NB Extra

As the ratings for Fox News shows continue a grip on the top 13 or so shows on cable news (including the 11pm "O'Reilly Factor" repeat), Dominic Patten at Deadline Hollywood reported that MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 pm and CNN’s tryout of “The Point” (a ripoff of “The Five”) at 10 pm were not impressive.

“With a four-day average of 684,000 viewers and 199,000 in the demo, All In was down 24% from what the Ed Show had in total viewers for April 2-April 5, 2012, and it was down 13% in adults 25-54,” Patten reported.  It’s a good thing MSNBC will likely let this show attempt to bloom and grow.

Paul Bedard at the Washington Examiner reported that in speaking to David Gergen at Harvard's Institute of Politics on March 27, former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau said "it's a lie" the way the news media portray President Obama  as "purely cynical" and pursuing selfish political interests.

Does Favreau watch the networks? They love offering Obama the mantle of idealism whenever they can. But he insisted:

Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh had some harsh words Friday in response to today's lousy jobs report.

"We are living in a dying country."

Labels might be useful for can of soup, according to The Huffington Post, but they aren’t practical when it comes to being Christian. 

At issue was 26-year-old Marcus Mumford, the lead singer of the popular British band “Mumford & Sons,” who refused to identify himself as “Christian” during an interview with Rolling Stone reporter Brian Hiatt. Mumford’s denial came as a surprise in Christian circles, considering his music thrives on religious imagery – or what Christianity Today called, “Christ-haunted” lyrics.

The New York Times's Michael Shear passed along the Obama administration's unsubstantiated claim that 40% of gun purchases take place without a background check, in Wednesday's "Background Checks Are Still Stumbling Block in Gun Law Overhaul."

Since the existing background-check system began, in 1994, officials have screened more than 108 million people before they could buy a gun, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics; the federal government has blocked 1.9 million attempted purchases because of felony convictions or other problems with the would-be buyers’ background.

But no background check is required for about 40 percent of gun purchases, including those made online or at gun shows, federal officials estimate. Requiring checks for those purchases would be the single most effective way to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people, advocates say.

Since its founding in 1996, the Fox News Channel has been the subject of much media scrutiny. Part of this was inevitable given that its creator, Roger Ailes, explicitly designed it to be different than the rest of the national media outlets which lean to the left.

As such, there has been a lot of journalism produced about Fox News. Some of it has been excellent. Much of it has been nonsense, including a hoax “study” purporting to show that Fox News viewers have lower IQs than average and actual real study claiming that people who watched the channel were “misinformed” about political issues. As it turned out, the non-hoax was incredibly shoddy as it basically determined that someone was “informed” if he agreed with the political opinions of Democrats and “uninformed” if he agreed with Republicans.

Editor's Note: What follows is a speech delivered by Neal Freeman from March 23 in Amelia Island, Fla., entitled "Lessons for Today From the Immortals: Buckley and Reagan." Mr. Freeman is an award-winning TV producer credited with more than one thousand programs for national broadcast. He served as an executive with the Hearst Corporation before founding his own advisory firm, the Blackwell Corporation. Mr. Freeman also served in the Reagan administration as the director of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Looking over this audience, I sense that I may have been around the political track a few more laps than most of you. I can tell you that every lap is unique in its own way -- and that the lap we completed last November was uniquely disappointing. Rarely in my experience has a winning candidate appealed to meaner spirits. Never has a winning candidate seemed less interested in calling his countrymen to reconciliation and common purpose. When has an American President, even in the afterglow of victory, seemed so small?

As you all are painfully aware, it is the settling judgment of the commentariat that the light of the American day is beginning to fade. They say that we are on the downslope of history and headed for inconsequence. That’s highly unlikely, in my view, but it may help to remember that ours is not by a wide measure the darkest day in the American story. Heed the words of Abrhama Lincolm, speaking from the pitch-blackness of December 1862: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion . . . We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country.”

Here's proof that declarations of social liberalism are everywhere in the New York Times. Erik Piepenburg has an article on fans of the cult horror movie "The Evil Dead." The star of that 1981 film, Bruce Campbell, is behind a new, different version. But "For some fans no remake is worth their attention."

The star of the article is Zack Carlson, a writer for the horror movie Web site Bleeding Skull. Carlson wouldn't "watch it at gunpoint,"  adamant that he will be “aggressively and violently” ignoring the new “Evil Dead.” Unlike his ardor for abortion and gay marriage, which were somehow inserted into this story:

There never seems to be a shortage of extreme and vitriolic language spewing out of the folks at MSNBC.  The latest example of the extreme rhetoric appearing on MSNBC programming comes from a guest on the weekend show Melissa Harris-Perry.

Appearing as one of Ms. Perry’s guests was Anthea Butler, associate professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, who, when discussing record numbers of Americans now on food stamps, compared Walmart, the nation’s largest employer, to a “sharecropper.”  [See video after jump.  MP3 audio here.]