During a live interview on Friday's American Morning, Fred Thompson lived up to his reputation as the GOP presidential candidate most willing to challenge the media, as the former Senator complained to CNN anchor John Roberts that the show used a clip of him joking about Fed Chair Ben Bernanke to make it appear Thompson was not interested in a stimulus package for the economy. Thompson: "You sit there and you take an hour's worth of tape, of course, and we have a little fun every once in a while, and sometimes you guys pick that out and have a little fun with it yourself..." When Roberts suggested he was being "dismissive" of a stimulus package, Thompson continued: "You know better than that. ... From time to time, things come up, and I poke fun at it... And you guys pick it out, you know, and leave it lying out there. We proceeded to talk about the economy and talk about a stimulus package, which I've been talking about for two or three days, but if this is your highlight event, it's your highlight event." (Transcript follows)

MSNBC’s Live With Dan Abrams may not be a house on fire ratings-wise (Hannity & Colmes almost quadrupled it last night among all viewers, and it has about half of Larry King’s audience), but they’re still flailing away against the Fox News Channel after Keith Olbermann’s retired for the night. On Thursday night, MSNBC reporter David Shuster accused Mitt Romney of "insanity" and spewed at Fox News star Bill O’Reilly as a "buffoon and a jerk" within about one minute. The topic was AP reporter Glen Johnson angrily accusing Mitt Romney of lying, and Abrams showed footage of Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom telling Johnson to be a professional and don’t be argumentative with the candidate. Shuster erupted in outrage:

After a disagreement on Morning Joe of January 18, 2008, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and David Shuster "hug it out."

CNBC "Street Sweetie" Erin Burnett revealed what some might have suspected about "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer all along.

"[H]e's crazy - certifiably," Burnett said on the January 18 "Late Night with Conan O'Brien."

Of course, Cramer is a regular on NBC's "Today" and "Nightly News" as an expert on the economy. On December 19, Cramer appeared on "Today" and was very critical of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke for not cutting interest rates more than a quarter point. In another "Today" appearance on January 17, he declared the economy was in a recession, a 180-degree change from his comments earlier in the month when he declared "sunny skies" were ahead for the economy.

While the news media have focused like a laser beam on what Hillary Clinton said on the Tyra Banks show Friday, MRC's Michelle Humphrey and Kristine Lawrence each suffered through pieces of the interview to find the other angle: How soft and silly was Tyra Banks? Plenty. The show opened with the supermodel bowing deeply and gratefully to Hillary for appearing:

I am so honored that you are here. I am so -- aren't we like happy? (Cheers and applause)... This is a glorious moment, and I gotta tell you, I was intimidated at first, and I was intimidated because I feel like you are this -- there's an image of perfection, a polished diamond and I was like, oh, my gosh, what am I gonna say? And then I started doing all this research, and I started reading your book and just really digging into articles and I found such an honesty, vulnerability that I didn't know was there and I don't think a lot of people know is inside of you.

A few minutes later, Banks pulled out the "tough" questions:

TYRA: What about you? Do you ever get lonely, sit in a room by yourself and just feel lonely?

ABC reporter Kate Snow continued her long history of delivering generous Clinton spin during a segment on Friday's "Good Morning America." The GMA correspondent followed Chelsea Clinton as the former first daughter campaigned for her mother, repeating talking points along the way. Snow announced, "To be honest, [Chelsea] doesn't like cameras much. She let us tag along, but takes no questions." Later Snow repeated, "She doesn't want to be in the spotlight." The ABC reporter, who often covers the Clintons, didn't ask the obvious question: If Chelsea doesn't like the spotlight or cameras, why, exactly, did she allow ABC to follow her around with a camera crew?

GMA did balance the piece on the Clinton daughter with a sympathetic take on Mike Huckabee's wife, Janet. (At one point, reporter Claire Shipman asked about Mike Hucakbee's "legendary guitar playing.") However, Snow has developed a pattern of vigorously lauding the actions of various Clintons. On January 7th of 2008, she praised Hillary Clinton for seemingly ordinary actions. "No subject is too small. No issue too dense," Snow raved.

Yesterday Newsbuster writer Seton Motley wrote a couple of articles about the blatant liberal bias that stinks up syndicated feeds and news reports coming out of the Associated Press.

As a testimony to the truthfulness of Motley's articles I perused the headlines from the rapidly changing AP RSS feed of their top political news and found that the tone of the teasers were less than ingratiating toward Republicans. The feeds at the time of this writing were full of adjectival editorializing that had a tendency to associate Republicans with negative phrases and words that connote a scrambling uphill path to victory. Where the Democratic race was being characterized as "tight" the Republican race was being characterized as "chaotic" and "uncertain".

They May Have It Backwards

According to ABC News, it is Mitt.

Riled! Angry Romney Rips Reporter
Sparks fly as Mitt Romney tells reporters lobbyists aren't running his campaign.

According to anyone else who has watched the video, theirs is a difficult assessment with which to agree.

As we stated when we posted the video last night (video below as well), the Associated Press' Glen Johnson angily interrupts Romney on the podium mid-sentence, already visibly flustered, and only proceeds to become more so as he tries to drive home the semantic difference between a campaign "run"ner and a campaign "adviser".

One of the American mainstream media's favorite John McCain memes is that South Carolina voters rejected the Arizona Republican in 2000 because of a baseless smear campaign about McCain's personal life. That bias is so infectious it's now a global pandemic, just witness this item from the January 18 edition of the London-based Financial Times:

McCain hopes to avoid repeat of 2000

For John McCain, victory in tomorrow's Republican primary in South Carolina would exorcise the ghosts of the bitterest moment in his political career.

It was in South Carolina in 2000 that his first presidential campaign crumbled after a vicious smear campaign by supporters of his opponent, George W. Bush.

A barrage of misinformation was spread through phone calls and leaflets, including claims the Arizona senator had fathered an illegitimate black child and that his wife was a drug addict.

The smears reinforced doubts about Mr McCain among social conservatives and helped deliver Mr Bush a victory that set him on course for the Republican nomination.

The problem, of course is that the smear tactics were not only never proven to be linked to the Bush campaign, they are taken on face value as THE driving factor rather than conservative distaste for the more liberal stances of John McCain when set in contrast to then-Gov. Bush.

For example, McCain ran, to be charitable, gun-shy on income tax cuts compared to then-Gov. Bush's tax cut plans. What's more, McCain actually pushed some tax hikes and demagogic rhetoric about a major industry in South Carolina centered on the state's most profitable cash crop, tobacco.

Take this Nexis transcript excerpt from Linda Douglass's report on the Feb. 3, 2000 edition of ABC's "World News Tonight" (emphasis mine):

Washington Post reporter Peter Baker penned a story on Bill Clinton for Friday’s front page. The Post website summarized: "Former president promotes wife’s candidacy while trying to set the record straight on his own tenure." Set the record straight? That’s what Baker wrote in his article: "As Clinton travels the country campaigning for his wife with characteristic intensity, he is fighting not only to promote Hillary Rodham Clinton’s candidacy but also set the record straight on the two terms he spent in the White House." Does Clinton have the credibility to "set the record straight" when he has a long record of public lying, even lying in court?

Baker’s front-pager promoted Clinton’s long-standing pique with independent counsel Ken Starr:

"Ken Starr spent $70 million and indicted innocent people to find out that I wouldn't take a nickel to see the cow jump over the moon," he told the students last week, his eyes narrowing and his finger jabbing the air.

Class warfare seeped into the January 18 edition of "Today." Upon interviewing Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on the Bush administration’s proposed economic stimulus package and rebates, Matt Lauer pitched the liberal "tax cuts for the rich" line inquiring "you're not going to give rebates to the rich here, correct?"Secretary Paulson declined to answer the question saying he does not "want to get ahead of the president."

Just as he did yesterday, Matt Lauer asked again if the media’s gloomy economic news is a "self fulfilling prophecy."

"Do you ever worry that the media, we get the ‘r’ word on our lips, recession and we chant it and that eventually it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, the consumers of TV and the media hear it and they are also consumers of the economy and they spend themselves into a recession or don't spend themselves?"

Unlike the sensitive folks over at Media Matters, we NewsBusters are a relatively thick-skinned lot. And no one's ever confused me with Gloria Steinem. So we're not going to overreact to Willie Geist's comment this morning and demand a Matthewsesque mea culpa.

However . . . Willie did manage to diss the intelligence of his compatriots on today's Morning Joe. A Friday show tradition is for Geist and MSNBC celebrity correspondent Courtney Hazlett [a personal fave in the genre for her intelligent perspective] to predict which movie will score best at the box office during the coming weekend. When Hazlett tapped Cloverfield, an action-horror flick in which things go horribly wrong for Manhattan, Geist reacted with, well, horror.

View video here.

Former Navy SEAL Steve Robinson has been tracking down and exposing people falsely claiming to be real Navy SEALS or Green Berets, etc., for quite some time now. He says that people making false claims that they are members of America's elite forces are on the rise since 9/11. With the assistance of video producer John Carey, Mr. Robinson has created a little video about his efforts in which a NewsBusters story is featured prominently.

You'll recall that NewsBusters helped expose the false claims of Robert Levy, Mayor of Atlantic City, New Jersey. Levy had claimed that he was a Green Beret in Vietnam in his campaign literature apparently for several years. On Oct. 6th of 2007, we highlighted Levy's false claims in our posting titled "Atlantic City Mayor, Phony Green Beret, Under Investigation... but a Democrat?"

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: Bill Clinton regularly losing his temper...

After weeks of complaining publicly about Barack Obama’s record, the news media’s coverage of the Democratic presidential race, or both, Mr. Clinton on Wednesday ripped into a television reporter who had asked him about a Nevada lawsuit concerning participation in the state’s caucuses this Saturday. Mr. Clinton believed the question had seemed sympathetic to Mr. Obama’s stakes in the suit, Clinton campaign officials said.

The former president continually seems tense and agitated. Is this an indication of how Hillary's campaign is going, or something more to do with Bill himself?

It's Friday which means another episode of our comedy webcast "NewsBusted!" Topics in this show include rumors of Mike Bloomberg entering the presidential race, insane allegations about Halliburton assassinating Barack Obama, and Hannah Montana's body double.

If you're a Myspace user, feel free to click over to our new MySpace page and add us as a friend. You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel where you can leave comments about the show and help us reach out to a brand-new audience.

Bill and Hillary might be taking flak for the vote-suppressing lawsuit their supporters brought in Nevada, but the couple can count on at least one supporter in the MSM: David Shuster.

On today's Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough and MSNBC's David Shuster got into an extended argument over Mitt Romney's testy exchange with a reporter over the candidate's claim that Washington lobbyists were not running his campaign [in contrast with McCain's]. But while that dust-up between Scarborough and Shuster had its moments, a couple Shuster comments during the briefer Nevada-caucus discussion were, IMHO, more telling.

View video here, which includes both the MSNBC pair's discussion and footage of Bill Clinton's angry reaction to a reporter who had the temerity to question him about the lawsuit.