Somebody better break it to the New York Times: they might still be the paper of record in their own minds, but to the rest of the world they're just one more dead-tree joint struggling for attention.

The Old Grey Lady's unjustified conceit was on display during this afternoon's Hardball, when one of its columnists was aghast that Chris Matthews had had the audacity not to have read her oeuvre.

Deborah Solomon, who has a weekly column in the NYT Sunday magazine, had interviewed the Rev. John Hagee, a minister who has endorsed McCain and has made a number of controversial statements. I'd mention in passing that while Hagee's critics have accused him of anti-Semitism, he has in fact received numerous awards from Jewish groups for his steadfast support of Israel.

The week after it took the NBC Nightly News until the fourth day of coverage to inform viewers that disgraced then-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer is a Democrat, Friday's NBC Nightly News ran a full story on the scandalous behavior surrounding Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, but never identified his political party. Naturally, given the lack of a party identification by the mainstream media journalists, he's a Democrat. Anchor Brian Williams set up the story:

The city of Detroit is in a crisis over government and leadership. The current Mayor is just the latest Detroit Mayor elected on a promise to clean up and revitalize the city. Now he's been caught in a sex scandal, a trail of electronic messages reportedly provides the evidence, it threatens his career and then some.

Reporter Kevin Tibbles, also sans any mention of a party affiliation, outlined:

The Detroit city council votes overwhelmingly to ask the Mayor to resign. 37-year-old Kwame Kilpatrick, in his second term of the Mayor of the Motor City, is mired in financial, political, and personal scandal, but refuses to budge.

Update: I wonder how the media will spin Obama's church claiming that the "White Church is the Anti-Christ?"

On Anderson Cooper’s CNN blog, Roland Martin spins out of control in an effort to help sweep up the mess left from pastorgate. He claims that Rev. Wright was only quoting Edward Peck, former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and deputy director of President Reagan’s terrorism task force. He is particularly claiming that the controversial sermon that includes the quote, “chickens have come home to roost” was a quote from Peck. He goes on to provide what I guess is supposed to be the quote in question. However, if you watch the start of this video, Wright reveals exactly who the quote comes from....Malcom X!

Imagine for a moment Tim Russert, George Stephanopoulos, or Bob Schieffer being interviewed on their respective network's morning show, and scolding the co-hosts for excessive George Bush or John McCain bashing.

Wouldn't happen in a million years, right?

Well, Fox News's Chris Wallace was the guest of "Fox & Friends" Friday morning, and before allowing any of the co-hosts to ask him a question, he actually admonished them for spending too much time in the first two hours of the show on Barack Obama's "typical white person" remark (h/t Politico):

Pres. Bill Clinton interacts with Rev. Jeremiah Wright at a White House prayer breakfast in 1998 at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

A common complaint of most media watchers is that investigative journalism, despite the tools available in today's Internet Era, has become a lost art.

Take for example the media's fawning over Barack Obama's speech on Tuesday, with many of the usual suspects calling it "extraordinary," "worthy of Abraham Lincoln," "the best speech ever given on race in this country," and a "definining cultural moment in America."

In the midst of all this sycophantic praise, mightn't someone have uncovered a speech given sixteen years ago by one of Obama's key supporters that expressed similar concerns about how affirmative action stokes resentment in the white community?

If media would have taken the time, they would have found that Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) actually spoke about this issue in far greater detail during a rather controversial address given at Yale University on March 30, 1992. As reported the following day by the Boston Globe (subscription required, emphasis added):

Roger Cohen's column for the New York Times's international edition, "Beyond America's Original Sin," is the 1# read Times story at nytimes.com as of Friday morning, and it's no wonder -- Cohen basically endorses Barack Obama (not in so many words, as that would be a violation of finicky Times's regulations against columnists endorsing candidates).

The column itself is, frankly, embarrassing -- part Cohen apology for being born in apartheid South Africa, mostly Obama hagiography over his recent race speech that even appropriates the "Yes We Can" call-and-response slogan beloved of his more fervent supporters.

It takes bravery, and perhaps an unusual black-white vantage point, to navigate these places where hurt is profound, incomprehension the rule, just as it takes courage to say, as Obama did, that black "anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races."

We're getting this one started early for those of you (like me!!!) that have the day off. Other than Duke-Belmont yesterday, I found it a boring start compared to years past. Anybody agree?

On the other hand, in the past few years, many of the best upsets occurred on the first Friday. So, maybe today will be better (full brackets after the jump):

When is a terrorist simply an aged "radical" to the Los Angeles Times? When the terrorist is Kathleen Soliah, who in her glory days was a "fetching high school pep-squad member turned fugitive." Soliah was a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a group that plotted to blow up Los Angeles Police Department cruisers in the 1970s.

Here's how Times staff writer Joel Rubin opened his March 21 story on Soliah's recent release from prison:

Kathleen Soliah, a former member of the radical Symbionese Liberation Army, was released on parole this week from a California women's prison after serving about six years behind bars for her role in a plot to kill Los Angeles police officers by blowing up their patrol cars.

The white-haired convict, who has changed her name to Sara Jane Olson, had been sentenced to 12 years in prison. Like most California inmates, Soliah earned credit against her sentence for working while in prison. She served on a maintenance crew that swept and cleaned the main yard of the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, prison officials said.

This is really taking their quest to find stories that makes victims out of members of the U.S. military to the farthest degree! The Minneapolis Star-Tribune is apparently now resorting to advertising to dredge up women in the military "whose marriage is ending" for a story they want to write. There is really only one reason they'd want such examples and that is so that they can show that the military is hard on women so as to show the military in a bad light.

Catch this Jerry Springer-like form of modern "journalism":

Reader inquiry: Are you a woman in the military whose marriage has ended?

Are you a woman in the military whose marriage has ended?

We'd like to talk to you for a possible story.

Freshly squeezed into his Political Punch blog this morning, ABC's Jake Tapper (pictured in NB file photo at right) calls the Clinton camp for denying that they are milking the Obama/Wright controversy when, in fact, they are:

Seriously, how can the Clinton campaign with a straight face claim it in no way is pushing the Rev. Wright story?

(Answer: practice.)

Former Ambassador Joe Wilson, who appeared with Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, Tuesday in Philly writes in the Huffington Post of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, that "Claims of superior intuitive judgment by his campaign and by him are self-evidently disingenuous, especially in light of disclosures about his long associations with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Tony Rezko."

For more, click here.

Thursday evening, the New York Times' Kate Phillips published at that paper's Caucus Blog a 1998 picture of President Bill Clinton shaking Rev. Jeremiah Wright's hand (right, courtesy of NYT).

In her posting, Phillips said the photograph was provided to her by the Obama campaign.

Given all the controversy surrounding this hateful pastor, and how it has negatively impacted the junior senator from Illinois' standings in the polls, a number of questions are raised:

Are liberal Democrats less likely to have social lives than conservatives?

According to Karl Rove, the answer to that question is yes. The Republican guru all but made that argument explaining why he thought liberals are more likely to be on the web than conservatives.

"I hate to sound sort of diffident about it but it strikes me that a lot of people on the right have got active lives and are doing other things," Rove said. "The idea of spending a lot of time on the internet and taking their talents and displaying them there is not something [conservatives] really do."

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: a new poll finds that one in five Democrats will vote for McCain if their candidate doesn't win the nomination (paragraph break eliminated):

As Democratic Senators Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Clinton of New York slug it out for the nomination, many of their supporters -- at least in Pennsylvania, site of the next major primary -- aren't committed to the party's ticket in November, according to a Franklin & Marshall College Poll. Among Obama supporters, 20 percent said they would vote for Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the Republican nominee, if Clinton beats their candidate for the nomination. Among Clinton supporters, 19 percent said they would support McCain in November if Obama is the Democratic nominee. (See poll)

Do you think this will play out in the general election, or will the anger dissipate by November? Is this a national phenomenon, or endemic to Pennsylvania? How much of an impact do you think this will have 7 1/2 months from now?

It wasn't quite a "thrill up up my leg" moment, but Chris Matthews clearly hasn't gotten over his love affair with the candidacy of Barack Obama. It was a discussion of NM Gov. Bill Richardson's endorsement of Obama on today's Morning Joe that inspired an outpouring of emotion in which among other things Matthews acknowledged Obama "gets to me."

CHRIS MATTHEWS: I think [Richardson's] a gutsy guy, his own man, and I think it's a powerful endorsement. It certainly would have been powerful if it had gone the other way to Senator Clinton. I think it'll be a prized endorsement for Senator Obama, especially coming from a, he also comes from an interesting background. He always says, he says, you know, I've got a, what does he say? I've got an English name, I've got a Mexican mother, and I look like an Indian. I mean, he's, he's always had an interesting --

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: That's fabulous.

I cant beleive what I'm hearning this morning. First Chris Mathews labels all "northern whites" as racists. After that I turned on Fox and heard Chris Wallace say pretty much the same thing. What the hell is going on here?

Barack Obama’s interview with Anderson Cooper on Wednesday night's "Anderson Cooper 360" on CNN was quite gentle. While Cooper did press Obama to address some of the criticisms that have erupted over his pastor Jeremiah Wright, he did not press him about Wright’s criticism of white people, or his claims of the government giving blacks AIDS, only one (truncated) 9/11 passage. Cooper used ten-foot-pole language about those people who would be alarmed by Wright’s America-bashing remarks: "Patriotism is going to be used by whoever it is you are facing." Used? Have you ever noticed how the media never asks if America is being "used" by leaders who spit on America?

Obama was spinning furiously.

I never heard anything nasty about America.

COOPER: In the past, you said you didn't think that your church was particularly controversial. Yesterday, in the speech, you said that -- you admitted that you did hear in the church remarks that could be considered controversial. Do you know specifically? Do you remember what you heard?

We have now officially passed a milestone: fifty episodes of "NewsBusted." Thanks to everyone for watching, spreading the word, and helping us take the truth about media bias to a larger audience!

Topics in today's episode: Thirteen percent of Americans incorrectly think Barack Obama is a Muslim, should harming the environment be a sin? A study claims 1-in-4 teenage girls has an STD, and new TV shows from the AARP?