the media. The NewsBusters Book Review will provide excerpts from these passages and/or interview authors to learn what they think of the media and explain what they wrote.

But today's is a liberal book, co-written by the founder of Daily Kos.

"Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of the People-Powered Politics" is about how liberals should use blogs to win electoral victories. Written by MyDD.com founder Jerome Armstrong and DailyKos.com founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the book says that political consultants charge too much and that campaigns and fundraising should be managed by blogs.

Although Daily Kos does not have much of a track record for electoral success, we are going to look at the book's media commentary.

It's surprising to learn that Ann Coulter admits conservatives now control the media and that Free Republic is a "web publication." It also should be news that "conservative talk radio stagnates" while Air America Radio flourishes.

After the 2004 election, liberals in blue Northeastern states talked secession and the possibility of joining Canada. Now Harpers Magazine is delving into innuendo with an article about the possibility of a coup d'etat on American soil.

Entitled "American Coup d'Etat: Military Thinkers Discuss the Unthinkable," military experts are asked about the plausibility of a coup carried out by the military. They all said a coup would not work because the American people could not be controlled merely by occupying Washington buildings.

But one wonders why Harpers is bringing up the issue in the first place. Underneath it is an article called "The Spirit of Disobedience: An Invitation to Resistance," which discusses the debate over whether America is a Christian nation or an Enlightenment nation.

This one wasn’t hard to predict: With the box office failure of newly released “erotic thriller” called “Basic Instinct 2,” Hollywood elites are blaming the slumping interest in such films on Conservatives and the recent return to Christian values rather than the poor quality of the movies. According to Reuters (hat tip to Drudge):

“Paul Verhoeven, director of the first ‘Basic Instinct’ (which scored $353 million worldwide) as well as the widely ridiculed ‘Showgirls’ (now regarded as something of a camp classic), attributes the genre's demise to the current American political climate.

"‘Anything that is erotic has been banned in the United States,’ said the Dutch native. ‘Look at the people at the top (of the government). We are living under a government that is constantly hammering out Christian values. And Christianity and sex have never been good friends.’"

Let me clue you in, Paul: People didn’t go to see “Showgirls” because it was a derivative piece of tripe with a bad script, bad acting, bad directing, and bad editing. Other than that, the film was absolutely fabulous. Regardless, another holier-than-though elitist that most readers have never heard of agreed with Verhoeven’s sentiments:

Robert Novak's column today focuses on NASA scientist James Hansen, and how the New York Times and CBS's "60 Minutes" have played up his charges of being "muzzled" -- as many political figures would love to be limited to speaking only in The New York Times and on "60 Minutes." For our purposes, the most interesting paragraph may be Novak's last one:

In concluding the Hansen segment on "60 Minutes," CBS correspondent Scott Pelley said: "For months, we've been trying to talk to the president's science adviser, but we were finally told he would never be available." White House communications director Nicolle Wallace told me: " '60 Minutes' never contacted the press office." Assuming that the network attempted to contact the science adviser and not the press office and that both statements are accurate, they resulted in a one-sided political presentation that ignored the real scientific debate.

Perhaps I was reading into things in light of the rampant speculation about Katie Couric's possibly imminent departure for the CBS Evening News anchor spot. But this veteran Today watcher sensed a distinct mood of nostalgia on the set this morning.

Katie Couric was back after a couple weeks vacation, and all the crew members went out of their way to remark on the reunion of the regular cast. Beyond that, there was something in the air as somber as Katie's black outfit, as if the cast sensed this might well be the last week they were together as a unit.

Lauer: "Haven't seen you for a couple of weeks. Good to have you back." The pair jokingly shook hands as if they were meeting for the first time.

Howard Kurtz profiled Keith Olbermann for his Monday "Media Notes" column in The Washington Post with the headline "A Gadfly With Buzz: MSNBC's Olbermann Exercising The Right." For his part, Keith showed his membership in the liberal media elite by beginning with the utterly fatuous claim of nonpartisanship: "The former sportscaster denies that he's pushing an ideological agenda, noting that he relentlessly covered the uproar over Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in his first incarnation as an MSNBC anchor in 1998."

Kurtz isn't buying, either: "Of course, he was so sickened by the spectacle that he quit, complaining about the media's role in the tawdry process, though he now gives every indication of enjoying his anti-Bush program." (There's also the on-air content that displays an agenda, such as...comparing Ken Starr to Himmler.)

Drudge reports that in the new book Laura Bush: An Intimate Portrait, the First Lady is no fan of the mainstream media.

After NEWSWEEK ran a Periscope item claiming the U.S. military had flushed a Koran down a toilet, leading to rioting, Laura ordered: "I don't want NEWSWEEK around the house!"

Laura Bush became so disgusted with the media and their war against her husband that at one point, she told her public relations person Noelia Rodriguez she did not want to do any more media interviews. After about a month, she slowly resumed talking to the press.

A close friend of Laura's, Pamela Nelson, asks Laura how she's doing. Laura replies, "Well, it's the Kitty Kelly book and Dan Rather this week..."

“Real Time” host Bill Maher ended his show on Friday night attacking Christianity (hat tip to Crooks and Liars with video link to follow). He began by suggesting that Christianity has “taken over all three branches of government, country music, public schools, [and] the best sellers list.” He then suggested that Christians are “part of a dress-up cult that hates sex and worships magic.”

He continued: “The Christian right are now the party of paranoia.” His solution: “If you’re going to be that paranoid all the time, just get high.”

Then, Maher really took the gloves off:

Chris Matthews welcomed conservative radio host Laura Ingraham – straight from her knockout victory over NBC’s David Gregory on the “Today” show a few weeks back – to his panel on the Sunday program bearing his name. Given how well Ingraham did against one liberal foe, NBC must have felt better about its chances with a panel of CBS’s Gloria Borger, TIME magazine’s Joe Klein, and the New Republic’s Andrew Sullivan. Unfortunately for NBC’s producers, they were wrong (partial video link to follow).

The conversation began with illegal immigration. After an introduction, with salient points made by Klein, Ingraham, and Sullivan, one could sense the coming imbroglio when Sullivan implied that the whole problem was caused by Republicans. Matthews asked: “Why is there such fear on the side of the people who really want action on illegal immigration?” Sullivan rather ineptly responded: “Because part of the real base, the Republican base, regard any attempt to integrate these 11 million illegals into a guest worker program or anything else as amnesty and therefore they go off the minute you even mention it, and that is Bush's problem.” Rather facile, don’t you think Andrew?

Borger entered the discussion: “I think Americans don’t want to reward people who break the law. But I think more and more Americans understand assimilation is part of what we are.”

Ingraham struck back: