CNN daytime anchor Don Lemon appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources on Sunday to come strongly to the defense of Michael Jackson, whom he saluted twice as an "accidental civil rights leader." Lemon charged that anyone who thinks the Jackson story is overdone is "elitist," and when Kurtz suggested the "civil rights leader" might have been a child molester, Lemon quickly asserted that it was never proven in court and "if you talk to people who were involved in those cases, they don't believe that he did it."

Kurtz invited in Lemon, former Washington Post and New York Times entertainment reporter Sharon Waxman, and Baltimore Sun TV critic David Zurawik. All three thought the Jackson story was not overcovered. (Kurtz claimed on Twitter it was "hard to find a critic" of the overkill on the holiday weekend.)

Lemon suggested there wasn’t much criticism of the overcoverage of Princess Diana’s death (what country was he living in back then?), implying maybe because she was white:

HOWARD KURTZ: Don't you feel deep down that this is overdoing it?

Robert Kaiser, an associate editor of The Washington Post, and a former managing editor (second banana) from 1991 to 1998, bubbled over with praise in a Sunday book review for ultraliberal Rep. Henry Waxman. The headline was "Moustache of Justice."

Kaiser compared Waxman to baseball star Ted Williams and biblical hero King David, and offered his heartfelt "gratitude to the voters of Beverly Hills and nearby areas who keep returning this ornery fellow to the House to challenge entrenched special interests."

The book’s title is simply The Waxman Report, authored by Waxman and Joshua Green (the reporter who exposed Bill Bennett’s gambling habit). Kaiser began with a flourish:

Here’s the funny way the Washington Post celebrates the Fourth of July: it hands over the front of the Style section for a book review by Susan Jacoby, the leftist who hosts their website’s discussion group called "The Secularist’s Corner." In reviewing a book by liberal professor Woden Teachout on the uses of our flag, Jacoby instructs that patriotism is divided into two categories:

Teachout uses competing claims to the flag to trace the complicated relationship between American ideals of humanitarian patriotism, rooted in Enlightenment values of individual liberty and political equality, and nationalist patriotism, based on loyalty to a nation-state and emphasis on national security.

But don’t worry: Teachout believes that Barack Obama excels at both halves. But first, Jacoby must protest those dullards who put the words "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance:

On his Midday Open Thread Thursday, Daily Kos chief Markos Moulitsas found it very easy to associate the Republican Party ethos with spoiled tots:

I remember writing this about my son:

Right now, he's a Republican.
What's his is his, and he won't share.
What's mine is his, because he "wants it".
And if he gets angry and frustrated,
He hits people, preemptively!

He's now five and has evolved somewhat past this, developing a nice sense of empathy. But my 2-year-old daughter is VERY MUCH in her Republican phase. So the baton has been passed...

It sounds just a little like the infamous Peter Jennings post-election commentary in 1994, doesn't it?

The Washington Post may have canceled its $25,000-a-plate dinners matching lobbyists with top officials, but Publisher Katharine Weymouth is still not seeing it the way journalists do: paying for private dinners at the publisher’s private home looks like deal-making rather than news-making. Howard Kurtz’s Friday story revealed the Weymouth worldview:

Weymouth, who had not seen the marketing copy, said that "we will never compromise our journalistic integrity." But she said other news organizations sponsor similar conferences and that she remains comfortable with the basic idea of lobbyists or corporations underwriting dinners with officials and journalists as long as those paying the fees have no control over the content.

But precisely what would be acceptable remains unclear. Asked whether the forums she envisions might still be viewed as buying access to Post journalists, Weymouth said, "I suppose you could spin it that way, but that is not the way it would have been done." She said the situation would be comparable to a company buying an ad in the newspaper while knowing that it "might hate the content" on that page.

But an ad in a newspaper is public and visible, unlike a private dinner. Kurtz brought in a former Miami Herald editor to offer the newsroom view:

Former Washington Post reporter Mike Allen has broken a shocking media-ethics story for the Politico about his old media home. The Post is offering lobbyists "off-the record dinner and discussion" with top congressional and administration officials for $25,000 a plate, first on the topic of health care. A copy of the invite reads:

"Underwriting Opportunity: An evening with the right people can alter the debate," says the one-page flier. "Underwrite and participate in this intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth. ... Bring your organization’s CEO or executive director literally to the table. Interact with key Obama administration and congressional leaders.…

Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz reported Thursday on black females on the Michelle Obama beat, and whether their shared race and gender produces gauzier coverage. "Indeed, most write with enthusiasm, in some cases even admiration, about the first lady as a long-awaited role model for black women." Kurtz found:

"Without a doubt, I identify with her as a brown-skinned African American woman," [Newsweek’s Allison] Samuels says. "Now we have Michelle and see her as a mother, a lawyer, a wife, and she's doing it fabulously." Samuels got to interview Obama during the campaign and "we had a girlfriend-to-girlfriend moment. We did connect."

Post writer Robin Givhan, one of the most syrupy writers on the Michelle beat, tried to suggest "news" wins out:

"We all bring the full depth of our experiences to the facts we emphasize, the questions we ask, the stories that get us excited," says Givhan, who was a year behind Obama at Princeton, although their paths did not cross. "But in the end, news is news."

The Washington Post and The New York Times published similar Supreme Court "analysis" pieces on their front pages Wednesday offering the theme that the court under Chief Justice John Roberts is moving boldly to the right, and the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor will have no effect on this bold shift. It sounded like two newspapers trying to cool down the controversy over judicial liberalism as the Sotomayor hearings approach.

The Post headline was "Term Saw High Court Move to the Right: Roberts-Led March Likely to Continue." Reporter Robert Barnes argued:

The court's term avoided the blockbuster decisions that at one point seemed inevitable. But its path was clear: a patient and steady move to the right led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., one that is likely to continue even if President Obama is successful in adding Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the high court -- and perhaps two others like her.

While conservatives were unhappy with the incrementalism of some Roberts opinions, Barnes wrote:

And they says bloggers are news-lite. The latest issue of Details magazine carries this ludicrous headline on the top of the cover: "Can Obama Make You Better In Bed?" Inside is an article suggesting that "from the way we wear our suits to the way we relate to our wives, somehow American men are acting a little more like 44."

This is, as you might suspect, the work of a magazine just making wild generalizations about American manhood with bold assertion and zero research. Men may have favored McCain last November, "But it might not matter all that much, because in voting for a radically different avatar of American masculinity, we were, in a way, voting for Barack Obama to change us. Which is exactly what he's doing." (Italics theirs.)

Then we’re subjected to the idea that Obama has arrived to overcome the "overcompensating masculine drag" of the Bush-Cheney era:

Many media outlets are glancing over "Senator-Select" Al Franken with a sentence or two emphasizing the word "finally." ABC news anchor Bianna Golodryga this morning reported "Comedian-turned politician Al Franken expects to be sworn in next week as senator from Minnesota. The state Supreme Court has finally certified last November's election results where Franken won by just 312 votes." What's left out is the Wall Street Journal editorial page story of a "legal street fight" that led to an overturned Republican election-night victory: 

Mr. Franken trailed Mr. Coleman by 725 votes after the initial count on election night, and 215 after the first canvass. The Democrat's strategy from the start was to manipulate the recount in a way that would discover votes that could add to his total. The Franken legal team swarmed the recount, aggressively demanding that votes that had been disqualified be added to his count, while others be denied for Mr. Coleman.

The Washington Post put the first White House celebration of Gay Pride Month on the front page Tuesday, but reporter Michael Shear left out some of the president’s most liberal and most supportive lines from the transcript. Obama pledged to be "an ally and a champion" of the gay left’s agenda and hailed gay activists "who have refused to accept anything less than full and equal citizenship."

He implied there was still work to do with all those fuddy-duddies who still followed the "worn arguments and old attitudes" from old sources like the Bible:

There are unjust laws to overturn and unfair practices to stop. And though we've made progress, there are still fellow citizens -- perhaps neighbors or even family members and loved ones -- who still hold fast to worn arguments and old attitudes, who fail to see your families like their families and who would deny you the rights that most Americans take for granted. And I know this is painful. And I know it can be heartbreaking.

The Washington Post’s free commuter tabloid "Express" earned its name on Tuesday. On page 8, its timeline of "Turning Points: Key Dates in the Iraq War" was so quickly assembled that it left out the capture, trial, and execution of Saddam Hussein. It began by noting the invasion as a "bid to topple" Saddam, but never noted U.S. troops taking Baghdad on April 9, 2003. However, it did emphasize U.N. estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths, and abuse at Abu Ghraib. Here’s the complete actual verbiage:

March 2003: U.S.-led invasion begins with strikes on Baghdad in bid to topple Saddam Hussein.

April 2004: Photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison released.

Jan. 2005: Millions vote in first multiparty poll in 50 years.

Jan. 2007: President George W. Bush announces troop "surge." U.N. reports 34,000 civilians died in 2006.

July 2008: As violent deaths decrease, Iraqi P.M. Nouri al-Maliki raises prospect of U.S. troop withdrawal.

The White House denied Time's Monday report that the Obamas have ended a search for a church home in the nation's capital. Here's Politico:

The White House said Monday that President Barack Obama continues "to look for a church home," and said a magazine report that he has stopped is erroneous.

White House deputy press secretary Jen Psaki said by e-mail: "The president and first family continue to look for a church home. They have enjoyed worshiping at Camp David and several other congregations over the months, and will choose a church at the time that is best for their family."

The Obamas haven't faced much questioning from the White House press corps about when they're going to make a church decision. With most presidents, this might not be a big deal, but the establishment media's reluctance surely reflects its sensitivity to Obama's political problems with choosing radical, ranting Rev. Jeremiah Wright in Chicago and staying in his church for 20 years.

Michael Jackson’s death offers a reminder that some old TV news encomiums were too gooey, even in their own time. On April 7, 1993 on PBS, MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour essayist Anne Taylor Fleming offered a tribute to Jackson as "The new-age Fred Astaire…an urban urchin with wings on his feet." Fleming was fixated more on the dancing: "I must confess that his singing has always seemed secondary to me, the leftover choirboy trying to rhapsodize about romance. It doesn’t ring right. It’s like Madonna trying to be soft and Monroe-like."

What followed became a Notable Quotable, where the liberal babble began:

If either of the two [Madonna or Michael Jackson] is the logical heir to Marilyn Monroe, it is clearly Michael Jackson, who is the more bruised and authentically vulnerable of the two....He doesn’t leave a single metaphor untouched. Not only is he black and white, male and female, but also young and old, hip and square, the crotch-grabbing self-appointed guardian angel of the world's children.

Months later, when allegations of child sexual abuse surfaced, Jackson was then compared to Ronald Reagan:

Time’s Amy Sullivan, who worked tirelessly to sell Barack Obama as an acceptable choice for Bible-toting Evangelicals -- a choice that most evangelicals didn't accept -- reported Obama has refused to pick a D.C. church as his religious home. In his latest move copying George W. Bush, he’s going to designate the Evergreen Chapel at Camp David as his official church. Now go away, she insists to people still disturbed by his longtime pastor Jeremiah Wright.

She quotes Obama religion adviser Vashti McKenzie: "Everybody needs to just back off and settle down. Let him choose where he's comfortable, choose where he and his family are going to be spiritually fed, and then let it be his choice." Sullivan added her own "Amen."

Between the lines, a cynic can see all the political convenience on display: no flashy minister, and not much ministerial contact either:

The Sunday Outlook section of The Washington Post digged into the dregs of reality TV to plead the case for more national health care subsidies. Post Magazine reporter Liza Mundy authored a piece titled "Jon and Kate Plus Health Care: Would better insurance have saved this marriage?"

Mundy guessed that if the federal government subsidized in vitro fertilization (IVF), Kate might have had only one baby instead of sextuplets. "Possibly nothing could have saved this marriage, but one thing would have made it less fragile: a mandate for health insurance to cover in vitro fertilization."

It’s one thing for liberals to insist that it’s reasonable for taxpayers to shell out a few hundred dollars for broader immunizations and preventative health care measures. Now imagine being asked to pay for a $10,000 round of IVF. Mundy argued it would achieve the liberal goal of lowering inequality:

CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl interviewed her occasional colleague (and CNN correspondent) Christiane Amanpour for the website The Women on the Web, and the oddest part came when Amanpour insisted "nobody knows my biases...I just try very hard to report the facts and to tell the stories as best as I can." In fact, Amanpour’s biased liberal journalism has landed her in our year-end Best of Notable Quotables issue four times. These professions of impartiality came as Stahl asked whether her Iranian background affected her reporting:

STAHL: That brings me back to Iran, because I wonder – this is always asked of me as a reporter – what are your biases? What are your opinions? How hard is it for you to cover anything in Iran, given your own family background?

The Washington Post is still on the lookout for the reemergence of fascism, long after its World War II heyday. Here was a weird place to find it: in fashion writer Robin Givhan’s Saturday review of the styles of the late pop star Michael Jackson:

As his career progressed, Jackson became more enamored with militaristic style. He took on the look of a toy soldier ruling over a Willy Wonka empire....There were times when the military jackets were discomforting. When they turned dark and threatening and vaguely fascist and Jackson didn't seem to understand how the images resonated in the real world. That, after all, wasn't where he was fully living.

What do you want to bet she’s thinking about how it was "vaguely fascist" for Jackson to wear the "militaristic" duds and stand next to the Reagans at the White House?

Washington Post movie reviewer John Anderson, meanwhile, found fascism in the new "Transformers" movie, from the very top of the review on Wednesday:

Like The New York Times, the Washington Post really hated the new movie The Stoning of Soraya M., which depicts sexist injustice under Islamic Sharia law in Iran. Post critic Jan Stuart complained Friday:

Iranian American director Cyrus Nowrasteh, co-writing with wife Betsy Giffen Nowrasteh, has amplified the basic elements of Soraya's story into the worst kind of exploitive Hollywood melodrama, presented under the virtuous guise of moral outrage.

From there, Stuart then condemned how the filmmakers had a reputation for "inflating" historical events like 9/11 and the crucifixion of Jesus:

In the run-up to the Inauguration, Newsweek held a competition (apparently canceled) to dress mean, robotic-looking paper dolls of Bush and Cheney and declare what they would do after high office in "Give These Men a Job." Now, its corporate cousin The Washington Post is declaring on Friday a new contest urging readers to imagine the first paragraph of Dick Cheney’s memoirs, as he’s just been signed by Mary Matalin’s Threshold brand at Simon & Schuster. The headline announcing the contest on the back page of the Style section was "It Was a Dark and Stormy Eight Years." The Post’s sample first paragraph is jokey, but really cheesy:

USA Today’s Maria Puente has proven herself to be a eager member of the Michelle Obama Fawn Club. Wednesday’s Life section advertised again that the First Lady enjoyed a "meteoric rise as a fashion icon." This time, Puente celebrated new books oozing over Michelle. The story began:

A chic sheath dress in a bold color — that is the unmistakable Michelle Obama look, one she has made her own as first lady of the United States, according to two new books celebrating Obama's fashion sense.

Her image is everywhere you look these days: Last week, Obama was given a Board of Directors' Special Tribute Award by the Council of Fashion Designers of America, which noted her "meteoric rise as a fashion icon." Last month, she was in Paris, where she once again shone next to super-chic French first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.

The New York Times reported on Wednesday that " Lawyers for President Obama are quietly drafting first-of-their kind guidelines barring workplace discrimination against transgender federal employees." Jim Rutenberg’s story on page A-15 followed one iron law to the letter: advocates for the "LGBT lobby" are not described anywhere as "liberal," but their opponents are routinely and repeatedly labeled "conservatives." Take this passage:

Though transgender men and women are not believed to make up more than a fraction of a percent of the federal work force, their inclusion in the discrimination guidelines is seen as a breakthrough by transgender and gay rights advocates.

"The president is making a very clear statement that transgender people won’t be discriminated against," said Mara Keisling, the executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, a group that has been talking with the White House about the new provisions.

In 2005, NBC and MSNBC and CNN strongly attacked the Bush White House for allowing reporter "Jeff Gannon" of Talon News and GOPUSA.com (real name: James Guckert) to enter the White House on a day pass and ask questions to spokesman Scott McClellan and President Bush. Will these networks find it even more scandalous that the Obama White House much more explicitly pre-arranged a question from the left-wing website The Huffington Post, and allowed their reporter Nico Pitney to have the second question of the entire event, like they were the second most important "news" outlet in America? Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank explained the special treatment on Wednesday:

After the obligatory first question from the Associated Press, Obama treated the overflowing White House briefing room to a surprise. "I know Nico Pitney is here from the Huffington Post," he announced.

While conservatives like National Review’s Kathryn Lopez were unimpressed by President Obama describing the shooting of student protester Neda Soltan in Iran as merely a "problem" – like having to stand in line for concert tickets? – the New York Daily News supinely painted Obama as emotionally distressed: "DEATH THAT BROKE HIS HEART," screamed their front page headline.

Inside, reporter Helen Kennedy at least acknowledged that Obama had toughened his rhetoric, contrary to his odd insistence at yesterday’s press conference that he’s been absolutely consistent in his Iran rhetoric:

President Obama dramatically toughened his criticism of Iran's crackdown on election protesters Tuesday, paying emotional tribute to slain student Neda Soltan and declaring the U.S. "appalled and outraged" by the violence.

"I strongly condemn these unjust actions, and I join with the American people in mourning each and every innocent life that is lost," he said.

Wil Haygood of The Washington Post had some fun at Republican Gov. Mark Sanford’s expense in Wednesday’s Style section, insisting that Sanford was a laughingstock, a man who went missing because he was strange and unpopular for resisting the appeal of the Obama "stimulus." Haygood began:

After all those weird stares, after he fought against stimulus money meant to help his fellow South Carolinians who've lost jobs at an astounding rate, after the blitzkrieg of complaints from Democrats, no one had to tell Gov. Mark Sanford to take a hike.

He did it on his own.

Haygood even compared the South Carolina governor’s press aide to a Soviet stooge:

He'd dropped his security detail like a bag of stale potato chips over at reelection headquarters. He'd told his press spokesman to keep it all on the hush-hush, and the spokesman clammed up like a Kremlin operative.

"It's not unusual for him to take a few days off to recharge his batteries," Joel Sawyer, the Republican governor's spokesman, finally explained yesterday.

National Public Radio’s website has a section called "Books We Like," and NPR is unafraid to declare it likes books that please the hard left. NPR book critic Simon Maxwell Apter lauded a book on white supremacists called Blood and Politics by the author Leonard Zeskind, a man who recently declared on Pacifica Radio that Sean Hannity and Pat Buchanan offer "a rational sense of justification" to hardened racists. Apter revealed that he liked not only the book, but the election of Barack Obama:

The recent murder of a security guard at D.C.'s Holocaust museum reminds us that racial and religious fanaticism live on in the U.S. But thankfully, while a handful of bigots are still grumbling on about the South's loss of the Civil War, the tyranny of "ZOG" (the "Zionist Occupied Government" currently reigning in Washington) and the "eight Jewish families" who "own" the Federal Reserve, some 70 million others have, in a testament to the overwhelming tolerance of contemporary American society, gone ahead and elected Barack Obama president.

Chris Matthews showed up on the Morning Joe set on Monday morning, and he quickly established a pro-Obama hard line. On Iran, he claimed "We are not the good guys. We did not liberate Iran. They liberated themselves from our people." Life under the ayatollahs is "liberation"?

Matthews also insisted that a new New York Times poll showed the American people are instinctively socialistic on health care: "So there is a socialistic sense to it, like Social Security in a positive sense. Nobody wants anybody at the door at the hospital to be kept out when they are sick or dying. There is a social responsibility here that seems to fit like running museums, running zoos. There are certain things we expect government to do."

On Iran, Matthews was pleased that John McCain and Barack Obama were debating how explicitly the U.S. government should sympathize with the pro-democracy protesters, but he clearly came down for Obama and against rotten American policy going back to the arrival of the Shah of Iran in 1953:

In its latest edition (dated June 29), People magazine piled up the praise for Chastity Bono’s decision to be "Chaz," declaring herself to be a male. This leads to the kind of journalism that ignores all the hard-to-obscure physiological facts and goes with the feelings of the celebrity it’s celebrating:

(Transgendered people believe they were born as the wrong sex, so except in quotes, PEOPLE will refer to Chaz as ‘he,’ even when referring to past events, to reflect what Bono considers his true gender.)

Journalists don’t have to oppose transsexuality to be accurate (and there wasn’t even a hint of opposition to the decisions of "Chaz" in the People article). But accuracy should require that females be described as female.

The "he" and "his" pronouns weren’t in the headline or beginning of the article, no doubt out of concern of confusing the reader. The headline was "Becoming Chaz: With her family’s support, Sonny and Cher’s daughter reveals she is transgender and living as a man."

The article began: "The images are iconic TV moments: Precious little Chastity Bono, with her blonde hair and chubby cheeks, gracing her parents 1970s variety show The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour..."

In the same vein as Warner’s San Francisco Chronicle example, Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy hailed Barack Obama’s fatherhood in the Monday Metro section. He spoke about being a father at a White House "national conversation on responsible fatherhood" on Friday with a hundred "mostly young black men" and their celebrity mentors. As Obama talked about his daughters being born and his swagger at parent-teacher conferences, Milloy reported:

The young adults in the audience were spellbound. At 47, Obama was younger than many of their dads, as eloquent as any rapper and revered even by the athletes that they hold in highest esteem.

In Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Randy Cohen’s column titled "The Ethicist" has a perfectly liberal sense of ethics. First, he told a nurse-midwife to help illegal aliens use their aliases when they miss work due to pregnancy-related appointments. (His compromise: create a form and leave the name blank, and let them fill in the fraudulent name. How ethical.)

From there, Cohen agreed with a Portland man studying to become a Catholic priest that receiving scholarships in preparation for a lifelong vow of poverty is sexist: "You might regard yourself as preparing to be a beneficiary of entrenched workplace discrimination, an ethically troubling position."

This is the entire exchange:

I belong to a Catholic religious order and am in formation to become a priest. As part of my training, I attended a university that was founded by my order and whose president is a priest and a member of the order. Nonreligious students also attend, but we religious students receive scholarships. Is this akin to any other scholarship, like that for an athlete, or is it discriminatory, especially because the order does not admit women? – NAME WITHHELD, PORTLAND, ORE.