"My dog ate our ratings."

Okay, that wasn't the one of the lame excuses that CNN president Jon Klein came up with to explain away that network's drastic plunge in the ratings but the ones he did dream up were equally hilarious. Try this one on for size...their low ratings can be explained away because they don't run cartoons during slow periods. The CNN hilarious excuse entertainment was provided courtesy of this Matea Gold Los Angeles Times story which first listed the ratings woes facing that network:

...the network has lost much of the gains it made during the political boom time. CNN has drawn an average of 932,000 viewers in prime time this year, down 25% compared with the same point last year, according to Nielsen.

The trend has worsened as the year has progressed. In October, it recorded its smallest audience of the year, barely edging out its sister network HLN to avoid placing fourth in the key 25- to 54-year-old demographic in prime time. (Among total viewers, CNN still beat MSNBC across all programming, but placed a distant second to Fox News.)

...CNN is even feeling the slump on nights when it is expected to dominate. On Tuesday, it placed fourth with its election coverage, attracting just 826,000 viewers in prime time. Fox News had more than 4 million, while MSNBC drew 974,000 and HLN (which didn't cover the election) had 842,000.

Check out the headline from on the front page of the hard-copy New York City edition of today's New York Times:

The article reports that Nidal Malik Hasan began feeling disgruntled with the Army as far back as 2004.

Let's see, there are 525,948 minutes in a year. If Hasan's been feeling "tension" for about five years, that makes about 2,629,740 tension-filled minutes.  And during that entire period, he only engaged in a homicidal rampage for seven minutes.  I mean, come on, he was only a murderer for some tiny, tiny fraction of 1% of the time!  

"Sesame Street" producers are getting criticized for a parody that suggested Fox News was "trashy," and the ombudsman for PBS says that the criticism is justified.

Foxnews.com reported that in a two-year old episode that was rebroadcast on October 29, Oscar the Grouch starts the Grouch News Network, or GNN. The skit later featured CNN’s Anderson Cooper filling in for Oscar as he chats with "Walter Cranky" and "Dan Rather-Not."

But when another green grouch Muppet caller decides that the news is not grouchy enough, she says she is changing the channel to Pox News. "I am changing the channel," the irate muppet says. "From now on, I am watching Pox News. Now there is a trashy news show."

PBS ombudsman Michael Getler, like many viewers, thought he heard "Fox" instead of "Pox," but regardless, he suggested it wasn’t classy to suggest Fox was "trashy" in front of the little ones:

The Republicans may have won huge victories in New Jersey and Virginia on Tuesday, but Time's Joe Klein still thinks the GOP is "an extremist shard of a party that is essentially a regional southern party in the country."

I guess the 66 and 60 percent of independents who voted for the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Virginia and New Jersey respectively on Tuesday are also part of this extremist regional southern party.

Alas, such facts didn't enter into the discussion on Sunday's "Reliable Sources" when Klein showed how one's political biases can easily trump logic (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript, relevant section at 4:18, file photo):

Several weeks ago, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann used the bizarre – and arguably disturbing – term "big mashed-up bag of meat with lip stick on it" to refer to Michelle Malkin as he slammed the conservative blogger, leaving some wondering where his idea for such a crude term came from. This question remains unanswered, but, notably, on Sunday’s Football Night in America on NBC, as he recited plays between the Houston Texans and the Indianapolis Colts, Olbermann used a similar term to refer to Kris Brown of the Houston Texans after he failed to score, calling Brown "a big bag full of mashed-up Kris Brown," as he was lying on the ground. (Hat tip to Clint Bradford for emailing in the tip.)

It was on the Tuesday, October 13, Countdown show on MSNBC that Olbermann compared Malkin to a "big mashed-up bag of meat with lip stick on it" during the show's "Worst Person in the World" segment.

Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the November 8 Football Night in America pregame:

The latest Pew poll found people see Fox News as conservative, but Time media writer James Poniewozik noted large numbers also thought the major networks were liberal. That must mean it’s time to assert the media has a "moderate bias." This is defined, as liberals usual define it, as pretending conservative idiocy isn’t idiocy:

As anyone following health reform knows, centrism is a political position too. And you see moderate bias — i.e., a preference for centrism — whenever a news outlet assumes that the truth must be "somewhere in the middle." You see it whenever an organization decides that "balance" requires equal weight for an opposing position, however specious: "Some, however, believe global warming is a myth." (Moderate bias would also require me to find a countervailing liberal position and pretend that it is equivalent to global-warming denial. Sorry.)

Last month liberal media members armed with false allegations of racism went into a full-court press to prevent Rush Limbaugh from becoming an owner of the St. Louis Rams.

On Tuesday, the owner of basketball's Los Angeles Clippers settled a multi-million dollar discrimination lawsuit wherein it was alleged that he had for years tried to keep blacks and hispanics out of his apartment buildings.

This is actually the second such suit Donald Sterling has settled in the past four years.

Despite this, America's television news media, which had a field day going after Limbaugh last month, completely ignored the story.

Bucking the trend was sports columnist Dan Wetzel (h/t Shekhar Jain):

On Saturday’s Huckabee show on FNC, host Mike Huckabee interviewed the former executive director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Bryan Texas, Abby Johnson, who became a pro-life activist after witnessing an ultrasound of an abortion while she assisted in a procedure. She charged that the abortion provider tries to "increase the number of abortions they do" for the purpose of making money, and described the emotional experience of watching an unborn baby at 13 weeks pregnancy "trying to get away" as its life was being ended. Video of the interview can be found here.

Johnson: "I saw the probe going into the woman's uterus. And at that moment, I saw the baby moving and trying to get away from the probe. ... And I thought, 'It's fighting for its life.' And I thought, 'It's life, I mean, it's alive.'"

She soon continued:

"The glow from a health care triumph faded quickly for President Barack Obama on Sunday as Democrats realized the bill they fought so hard to pass in the House has nowhere to go in the Senate."

That's not a quote from National Review, the Weekly Standard, NewsMax, or World Net Daily.

Such was the opening paragraph of a truly surprising Associated Press article published moments ago:

With the unemployment rate soaring in 10.2 percent in Friday's report on October, two old hands in the Washington press corps appeared on Sunday morning shows where they asserted that means we need another stimulus bill and/or the problem is the current “stimulus” bill wasn't big enough. On This Week, ABC News vet Sam Donaldson maintained “we're going to have to have more stimulus, more spending.”

Over on NBC's Meet the Press, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, a former Washington correspondent for the New York Times before covering politics for the Post, complained: “The problem is the stimulus was too small, and they compromised it down and so you had less effect. I mean, the fact is these numbers would be a lot worse without the stimulus.”

Donaldson contended:

"Special Report" host Bret Baier thinks Tuesday's election results changed the White House's view of the Fox News Channel.

He further believes that Obama senior adviser David Axelrod's interview with Fox's Major Garrett Wednesday was a sign "they’re gonna start playing ball on the news side."

During his Thursday chat with WOR radio's Steve Malzberg, Baier also agreed that Fox's ratings domination on election night had to be an eye opener for the folks at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (15-minute audio available here, relevant section at 8:50):

"If the Republican Party follows the course of Palin and Beck and Company it's doomed."

So said Sam Donaldson on ABC's "This Week" Sunday.

His evidence?

Democrat Bill Owens victory Tuesday in the 23rd Congressional district of New York.

Readers are strongly advised to stow all fluids, combustibles, and sharp objects for the ignorance on display here might produce uncontrollable fits of anger (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript):

Very often criticism of journalists is actually criticism of journalism. Effective investigative reporting entails asking the tough questions and demanding answers.   Powerful Democrats, including White House officials, have derided Fox News for this reason. But even conservative bloggers are not immune to the "extension of the opposition" charge for simply asking the tough questions.

Late last month Congressman Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D., held a conference call on the administration's reform efforts. Pomeroy reiterated his support for the House health care bill. Rob Port, of the center-right blog SayAnythingBlog.com, asked a question during the Q and A period, in which he displayed open skepticism that the "public option" would increase consumer choice in the health care market (audio and transcript below the fold).

Noting tomorrow’s 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Sunday’s Today show, former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw claimed East Germans were “still adjusting to the harsh economic realities” of life after communism. But a recent poll of former East bloc countries by the Pew Research Center actually discovered that the people of what was East Germany are actually the biggest enthusiasts of the shift to capitalism, with 82% approving, higher than any other ex-communist country.

Brokaw did note, however, that the current “center-right” Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, was “born and raised in East Germany,” implicitly acknowledging that her youth spent under communism obviously did not make her a fan of leftist economic policies.

The suggestion that capitalism is somehow “harsh” compared to communism echoes what many liberal journalists argued after the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago. “The transition from communism to capitalism is making more people more miserable every day,” CBS reporter Bert Quint argued in 1990.

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele accidentally referred to House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) as "Speaker Boehner" during Sunday's "This Week," and host George Stephanopoulos surprisingly didn't disagree.

Quite the contrary, he found this so compelling he gave great attention to it at ABC News's website:

Republican Chairman Michael Steele had a Freudian slip this morning on 'This Week' when he referred to Minority Leader John Boehner as "Speaker Boehner."...And Steele stuck by his slip: predicting a Speaker Boehner if Dems continue to push health care.

During the broadcast, Stephanopoulos not only didn't disagree with Steele, but instead used exit poll numbers from Tuesday's elections to show just how much trouble Democrats might be in 2010 (videos embedded below the fold with partial transcript, file photo):  

On Tuesday's The O'Reilly Factor on FNC, former ABC News anchor John Stossel -- now with Fox Business -- came aboard to discuss the New York Times's recent attack on him for speaking in front of the conservative/libertarian group Americans for Prosperity. After charging that the Times never showed interest in his speeches to conservative groups before he joined Fox Business, the former 20/20 host also relayed that during his early days as a consumer reporter, he received a number of Emmy Awards because "they loved me" for his left-leaning work. But after, in Stossel's words, "I got smarter," turning more pro-business and anti-regulation, the Emmy Awards were no longer forthcoming.

Stossel even recounted an incident in which a person he met on the street expressed a desire that he "die soon" for his conservative views.

After starting the interview by asking Stossel about Web sites that engage in gambling based on election predictions, O'Reilly brought up the Times's newfound interest in the former ABC anchor. Stossel pointed out the double standard: "I make speeches. I make about 25 a year. I've done that for years. And suddenly, now that I'm at Fox, critics are leaping to attack me, according to the New York Times."

The White House might want to rethink its position on Fox not being a real news network after what happened during Saturday's historic debate and vote on healthcare reform.

Consider that as far as cable is concerned, with the exception of C-SPAN, only Fox aired House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's speech live as it was happening.

You're not going to believe what CNN and MSNBC thought was more important according to TVNewser:

What are today's big NFL games and big upsets? Anything else you want to talk about related to sports?

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: PelosiCare passes by surprisingly narrow margin.

How many people watched much of the debate and vote Saturday? Regardless of the results, did you enjoy it? How do you think this sets up the Senate? Will this narrow margin make it very difficult for Reid to get 60 voters? What's up with the lone Republican Cao from Louisiana breaking ranks?

Finally, and maybe most importantly, do you think Stupak's abortion amendment impacted the final result actually allowing some moderate Democrats to vote for the bill? Or do you think this is a lot of hooey either because an equal or greater number of liberal Democrats especially women might have voted "Nay" because of that amendment passing or that Pelosi was going to get this passed no matter what she had to do?

Any other post mortems?

"Saturday Night Live" in its recent installment took shots at the Fox News Channel for what it saw as an amazingly one-sided, anti-Obama take on Tuesday's election results.

The skit began with an off-screen announcer declaring, "You're watching Fox News, continuous coverage of the 2009 election -- end of an era."

On screen at that moment was a picture of President Obama above a graphic which read, "End Of An Era."

Actress Kristin Wiig, doing a marvelous impersonation of Greta Van Susteren, then hosted a discussion on the election results which included one-sided opinions from actors impersonating Glenn Beck, Brit Hume, Karl Rove, Shepard Smith, Joe Trippi, and Juan Williams.

The group was ecstatic over what happened in New Jersey and Virginia, but chose not to discuss Democrat Bill Owens victory in New York's 23rd Congressional district (video embedded below the fold h/t Story Balloon):