Merry Christmas everyone! Whether you're celebrating religiously, secularly, or both, I hope your holiday today is great.

For our friends in the Midwestern states, please bundle up and be careful on the roads. It's supposed to be a doozy of a storm today.

Just out of curiosity, how many NBers travel for the holidays versus stick around your metro areas?

Climate alarmists have put enormous pressure on the western media to suppress knowledge of facts inconvenient to their scientific arguments using a variety of methods to supress dissenting opinion.

Besides threatening journalists, promoting the use of Nazi-esque insults like the word "deniers," and bullying scientists who publish research papers critical of their near-religious beliefs, alarmists have taken to the web with aplomb, most famously exposed in the ongoing "ClimateGate" scandal.

Engaging in politicized science via email isn't the only cyber activity that left-enviro activists engage in however. Wikipedia is also a favorite target, particularly for a British global warming activist named William Connolley who seems to have made it his life's mission to censor climate realists in the online encyclopedia.

As requested by numerous NewsBusters readers, we have just opened up a new store where you can buy NB-branded merchandise. We have clothing, books, and specialty items like our Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann doormats. There's something for everyone, so stop by and get some early holiday shopping done.

We did it! Thanks to your generous donations, we have now met our fund-raising goal for server improvements and expenses. In less than 2 weeks we managed to raise over $30,000.

Congratulations! Thanks to everyone who chipped in!

We're almost there! Thanks to your help, in less than a week NewsBusters is just $5,000 away from our fund-raising goal of $30,000. Congratulations!

Please put us over the top today by clicking over to our secure server and giving us a generous (tax-deductible) donation. Your support will ensure that NewsBusters is speedy and our 24/7 exposure of media bias is always available.

Update: Please click here if you are interested in supporting NB via Paypal.

Thanks to everyone's efforts, we are now over the $20,000 mark, just $10k more to go! Please help support our effort to upgrade NB's servers by helping put us over the finish line.

Great job NBers! After only four days of fundraising, we're almost at the 50 percent mark. As of this morning, you have helped us raise $13,022 to update and improve the NewsBusters servers. But we need your help if we are going to reach the $30,000 mark.

Follow this breaking story here on this thread. Post updates as you find them so others can keep tabs. I've posted a Twitter updater below to make it easier to follow here at NB:

Sometimes spotting liberal bias is like shooting fish in a barrel. The folks at the Los Angeles Times really must have been trying to make it easy, however by downplaying two Republican gubernatorial victories (state-wide) and playing up two House races won by Democrats.

"Democrats win congressional victories in California, N.Y." the paper's editors are touting on the site's home page. The linked story is similarly absurd (no wonder it has no byline).

It's almost surreal. Republicans haven't won governor's race in Virginia since 1997. In New Jersey, it's been the exact same amount of time for the GOP. Oh and did I mention that President Obama won both states? Never mind. The Times editors know where the real news is: a regional race where California Democrats were trying to keep control of a seat they already had held.

The controversy over an anti-semitic email to the conservative group Americans for Limited Government allegedly sent by an NBC News producer is continuing to develop as the network is still persistently denying it was sent. Both sides have now spoken on the telephone with each continuing to stick to their respective stories.

As reported earlier by NB's Noel Sheppard, the dispute involves an email message allegedly sent by NBC producer Jane Stone in response to a press release she was sent by ALG's director of media relations, Alex Rosenwald. According to ALG, the "Dateline" producer replied by "Bite me, Jew Boy."

NBC News denied the legitimacy of the email throughout the day Friday, issuing an even stronger statement after its president, Steve Capus, contacted ALG to ask for a retraction but was denied one:

Taxpayer tea party activists got their chance earlier to today to speak against CNN during a live television discussion between CNN reporter Lisa Desjardins and anchor Fredricka Whitfield.

With chants of "tell the truth," and "Glenn Beck," protesters made known their great displeasure with the former #1 cable network. The Beck taunt, of course, is a reference to the former CNN host turned FNC star.

Unlike her former colleague Susan Roesgen who insulted tea party protesters and was confronted on her bias by NewsBusters member "namron", Desjardins didn't dismiss the protesters but instead asked them what they thought of congressman Joe Wilson, famous for his recent outburst that President Obama was lying about his health plan covering illegal immigrants.

Estimates for crowd sizes are starting to come in. We're talking at least a million people, folks.

Considering the huge hit that Noel Sheppard's post about the posters of President Obama as the Joker was, we had to make some major server changes in order to accomodate the massive influx of readers (over 570,000 pageviews as of this writing).

Most of the changes haven't affected the site itself, however, there are a couple of bugs which we're still working on fixing. The first one is that you currently can't navigate through prior editions of the home page. To get around this, please use our Archive feature and navigate to the dates you're looking for.

The other bug is that the search engine is not working. You can get around that by going to Google and typing in your search terms and then follow it with site:newsbusters.org. For example, if I were looking up articles about Joe Biden, I would type this:

NewsBusters will be going down tonight around 4am ET for some server upgrades. We'll be back in the  morning. Just a note for you night owls who may be wondering what's up.

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.