Fox News Channel

On Wednesday, the New York Daily News reported that Rob Morrison, an anchor for CBS's New York City affiliate WCBS, had quit his job after being arrested the previous weekend for an alleged assault on his wife, CBS MoneyWatch anchor Ashley Morrison. While this news story has been picked up by CNN, the New York Times, and UPI, CBS's own morning and evening newscasts have yet to report on it.

By contrast, CBS This Morning devoted several news items to the arrest and trial of Fox News correspondent Douglas Kennedy in 2012. During a April 4, 2012 report, then-anchor Erica Hill pointed out his affiliation with the news outlet before interviewing the journalist's attorney:

Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) had some harsh words Friday for all the fearmongering going on around the country concerning the looming sequester next week.

Appearing on Fox News's Happening Now, Paul said, "Balderdash. It’s untrue, unfair, dishonest, disingenuous. The president is making stuff up" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

How does Bill Maher keep his job at HBO?

On Thursday he tweeted, "Man, #HermanCain is making a comeback - says he likes working with Fox team, particularly some of them fine-ass white women they got there":

While the President and his media minions are trying to scare everyone into thinking that if the sequestration on federal spending goes through on March 1 it will be the end of the world, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer had a different view Wednesday.

Appearing on Fox News's Special Report, Krauthammer said, "This is the most ridiculously hyped Armageddon since the Mayan calendar" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Taken to task by numerous individuals on Twitter yesterday -- see Twitchy's excellent roundup here -- Fox News Channel The Five liberal co-host Bob Beckel today sought to explain, if not actually apologize for, his comments on the February 19  program in which the panel's token liberal both suggested campus rapes were rare incidents and that college co-eds might accidentally shoot someone who was not really a rapist:

On Tuesday's MSNBC Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough blamed conservative media outlets for recent Republican electoral defeats: "...for conservatives that think they have to stay in their own little media world, since Rush Limbaugh went on the air and became a national figure, Republicans have lost five out of the last six presidential elections in the popular vote. Since Fox News went on the air in 1996, Republicans have lost four out of five." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Co-host Mika Brzezinski snidely chimed in: "Please keep doing what you're doing." Scarborough continued his rant: "So when Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon had to go up against a media culture that absolutely hated them, that despised them, that mocked them, that ran them into the ground every night, and there was no conservative outlet, they won 49 states....But for people that think...they have to stay in this little box, I've got bad news for you. It's not working."

During yesterday’s edition of Fox News Sunday, Washington Post editor Bob Woodward, who wrote the book "The Price of Politics" on how Obama handled the debt-ceiling fiasco in 2011, explained again to his media colleagues that it was a White House initiative to use a hatchet with these budgetary matters in the form of sequestration.

When Fox host Chris Wallace suggested the news media would highlight every spending-cut casualty expected from sequestration, liberal analyst Juan Williams agreed: "I think the news media will play into that at every level." Wallace asked Woodward to repeat his reporting:

"It’s not so much about Marco Rubio drinking water, it’s about the media drinking the Kool-Aid for Obama."

So marvelously said syndicated columnist and dear friend of the Media Research Center's Cal Thomas on Fox News Watch Saturday (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

Remember Anita Dunn, the former Obama communications director that claimed Fox wasn't a news network?

Well, she's at it again saying Wednesday, "What you're seeing now with Fox is that that alternative Fox universe that they created for four years is crumbling."

Conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham on Tuesday made a marvelous observation about the media firestorm surrounding Dr. Benjamin Carson's speech last week at the National Prayer Breakfast.

Appearing on Fox & Friends, Ingraham said, "We can have celebrities talk about fracking and all sorts of political issues...but the head of pediatric neurosurgery at one of the top hospitals in the world" shouldn't discuss healthcare (video follows with partial transcript and commentary):

Former Congressman Allen West (R-Fl.) had some harsh words for America's media Monday.

Appearing on Fox News's On the Record, West said, "I think that we cannot continue to go on believing that all we can do is ask the President what his favorite color is and continue to have these softball interviews" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

"If you go and you talk to most people, they mean well but they don't have much of a breadth of education, of knowledge, of understanding what the real issues are, and therefore they listen to pundits on television who tell them what they're supposed to think, and they keep repeating that and pretty soon they say, 'Oh, that must be true.'”

So marvelously said Dr. Benjamin Carson - the neurosurgeon who blasted onto the political scene last week with an extraordinary speech at the national prayer breakfast - on Fox News's Your World Monday (video follows with transcript and absolutely no need for additional commentary):

Fox News CEO Roger Ailes had some harsh words about Barack Obama recently.

In an interview published by the New Republic Monday, Ailes said, "The president likes to divide people into groups."

"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"  Time for Joe Scarborough to brush up on the Sermon on the Mount?

On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough gloated at length over survey results indicating that the public's trust in Fox News has declined and that PBS is the only network that more people trust than distrust. But he conveniently failed to mention that Fox News remains the network that more people trust than any other . . . and that his own MSNBC trails way—way!—behind Fox News in public trust.  View the video after the jump.

It's been nothing less than astonishing watching the media cover for Monday's leaked Department of Justice memo making the legal case for drone attacks against Americans.

Exposing the hypocrisy of this Wednesday was one of Fox News's liberal contributors Kirsten Powers who said of her colleagues on the left, "They're clearly hypocrites. They clearly don't really care about human rights. They only care if it helps them politically" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Liberal media members defending Fox News and Rush Limbaugh are about as rare as Halley's Comet.

Yet that's what CNN's Howard Kurtz did Monday in a piece surprisingly titled "Obama, Gore, Stop Whining About Right-wing Media."

As NewsBusters reported in early January, HBO's Bill Maher offered Donald Trump $5 million if he could prove he wasn't spawned by a father that was an orangutan.

On Fox & Friends Monday, Trump announced that he was suing Maher for $5 million for not following through on his offer (video follows with transcript and commentary):

As NewsBusters reported, CBS's Steve Kroft told CNN's Piers Morgan Monday that President Obama likes going on 60 Minutes because "he knows that we're not going to play gotcha with him."

On Tuesday, Fox News's Bret Baier quoted NewsBusters associate editor Noel Sheppard's opinion on this matter (video follows with transcript):

In a column which went up this morning, Fox News Political Analyst Kirsten Powers, whose political positions certainly lean left and is a self-described liberal, ripped into President Obama and his administration for what she correctly characterizes as their "strategy to delegitimize a news organization" -- hers.

Her column is about far more than Obama's recent complaint to the New Republic's Chris Hughes (covered by Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters) that "If a Republican member of Congress is not punished on Fox News or by Rush Limbaugh for working with a Democrat on a bill of common interest, then you'll see more of them doing it." What Powers recounts is a strategy first employed in 2009 and apparently being revived, now that Obama no longer has to answer to America's voters, to marginalize the only U.S. network which still tries to be fair and balanced (bolds are mine):

As America's media predictably fall in line behind any attempts President Obama makes to reform immigration policy, one has to wonder if they're going to recall how he cast the pivotal vote in the Senate in 2007 to block such legislation.

Keeping the press on their toes, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on Fox New's On the Record Monday, "In 2007 when we tried to do immigration reform, he folded like a cheap suit" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Steve Kroft at CBS News is apparently feeling the heat over his powder-puff interview of President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It has fallen to television writer David Bauder at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press (HT Dylan Byers at the Politico) to try and help put out the fire.

You see, according to Kroft (my paraphrase), "This whole interview thing was a surprise, and we were only allowed 30 minutes, and besides, there are so many other opportunities to ask tough questions in other venues. So why should I waste precious fawning time asking tough questions mere journalists ask when I can let the lovely pair go all gooey?" Exceprts from Bauder's butt-covering effort follow the jump (bolds are mine):

Brit Hume on Monday made some strong comments about Barack Obama's recent attacks on Fox News as well as the gooey interview CBS's 60 Minutes did with the President and Hillary Clinton the previous evening.

Of the latter, he said the theme was “Just How Great Is the Relationship Between You Two?” (video follows with transcript and absolutely no need for additional commentary):

As NewsBusters has been reporting all day, CBS's 60 Minutes on Sunday gave a gushing and fawning interview to President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that should be an embarrassment to the network.

On Fox News's America's Newsroom Monday, left-leaning contributor Kirsten Powers said of this fiasco, "It really was something you would expect from like the state-run media...60 Minutes was transparently being used as a campaign advertisement" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Monday's NBC Today was quick to seize on Sarah Palin ending her tenure as a contributor for Fox News, with correspondent Kelly O'Donnell announcing: "Sarah Palin has people guessing again this morning...After a breakup that seemed unlikely between the former governor and her conservative home at Fox News."

O'Donnell remarked that Palin had "carved out an unusual space, at the intersection of politics, celebrity, and pop culture," followed by a clip of comedian Tina Fey mocking the former Republican vice presidential candidate. O'Donnell then observed that "Palin's main gig is over."

As NewsBusters reported, President Obama, in an interview published Sunday by The New Republic, said, "If a Republican member of Congress is not punished on Fox News or by Rush Limbaugh for working with a Democrat on a bill of common interest, then you'll see more of them doing it."

Within a few hours, Fox News's Greta Van Susteren struck back: