PBS

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman this weekend said he'd give President Obama high marks for fulfilling Bush's foreign policy.

This surprising observation on PBS's McLaughlin Group came somewhat coincident with Chris Matthews saying George W. Bush was actually better at conveying his message than the current White House resident (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On the Friday news roundup on the PBS NewsHour, pseudoconservative analyst David Brooks of The New York Times kept up his disparaging of Herman Cain, predicting "he will be deflated very seriously within a week or two." He attacked Cain for "behaving badly" and having "gone for the home run" in denying all sexual harassment claims. Mr. Brooks didn't consider it at all possible that Cain could be truthful in denying all claims.

On both NPR and PBS Friday, Brooks lamented that Jeb Bush isn't in the race and would be the frontrunner pleasing both conservatives and moderates if he had chosen to make a run. He clearly has no respect for Herman Cain:

There have been a lot of ridiculous comments made in the past week since Politico published its hit piece on Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, but one of the most absurd yet came from Newsweek's Eleanor Clift this weekend.

Appearing on PBS's McLaughlin Group, Clift actually said, "This is the press doing what the press should be doing, and they should have done due diligence on this candidate earlier on...He got a free ride for a good long while." (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On the PBS NewsHour Friday, there was the typical agreement between "conservative" David Brooks and liberal Mark Shields on the sour state of the economy, and that despite that, Brooks said President Obama's "hanging in there reasonably well," and Shields agreed he's "defied gravity."

Brooks slammed Herman Cain's response to the incredibly vague Politico story: that he "didn't do kindergarten-level preparation for this story is just incredibly damning." Shields agreed, adding a slam on conservatives hating candidates with any experience: "Herman Cain's candidacy is a reflection, if not a direct product, of the feverish anti-government flavor, fervor of Republicans, because they really have so little regard, Republican primary voters, for government."

PBS's Mark Shields on Friday took some childish swipes at Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich.

During an Inside Washington discussion about who might be next to challenge Mitt Romney for the GOP presidential nomination, Shields said, "Don't count out the chubby fellow from Georgia, Newt, the rehabilitated Newt Gingrich, carrying along a bogus IQ and some other baggage" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The hyperventilation of media members concerning income inequality in America reaches a new high with each passing day.

Case in point, on Inside Washington Friday, PBS's Mark Shields, with a straight face no less, said this disparity is a "national security issue" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

There was a truly marvelous exchange between syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer and NPR's Nina Totenberg on Friday's "Inside Washington."

When Krauthammer pressed her on why President Obama didn't embrace the Bowles-Simpson plan to reduce the budget deficit, Totenberg replied, "Don’t make me the spokesman for the White House," leading him to deliciously ask, "What would be new about that?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On Friday's Inside Washington on PBS, regular panel member Nina Totenberg of NPR incorrectly claimed that the "top tenth of one percent" of income earners in America "controls something like 20 or 30 percent" of the nation's income, and went on to characterize the economic situation as being worse than it has been in "hundreds of years," as she suggested income gaps were at a level that "people came to this country to avoid."

In reality, it is the top one percent - not the top "tenth of one percent" - that earns about a quarter of the nation's income.

As the group discussed the Occupy Wall Street protests, Totenberg made the following observations:

PBS's Charlie Rose opened last night’s Bloomberg/Washington Post GOP presidential economic policy debate by noting the round table format was like a “kind of kitchen table where families for generations have come together to talk and solve their problems.”

But through much of the debate it sounded more like Thanksgiving dinner with your liberal aunt and uncle as panelist Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post hammered the candidates from the left and moderator Charlie Rose used a 27-year-old Reagan sound bite to push candidates to come out in favor of tax increases.

New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter marked the 15th anniversary of Fox News on the front of Monday’s Business section with a profile of host Sean Hannity, whose program has been a channel mainstay from the beginning: “Victory Lap for Fox and Hannity.”

Stelter wasn’t hostile, but did use something a guest said on Hannity’s show to accuse Hannity of instigating “inflammatory rhetoric.” But another Stelter story in the same section failed to criticize a left-wing figure, Tavis Smiley, who engages in truly inflammatory rhetoric from a secure public perch at PBS.

Tonight's GOP presidential debate (hosted by The Washington Post and Bloomberg TV) is moderated by longtime PBS late-night host Charlie Rose. His show has been touted as a "national salon," but it's a very cozy place for liberal media elites. Conservatives are not regulars. The most frequent guests include his journalist buddy Al Hunt (with 79 appearances), who now works at Bloomberg, and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (74 appearances). Most of the GOP contenders have never been on Rose's PBS show. (Gingrich and Romney have. It's not shocking that the only one to appear in the last four years was Jon Huntsman, last December.)

Rose has been notoriously fawning with some major Democratic figures, including the Clintons, and perhaps most energetically with Al Gore. In a cozy 2007 interview taped inside a supportive liberal bubble at the 92nd Street Y in New York, Rose offered testimony of how correct Gore was on the issues and how graciously he accepted defeat in 2000 (apparently after the six-week marathon of legal battles). The experts Rose quoted on this matter were two liberal columnists from The Washington Post and a liberal venture capitalist:

To answer Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain's claim that racism is not a big factor in African-American unemployment, CNN brought on radical left-wing activists Professor Cornel West of Princeton and Tavis Smiley of PBS, both of who co-host a public radio talk show.

Not-surprisingly, West and Smiley, both African-Americans, ripped Cain's comments. West griped that Cain needs to "get off the symbolic crack pipe" and added that he has "mediocrity, mendacity, mean-spiritedness toward the poor, and now mean-spiritedness toward black people fighting for their lives in this very ugly economy." [Video below the break. Click here for audio.]

On PBS's Inside Washington on Friday, the Politico's Evan Thomas - formerly of Newsweek - characterized the United States as a "great giant" that would go on to "stomp on" other countries after the 9/11 attacks.

After substitute host Mark Shields introduced a segment on the 10th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan by asking how history would "judge" the military operation, he turned to regular panel member Thomas who responded with a questionable choice of words:

"It’s an outrage that federal money has been an enabler for NPR and PBS since 1967 in their efforts to undermine conservatives and Christians," NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell complained in a statement released this morning that accompanies the release of a new Media Research Center (MRC) study detailing a comprehensive compilation of the 20 most memorable leftist excesses of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System.

"In this current era of huge deficits, surely this is the most non-essential spending. The pattern of bias from PBS hosts and contributors is more than severe. Now is the time for Congress to finally put an end to it," the MRC founder argued.

Some of the 20 instances in the MRC’s report on NPR & PBS include:

Newsweek's Eleanor Clift made a rather shocking prediction on this weekend's "McLaughlin Group."

"Obama’s justice department took the, asked for healthcare ruling from the Supreme Court because they’re nervous that they’re not going to be in office a year and a half from now" (video follows with commentary):

The juvenile bashing of Chris Christie's weight hit a disgraceful low on PBS's "Inside Washington" Friday when a panel absent the guiding sanity of syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer chuckled and guffawed over the size of the New Jersey governor.

What posterity will certainly view as one of the more embarrassing episodes on this political talk show stalwart came when PBS's Mark Shields quipped, "When you sit in the bathtub, and the water level in the toilet does rise, it’s a pretty good indication that you probably ought to cut the second dessert" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley interviewed Michael Moore on Monday night, and it wasn’t hardball time. Smiley asked: “What about growing up in Flint allowed you, moved you, in the direction of being the humanist that you are?” He also explicitly compared Moore to Martin Luther King, both seeking a “vocation of agony.”

But Smiley stayed true to his record of whacking President Obama from the left, asking Moore if he is finally seeing the light about “the venom and the vitriol and the vulgarity of the enemy that he’s up against?” Smiley isn't looking in the mirror. He means the conservatives.

For several weeks, NewsBusters has been reporting that despite protestations from liberal media members, Texas governor Rick Perry is 100 percent correct when he calls Social Security a Ponzi scheme.

On PBS's "Inside Washington" Friday, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer put a fine point on this saying, "If Charles Ponzi had had the force of the law forcing people, new entrants, into his scheme, he’d still be going. He’d be commissioner of Social Security" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer and the Washington Post's Colby King got into a heated debate about Barack Obama on Friday's "Inside Washington."

After King compared the current White House resident to Harry Truman, Krauthammer struck back with a list of Obama's shortcomings concluding, "He would be a good professor...He can do a lot of things, but run the United States he can't" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Although he attributed it to Mike Huckabee, Mark Shields on PBS's "Inside Washington" said Friday that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney "has more positions than the Kama Sutra."

This led Charles Krauthammer to humorously scold, "I thought this was a family show...There are children watching" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer on Friday said one of those truly memorable lines he comes up with from time to time.

Speaking about Barack Obama's decision to give his jobs creation plan before a joint session of Congress next week, Krauthammer told the host of PBS's "Inside Washington," "The same way the Federal Reserve is debasing our real currency he’s debasing the currency of presidential authority and presence" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In the view of the perilously liberal syndicated columnist Mark Shields, nothing good ever comes from corporate America.

On PBS's "Inside Washington" Friday, Shields told his fellow panelists, "If one waited for all the great social improvements of this country to come from CEOs, we would still have child labor at 8 cents an hour working at mills and looms and lathes" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

President Obama's vacation in Martha's Vineyard also became an occasion for a panel of liberal journalists, politicians, and academics to mourn his alleged mistreatment in the media at a race-and-the-media panel discussion organized by Harvard professor Charles Ogletree. PBS Washington Week anchor Gwen Ifill  lamented the overwhelming media bias against Obama in the Henry Louis Gates controversy, when Obama said he didn't have all the facts, but the local police "acted stupidly" for their actions in arresting Gates on his own porch.

Ifill somehow ignored that the Obama-supporting news networks pouted over how this comment was a "distraction" from passing ObamaCare, and overpublicized the "beer summit" Obama held at the White House with Gates and his arresting police officer to fix any public-relations damage he might have incurred. (She even ignored the newscast she sometimes anchors, the PBS NewsHour.) On August 18, the Vineyard Gazette reported Ifill complained:

It might not be surprising to see someone sit in the rarefied liberal air of a PBS set and dismiss the undignified palaver of talk radio and Ann Coulter, but on Friday's PBS NewsHour, this line was coming from former Bush speechwriting chief Michael Gerson, and the target was Gov. Rick Perry.

Gerson and liberal Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus were sitting in for David Brooks and Mark Shields. (In other words, Gerson was in the "I agree with Mark" chair.) Both agreed that Perry really gaffed in suggesting Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke was "treasonous" if he shoveled more dollars into the economy before the election:

Stock markets around the world are once again imploding in fear of a global double-dip recession.

Appearing on PBS's "Inside Washington" Friday, NPR's Nina Totenberg said Barack Obama can cure what ails us with "a lot of very populist rhetoric" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

After Congresswoman Michele Bachmann's win in Saturday's Iowa Straw Poll, the Obama-loving media have been working overtime to make darned certain the public doesn't think this has any significance.

Doing her part was PBS's Gwen Ifill who said on Sunday's "Face the Nation," "The last person to actually get elected president to win a Straw Poll was George W. Bush" - as if that was soooo long ago (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Charles Krauthammer on Friday evening exposed a classic liberal media hypocrisy concerning the differing bar used to determine truthfulness in politicians depending on their political leaning.

When "Inside Washington" panelist Nina Totenberg (NPR) asked if Republican presidential candidates might not have been totally honest Thursday evening when they all said they wouldn't accept a budget that incorporated ten dollars worth of spending cuts for every dollar raised in taxes, Krauthammer smartly responded, "Obama in the end said he wouldn’t sign a bill that didn’t increase taxes. In the end, he did. Was he lying?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

It was by no means surprising when Politico's Roger Simon claimed on Friday's "Inside Washington" that former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney's comment concerning corporations being people "was one of his rare flubs."

But when the Washington Post's Obama-loving columnist Colby King stuck up for Romney saying, "He's actually right," it's a metaphysical certitude many unsuspecting viewers around the nation spit out whatever was in their mouths (video follows with partial transcript and commentary):