We've seen this before, self-proclaimed "objective" journalists getting so swept up in infatuation with Barack Obama that they literally applaud his public speeches:

The line to get in stretched about 500 feet down a long hallway at the convention center hosting the conference and the 800 seats were all full inside, prompting scores of reporters to line the walls.

When Obama arrived, dozens of the print reporters in the audience stood to take their own keepsake photographs on camera phones and BlackBerrys behind the news photographers thronging the entire width of the vast stage.

When the president departed after nearly an hour, dozens more reporters offered him applause — something one veteran reporter who has covered the globe for decades said he could not recall seeing except for in authoritarian nations.

It's inauguration day which means the media Obama love-athon is going to be going on for hours today.

We can't bring some objectivity to all the reporting today but we can present a special inauguration edition of "NewsBusted," complete with several non-political jokes for those who aren't feeling especially political today.

Big business, the supposedly right-wing, conservative entity that thwarts "progress" and advocates against left-wing economic policies sure doesn't seem to be acting that way of late.

Of course it never really does but that is beside the point. AP reporter Stephen Manning chronicles how corporate America is trying to cash in on Barack Obama's inauguration in an unprecedented, literal selling of a president:

The guys hawking Barack Obama T-shirts and trinkets on the corners of downtown Washington have some new competition in the selling frenzy building up to the president-elect's inauguration Tuesday - Corporate America.

Companies ranging from global giants like soda and snacks maker PepsiCo to a local grocery chain offering cakes with Obama's face in icing are jumping on the Obama commercial wave. Others, like the Swedish home store Ikea, are hoping consumers take Obama's mantra of "change" to heart so much that they go out and buy furniture to mark the change in the White House.

Today marks the launch of Big Hollywood, a new blog launched by Andrew Breitbart designed to give voice to the previously voiceless center-right crowd in the entertainment industry.

Besides featuring blogging on pop culture and politics, it will also feature box office results analysis. Expect to see a lot more from the site in the future. You may see a few posts here and there from yours truly as well.

Big Hollywood is an idea whose time should have come a long time ago. Kudos to Andrew for his great efforts in putting it together.

After a few weeks off for the holidays, "NewsBusted" is back! Some of the topics in today's show: Hillary Clinton celebrates 2009, Barack Obama named "Person of the Year," Sarah Palin has new grandson, Rod Blagojevich asserts himself, "Dark Knight" will not be screened in China.

It's good to be back!

Got some short jokes for us in the new year? Send them to newsbusted at dialognewmedia.com. We pay $50 for each one.

For most people, late December conjures up images of Christmas trees, religious services, and year-end recaps.

That is not the case in Hollywood, however, where Christmastime seems to be Nazi time. That is especially true this year where six World War II films are being released almost simultaneously.

AP reporter Sandy Cohen details this strange phenomenon and delves a bit into its origins:

Fox News anchor Brit Hume, host of "Special Report" will be stepping down after tonight's show.

His successor is scheduled to be Bret Baier, currently the chief White House correspondent for the network.

Hume is not quitting the network entirely however. He is expected to continue on as a senior political analyst, one presumes as a panelist on either "Fox News Sunday" or "Special Report."

Hume is one of the few openly right-leaning news reporters who managed to climb up the ranks of the elite television networks, first at ABC and later at Fox News.

Update 12-24 10:11. On his last program, Hume aired a tribute video put together by Fox News staffers with several prominent individuals tipping their hats to him, including Presidents Bush 41 and 43, and ABC anchor Charlie Gibson.

Watch it above.

Oops! The New York Times admitted yesterday that it had inadvertently printed a letter critical of would-be Democratic senator Caroline Kennedy.

"This letter was a fake. It should not have been published," the paper admitted in a note printed after it had already printed it.

The hoax message was supposedly sent by Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris.

Well bias busters, looks like we are probably still going to have Chris Matthews to kick around.

Two reports out today indicate that the liberal MSNBC host does not seem likely to be pursuing that Democratic Senate run that he's been flirting ever so coyly with.

First this one from Reuters:

As media company after media company fall on hard times, the amount of handwringing within the journalistic community is reaching epic proportions.

One point not often noticed, however is that there are many similarities between the American media business and our auto manufacturing industry as Tony Hopfinger points out in an excellent Alaska Dispatch post:

There are many reasons for the downturn - a weak economy, the Internet, etc. But one explanation that often goes unmentioned is the generally poor management within the newspapers themselves. It's surprising how many editors, publishers and executives have been allowed to keep their jobs as their papers crumble around them. In any other business, these managers would be replaced. Instead, failures are blamed on "markets" and "ad dollars" and "the Internet," instead of lack of vision and poor leadership.

If you are even an occasional viewer of CNN, chances are you have not been able to escape a commercial for the channel's "Planet in Peril" two-hour homage to environmental alarmism.

Despite the huge hype, however, CNN's regular audience seems to have tuned out the special. It was a ratings dud:

It's not just the "Planet in Peril." The ratings for CNN's two-hour environmental special last week were also in crisis.

At least he made it official.

Time's Washington bureau chief Jay Carney is quitting his magazine post to take the fearsome task of managing the communications problems of incoming vice president Joe Biden.

This hardly comes as a surprise. During his tenure at Time, Carney accrued a reputation for bashing Republicans. In March, he urged President Bush to give a speech on the economy and say that he is "a Republican who actually cares about people that are suffering."

In a November 2007 blog post, Carney slammed the Bush administration for "los[ing] touch with reality" for insisting that the situation in Iraq was improving, despite many indicators that the surge strategy was working.

With the economic recession beginning to affect even Google, news came out today that the web giant's YouTube property is making some major changes to its video service that are designed to clean up the site's image in the hopes of slowing the massive financial bleeding.

The policy changes were announced in a posting at the YouTube blog. An excerpt from the post is after the jump:

The Censorship Fairness Doctrine has been something near and dear to the hearts of the far left for a long time. With talk radio and the web being the main pillars of the center-right media landscape, effectively neutralizing conservative radio is a fantasy scenario for Bill Moyers and others like him.

That being said, it is becoming more likely that instead of going the congressional route to squelch conservative radio speech, the incoming Obama administration will try an alternate approach through regulatory bodies and the bureaucracy.

Conn Carroll explains:

Got a few moments this evening? Please take a little bit of time to fill out our annual reader demographic survey in conjunction with our advertising partner BlogAds. The more info we get, the more revenue we'll be able to receive next year which means more resources to bust the news.

Give us a click if you get a sec. Last year's NB numbers are here. To see how we compared with other blogs, visit the main Blog Reader Project site.

On an unrelated note, there will be no "NewsBusted" episodes this week as we are off for the Thanksgiving holiday.

Following on the heels of complaints from Time magazine's Mark Halperin that the press hugely favored Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential election, ABC political correspondent Jake Tapper chimed in today to say that he agreed:

Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn that I too wonder just how fair the media coverage of this campaign was.

Case in point: perhaps the most unfair and negative TV ad run during the entire campaign, by either side, was the Spanish-language TV ad Obama ran against Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, that got very little media coverage.

Missed in the hubub of Tuesday night were some interesting remarks by former GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin rebuking the American media for its overwhelming bias in the '08 elections.

"[T]here is a little bit of disappointment in my heart about the world of journalism today," Palin said.

"I have such great respect for the role of the media in our democracy, it is a cornerstone, it allows the checks and balances. But only when there is fairness and objectivity in the reporting."

Palin's comments are especially interesting because she seems to have gone out of her way to attack the press, responding to a general question of her thoughts as she returns to Alaska. Full transcript below the jump or watch the video above.

Normally we put out "NewsBusted" on Tuesdays and Fridays but today we're making an exception given the motherlode of material Barack Obama just gave us by winning the presidency.

Jokes in today's episode touch on a number of topics including the economy still remaining a problem, comparisons of Obama to Ronald Reagan, Joe the Plumber's reaction, and Obama's aunt who's currently living illegally in the U.S.

Now that Barack Obama is going to be president, what should the right do now?

Beyond the recriminations, what positive active steps should be taken? Post your thoughts or link to others with interesting remarks here.

Fundamental changes are needed to how conservatives and libertarians do things now, not just at the politician level. What changes would you like to see?

After the GOP rout of Democrats in 1994, one of the most common liberal media refrains was how Republicans shouldn't read too much into their victories. Similar things happened in 2000 and 2004 for George W. Bush.

With Barack Obama poised to take the presidency now, no such disclaimers are being uttered in media land.

That stark disparity bubbled to the surface tonight on CNN where outnumbered conservative pundit Bill Bennett was the lone voice trying to say that an Obama presidency is not a mandate for radical liberalism:

Things looking better for Barack Obama in contrast to John McCain. Post your comments here or join the chats below.

If you want to talk politics, click over to this room, if you want non-politics, try this room. Note: You must sign up with our third-party chat supplier Chatzy in order to participate. 

In what could be seen as a disturbing sign for the future, the Barack Obama presidential campaign has blocked the Washington Times newspaper from traveling with the Democratic nominee in the final days of the election.

The ostensible reason given was a lack of space:

Times reporter Christina Bellatoni, who has covered the Democratic campaign since 2007 is being asked to leave the campaign plane starting Sunday. In defending its decision, the Obama campaign said it respected Ms. Bellatoni's reporting and simply ran out of seats on the campaign plane for the finale because of high demand. It also noted that the Obama campaign is allowing some news media critical of the democrat to travel, including Fox News.

I've dropped a few hints here and there about a new project that I have been working on but now I can finally put it all on the table.

Starting November 10th, I will be working with the Washington Examiner to help take its web site to the next level through a managing editor position within the paper.

I will still be continuing my efforts here at NB, however. To help ensure NB readers get the hard-hitting media watchdog you've become used to, we will soon be adding an additional member to the staff. More on that in a few days.

The official press release is below the fold.

Part of the reason that liberal bias in the elite media exists is that not enough conservatives and libertarians decide to get involved in journalism, especially straight news reporting.

One of the best organizations on the right trying to combat this is the Phillips Foundation which has a program that pays generous amounts of money to encourage people to get involved in producing high-quality journalism that can really make a difference.

If the idea of this appeals to you, consider applying for the 2009 Phillips fellowships. Full-time fellowships pay out $50-75,000 to successful applicants. Part-time ones pay $25,000. 

Despite the huge media hubub that it's caused, the U.S. Secret Service is formally denying an allegation from a Pennsylvania newspaper that an attendee at a Republican rally shouted out "kill him" in reference to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

"We have yet to find someone to back up the story," agent Bill Slavoski told the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader. "We had people all over and we have yet to find anyone who said they heard it."

The alleged remark was first reported by David Singleton, a writer for the Scranton Times-Tribune newspaper. Singleton remains the sole person claiming he heard the offensive words:

With Republicans John McCain and Sarah Palin receiving some return fire from the media for their criticism of the press, it's interesting to note that they are not alone in criticizing the media at this point in the campaign cycle.

In an interview with the New York Times Magazine, Democratic candidate Barack Obama lashed out at Fox News Channel, accusing it of portraying him as an "arrogant liberal" and making people not want to vote for him.

"I am convinced that if there were no Fox News, I might be two or three points higher in the polls," Obama told liberal journalist Matt Bai. "[T]he way I’m portrayed 24/7 is as a freak! I am the latté-sipping, New York Times-reading, Volvo-driving, no-gun-owning, effete, politically correct, arrogant liberal. Who wants somebody like that?"

D'oh! In his haste to condemn Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin last night far-left MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann made a particularly elementary reading comprehension error.

The mistake, caught by our friends at Olbermann Watch, involved a report of a person at a McCain-Palin allegedly shouting out to "kill" Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.

Rushing to tag the GOP ticket with this as much as possible, Olbermann expressed outrage that "as usual, [Palin] does nothing about it."

Remember those fake "undecided voters" during the Democrats' town hall debates last year?

Looks like they're back. Turns out at least one of the questioners in Tuesday's presidential debate actually told event organizers that he would "most likely be voting for Obama" but was allowed to continue participate just the same.

Townhall's Amanda Carpenter caught the admission from Oliver Clark, the man who asked the first question about the disgraced Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:

Fact-checking politicians seems to be the journalistic "in" thing to do this campaign season. Aside from the self-aggrandizing nature of such pronouncements, there isn't anything necessarily wrong with the concept.

The devil is in the details, however. Over at the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto notes that these esoteric fact check stories too often end up as opinion pieces criticizing the policies or rhetoric of politicians.

In more cases than not, it's Republicans who bear the brunt of such "corrections," simply because truth in politics is often a highly subjective thing. Taranto focuses on one particular fact check by USA Today criticizing a John McCain ad for quoting Barack Obama out of context:

One of the hottest Internet videos during the mortgage and banking crisis has been a YouTube clip titled "Burning Down the House," which outlines the untold story of how liberal Democrats pressured banks and lenders to throw standards out the window and give money to people who couldn't pay it back.

Try watching it now, however, and you won't be able to, thanks to the growing problem of "flag spam," the practice of abusing online filter systems to squelch political speech with which one disagrees.

We've all seen spammers at work in our e-mail inboxes. Experts estimate that 90 percent of all e-mail messages nowadays are spam, or unsolicited commercial e-mail.

Luckily for most of us, the majority of it gets filtered out. That's caused the more sophisticated spammers to change course and target a more vulnerable part of the Internet - the hugely popular Web sites like YouTube, Digg and the blogosphere, where anyone can join the discussion by posting videos, essays, reviews and other content.