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The Washington Post Twitter account pushed this strange thought: "Who's tweeting about Benghazi? Rich, middle-aged men and Chick-fil-A lovers." It links to the Post Politics blog, where Caitlin Dewey wrote a blog post with the same headline.

Dewey turned to a Twitter analysis firm called Demographics Pro to see who's using the #Benghazi hashtag and "helping disseminate, and even steer, the divisive political narrative of what happened that night." The answer seems to be rich white male fans of "hate chicken" restaurants:

Appearing on Wednesday's NBC Today, Huffington Post contributor Abby Huntsman proclaimed that following Mark Sanford's win in Tuesday's special congressional election in South Carolina, disgraced ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner "probably slept well last night knowing that he can potentially come back, too."

Co-host Willie Geist agreed: "Absolutely, absolutely." News reader Natalie Morales chimed in: "I was thinking the same thing this morning."

The far left hate campaign against Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is really quite a sight to behold. The guy clearly is not a conservative but the fact that a political group he founded spent money on a 1-week television ad campaign featuring two senators speaking positively about oil drilling and the Keystone XL pipeline has sent the self-proclaimed merchants of tolerance into a fit of rage.

Not content with manufacturing false allegations of censorship against Zuckerberg and Facebook, extremist groups have now organized a boycott of the social network where they are refusing to purchase ads from the company--for two whole weeks. The threat is pretty absurd on its face but the motivation behind it is no joke. As I wrote last week, the real motive behind the campaign is to intimidate Zuckerberg into bowing down to the jackbooted "progressive" power structure. The recent independence Zuckerberg has demonstrated must not be tolerated.

Of the three cable networks, Fox News on Wednesday offered the most substantial coverage of whistleblower testimony on the September 11th terrorist attack in Benghazi. Fox broke in first at 11:36am and has been airing the hearings mostly unobstructed since. CNN followed at noon. Anchor Wolf Blitzer appeared and introduced coverage.

The cable network stuck with the testimony for 15 minutes before leaving to feature discussion by Blitzer and Jake Tapper. MSNBC, unsurprisingly, was last. It wasn't until 12:17pm, after spending copious amounts of time on the Cleveland abduction case, that the network finally showcased the hearings.

The Associated Press could not very well ignore today's hearing at which whistleblowers are testifying as to the events surrounding the Benghazi attack and the Obama administration's failed response thereto.  So AP did the next best thing from its liberal perspective: it downplayed the hearing's significance, casting it as a purely partisan event in its headline as a "GOP hearing."

That is not mere MSM spin: it is blatant journalistic malpractice.  This is not some unofficial hearing held under Republican auspices.  It is an entirely official hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.  Yes, there has in recent times been a faux House "hearing" held by a political party for partisan purposes.  That would be the "hearing" held by Democrats in February 2012, featuring Sandra Fluke.  More after the jump.

Politico media writer Dylan Byers sought to add context to Paul Farhi’s “glowing profile” of CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson in Wednesday’s Washington Post.

Byers suggested Farhi painted it as a David and Goliath story with Team Obama as Goliath. But there’s another Goliath, he wrote: CBS News executives who aren’t happy with Attkisson’s “Benghazi campaign” that’s “wading dangerously close” to advocacy:

The extent of the media's influence to shape public opinion was on full display in a new Pew Research Center poll that shows, even though gun crime has dropped by half since its peak in the mid '90s, most Americans (56 percent) wrongly think gun violence has increased.

In an L.A. Times article that highlighted the poll, Emily Alpert posited "It's unclear whether media coverage is driving the misconception that such violence is up. The mass shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., were among the news stories most closely watched by Americans last year, Pew found."

Benghazi hearings open in the House on Wednesday, and the New York Times printed a preview on page 16 of Wednesday's edition that downplayed any possible revelations about the Obama administration's reaction to the terrorist attack, which killed ambassador Chris Stevens and three others. Testimony is expected by three State Department officials, led by U.S. diplomat Gregory Hicks, deputy mission chief in Tripoli, who said his pleas for military assistance were overruled.

Feeling reader pressure after the Washington Post led its Tuesday's edition by setting up the House hearings, Public Editor Margaret Sullivan addressed the issue on her blog Tuesday afternoon, posing a coverage question to Washington bureau chief (and former neoliberal economics reporter) David Leonhardt, who didn't anticipate hearing much new on Wednesday:

Covering New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's secret weight loss surgery, Good Morning America's Paula Faris couldn't help but make fat jokes. The reporter on Wednesday began her segment by wryly asserting, "Chris Christie is wasting no time devouring his critics." She continued, "The no-holds-barred New Jersey Governor known for his healthy appetite...sounded off" at reporters. [See video below. MP3 audio below.]

Faris found clips of liberal comedians mocking the Republican governor. She included one of David Letterman joking, "Bring it, fat boy!" In another snippet, Jimmy Fallon sneered, "Christie hopes to visit the site of the Last Supper. You know, see if there's any leftovers." This isn't the first time the ABC morning show has joined in on fat jokes about Christie.  

At the Daily Beast on Sunday, liberal Peter Beinart called on Democrats and liberals to "strongly denounce" former South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian's insult campaign against Palmetto State Governor Nikki Haley, or else "Democratic Party bigotry is likely to get worse."

It's too early to test Beinart's long-term prediction (such bigotry is bad enough already), but the denunciations he desires are nowhere to be found, even as Harpootlian has doubled and tripled down on his original wish to see Haley sent “back to wherever the hell she came from.” Meanwhile, the establishment press has virtually ignored Harpootlian's unhinged harangues.

Comcast is holding a shareholder meeting in Philadelphia next week, and the Tea Party is planning a protest of the company's so-called news outlets NBC and MSNBC.

FreedomWorks recently sent the following email message out to 60,000 Tea Partiers around Philadelphia (published with permission):

Chuck Todd has defended the Obama admin's decision not to send more special ops to Benghazi.

Appearing on today's Morning Joe, NBC News political director Todd claimed that the decision to send only two special ops to Benghazi was "very rational."  He also literally laughed off the notion that Benghazi could boil into a major scandal.  View the video after the jump.

The Washington Post reported Mark Sanford’s “easy victory” in a special-election vote for Congress to replace now-Sen. Tim Scott. This had to be disappointing for columnist Dana Milbank, who predicted just last Thursday that “South Carolinians, asked to cross the line with Sanford on Tuesday, are likely to tell him to take a hike.”

The Post tried to paint Sanford as a goner. The only time his race made the front page in the last month was a Karen Tumulty story on April 18 headlined “Trespassing case, GOP's pullout rattle Sanford's bid.” You could smell the morning toast:

The Washington Post and reporter Dan Zak returned to bowing before the radical-left  “Prophets of Oak Ridge” as their trial began Tuesday. The protesters broke into a nuclear-weapons production facility last July and hammered a wall and vandalized it with human blood. The headline at the top of Wednesday’s Style section was “Protest and protocol vie in anti-nuclear activists’ Tenn. trial.”

Zak began by putting the leftists on the side of “morality and conscience” and the national-security apparatus on the side of “protocol and budgets.” That’s funny, we could have put our nation’s defenders on the side of “morality and conscience,” and these radicals on the side of “vandalism and political exhibitionism” (or just “breaking and entering”):

Have you seriously wondered why the media have largely boycotted the Benghazi story?

Dennis Miller has, and on Fox News's O'Reilly Factor Tuesday, he compellingly said, "If you’re the one who brings down Barack Obama, you will be out of the game" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The Washington Post offered a splashy profile of freshman Sen. Ted Cruz on Tuesday, and the most surprising thing about it was a lack of venom. The reporter described “the self-assured, nonstop talker who won national debate championships as an undergraduate at Princeton.”

Cruz “honed his reputation early in his career as a dazzling Supreme Court advocate” and now “has bashed into the national conversation,” most notably in attacking establishment Republicans who’ve called him and other young Senate conservatives “wacko birds.”

In the race to the bottom event known as South Carolina's First Congressional District special election, Mark Sanford has defeated Elizabeth Colbert Busch.

Not that the establishment press didn't try to help Ms. Busch, to whose background they gave little or no scrutiny. And when two forms of scrutiny did arrive from independent quarters, first of her actual beliefs expressed in tweets before she or someone associated with her deleted them, and then this weekend of her past jailing on contempt charges during a messy divorce, they chose to ignore it.

On Tuesday's CBS This Morning, Charlie Rose and Norah O'Donnell pressed Senator Joe Manchin about a possible new push for gun control in Congress. Rose wondered how Manchin and his allies could make legislation "more palatable to those people who may be afraid of it", while O'Donnell bluntly asked the Democrat, "Are you frustrated with the NRA?"

Manchin was their only guest on the gun issue. The CBS anchors had an opportunity to provide balance by asking Senator Bob Corker about his support for gun rights. Instead, Rose and Gayle King peppered the Republican with questions about his recent game of golf with President Obama: "Do you pull out all of the stops to beat him, or do you think, he's the President – I'm going to let him win this one?" [audio available here; video below the jump]

To normal people, the Fox News Channel is just one cable TV channel among hundreds or thousands on their set-top boxes. To a very tiny minority of Americans, though, FNC is the very apotheosis of evil in America, even “worse than Al Qaeda” as the deranged Keith Olbermann once put it back when he was employed.

For these people, Fox News is something to be not only feared and loathed, it’s also something to make up stories about. The latest lefty to come out with a tall-tale about Fox News is MSNBC contributor and veteran purveyor of conventional group-think Jonathan Alter. The former Newsweek editor claims in an upcoming book that FNC chief Roger Ailes ordered liberal pundit Geraldo Rivera’s microphone silenced during a particularly heated debate last year over the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya:

There are times when I really think I live in different country than liberal media members.

Take Al Sharpton for example who in his most recent Lean Forward ad for MSNBC said that America isn’t living up to the Pledge of Allegiance’s creed of “One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Appearing on Monday's Tonight Show, NBC Today co-host Savannah Guthrie told Jay Leno that President Obama was "deeply disappointed" by gun control legislation being voted down, prompting the late night host to complain: "Why do you think he's not able to close a deal? This seems to happen a lot....how come Obama hits this wall sometimes?" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Guthrie acknowledged: "I think the criticism is that he hasn't quite learned how to work with Congress to get some of his initiatives through." But then she offered a defense of Obama by touting his supposed accomplishments: "I know if he were sitting here he'd say, 'Wait a minute, what about health care reform?' There have been big parts of his agenda that he has gotten through."

Ever since MSNBC finally chose to cover the murder trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell, the majority of MSNBC hosts have used the case as a disgusting opportunity to slam conservatives who want to regulate abortion clinics. Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough was the first MSNBCer to actually mention the case, expressing disgust and outrage over the abortionist's practices.

Today, which marks the 6th day since the jury entered deliberations, the network’s only other conservative, S.E. Cupp, finally used her daily platform to express similar outrage over the case involving Gosnell.  [See video after jump. MP3 audio here.] 

Have liberals already conceded defeat in today's South Carolina special election? Though polls show the race a true toss-up, some Democrats are attacking not just Republicans, but smearing the entire state as well.

During today's Stephanie Miller Show, guest Charlie Pierce of Esquire Magazine slammed the Palmetto State as "tribal", "a cult" and the ultimate dig, "religious"! From the program:

On Monday's The Last Word, MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell portrayed NRA members as imagining themselves killing police officers in a "psychotic vision of an armed uprising" as he ranted against the NRA's Wayne LaPierre alluding to the benefits of American citizens being armed while a fugitive like Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is on the loose. O'Donnell:

Conservative author Ann Coulter made a statement about the press Monday that should embarrass all the so-called "journalists" in America.

Appearing on Fox News's Hannity, Coulter said, "The media is now the Praetorian Guard to protect the President from the dumb things he does" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Yes, MSNBC has booted Ed Schultz from its primetime lineup to the the penal colony that is the network's weekend schedule.

Now MSNBC wants to show you how popular Schultz is -- and what better way to do that than record the first weekend broadcast of "The Ed Show" before a live audience of rowdy liberals in Madison, Wisc., one of the most left-wing towns in the country. While MSNBC viewers will be none the wiser, everyone else will see through the ruse. (Audio clips after page break)