Poor Joe.  Ann Curry is concerned that the senator from Delaware was the victim of a double-standard during last night's debate that caused him to hide his light under a barrel.  The Today show co-anchor [subbing for Meredith Vieira] expressed her misgivings this morning to Obama supporter Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.)

ANN CURRY: But he restrained himself to some degree. I mean, she called him "Joe," he called her "Governor."  She attacked him, he didn't attack her.  Do you think there was a double-standard at play here? Did Joe pull down his full game, and did that hurt him last night--and his ticket?

View video here.

Six days after declaring Barack Obama the winner of the first presidential debate, following Thursday's VP debate George Stephanopoulos again decided the liberal Democrat in the debate, this time Joe Biden, was the winner -- but in assigning his “Nightline Report Card” grades he gave both Biden and Sarah Palin the same overall assessments: each got one A, one A-minus and one B. Asked by anchor Terry Moran to name “the winner,” Stephanopoulos argued:

Joe Biden, but boy, was this close. I think that Governor Palin did an awful lot to help herself tonight. There is no question that she beat expectations, that she was fluent, that she showed she could stand up there on the stage. She laid a couple of attacks there against Barack Obama, but going back to my first point on overall strategy, right now, this is a race where if John McCain cannot convince the country that he's going to take it in a different direction from President Bush, he simply cannot win...

The grades from ex-Democratic operative Stephanopoulos. On “Strategy,” an A for Biden and an A-minus for Palin; on “Style,” an A-minus for Biden and an A for Palin; and on “Accuracy,” a B for both.

The Rolling Stone has a long attack piece on John McCain in its October issue that really rakes the GOP presidential candidate over the coals. The piece indulges in quite a lot of name calling and dismisses his patriotism, bravery, and integrity in nearly every paragraph. It's quite a vicious attack piece, really.

This slanderous piece doesn't even take a little time to get warmed up as it emerges, guns blazing, in the first few paragraphs by calling John McCain an "undisciplined, spoiled brat" and insisting that he once went to Rio to "get laid" despite being married, with three kids at the time. This sort of name calling is indicative of the whole piece.

Two themes in post-VP debate coverage Thursday night: First, “surprise” that Sarah Palin wasn't a “car wreck” and “did not embarrass herself.” Second, distress that she failed to answer moderator Gwen Ifill's questions.

On NBC, Chuck Todd observed “those that were tuning in looking for some sort of car wreck, probably came away disappointed.” CBS's Katie Couric proposed, without saying in which camp journalists fall, “the headline is Governor Sarah Palin did not embarrass herself or her running mate as some Republicans might have feared and some Democrats might have hoped.” Colleague Bob Schieffer asserted that “I think a lot of people were expecting” Palin “to make some sort of blunder or mistake and she did not do that.” Jeff Greenfield, also on CBS, decided “Palin passed the Tina Fey test. Anyone looking for a deer in the headlights experience didn't get one tonight.” Over on ABC, Diane Sawyer found that Palin, “after a bruising time in the media, showed up not just with confidence, but cheerful confidence that might surprise a lot of people.”

On Palin avoiding questions, CBS's Schieffer “found it a little disconcerting” that “time and again Governor Palin would just choose not to answer the question and launch in to some dissertation, sometimes talking points, and not really address what Gwen Ifill had asked her.” On CNN, reporter/analyst Gloria Borger charged: “I think at the beginning of the debate actually, Sarah Palin's problem was that she wasn't answering questions directly.” NBC anchor Brian Williams scolded: “Looking at some of the e-mail traffic and some of the commentary online tonight, people found it bracing when she said quote, 'I may not answer the questions the way the moderator and you,' Senator Biden, 'want to hear.' Of course, it's the only set of rules in town.”

Video/Audio: Click on frame above for video, compiled by the MRC's Michelle Humphrey, of Katie Couric, Bob Schieffer, Diane Sawyer and Chuck Todd. Matching MP3 audio (55 seconds)

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For the night owls, discuss the vice presidential debate and whatever else here.

After the vice presidential debate Chris Matthews criticized Sarah Palin for, of all things, looking into the camera because it made her look like a "dolt." In fact, the "Hardball," host took several stylistic shots at Palin that implied the Alaska Governor wasn't very intelligent. Audio here

When guest panelist Roger Simon noted Palin looked directly into the camera, Matthews observed:

You know what I think of people when they come on "Hardball," and they look at the camera, I think they're dolts.

In addition to the "dolt," remark Matthews viewed Palin's performance as "so reciting," and "automatic," "like a spelling bee," and charged:

The dangerous thing about these debates is that you can really recite your way to victory. You can memorize an awful lot of material and get away with it as intelligence, when in fact, it's just really good preparation.

The following exchanges occurred during MSNBC's October 2, post vice presidential debate coverage and then later on a special midnight [EDT] edition of "Hardball:"

During the 7pm edition of Thursday’s "Hardball," Chris Matthews repeatedly asked his guests if Sarah Palin's "brain" was up to the task for tonight's vice presidential debate. Matthews even managed to go where a Democratic Congresswoman wouldn't, when he asked Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz: "Is this about her brain power?" To which, even the Florida Democrat balked: "It’s really not nice to suggest that there's something wrong with her brain power."

However Matthews didn't let Schultz's hesitancy stop him from questioning the Republican vice presidential nominee's intelligence as he asked these series of questions about Palin to Schultz:     Mp3 Here

Well do you think cute will beat brains?

Do you think she'd do better on the questions on "Jeopardy" or the interview they do during a halftime?

Congressman how much would you, how much would you like to be debating her tonight?

Then a little later on in the program, during a segment with the Politico's Mike Allen and New York magazine's John Heilemann, Matthews worried Palin's perceived lack of intellectual curiosity was "scary."

Who will win tonight's vice presidential debate? Will openly liberal moderator Gwen Ifill be fair to GOP candidate Sarah Palin?

Tune in via web or TV starting at 9pm ET to find out. Post your comments and observations on the questions here or, if you are a registered NewsBusters member, join our live discussion.

Update 22:10. Live chat was bogging down the server. It's disabled temporarily.

At the top of Thursday's World News, just hours before the vice presidential debate, ABC anchor teased that “a new poll shows most Americans don't think” Palin is “ready to be a heartbeat away,” and, in explaining the advice both candidates are getting from their advisers, George Stephanopoulos fretted about “the dilemma for Biden,” which given that “we expect Sarah Palin to have some attack lines on Biden, on Obama. He's got to choose, at some point, not to let those attacks go unanswered.”

So there's the early media line: Biden will be the victim of attacks from Palin and must figure out how to counter those unfair attacks.

In the lead story, reporter Kate Snow did not cite any poll number about how “most Americans don't think” Palin is ready to be President, but she did highlight how “our new ABC News poll finds the public souring on Palin. One-third of registered voters now say her selection makes them less likely to support John McCain for President.”

Former Los Angeles Times reporter Sam Fulwood III unloaded on conservative criticism of Gwen Ifill’s conflict of interest on the Washington Post-owned website The Root on Thursday with an article titled "Distort, Distract, Demagogue." Any conservative who questioned whether Ifill would be a fair moderator when she’s writing a book chronicling the "age of Obama" is not only a demagogue, but a sycophant:

If nothing else, the sycophants genuflecting to the McCain-Palin presidential campaign are experts at creating diversions.

When things go bad, they call out the troops to fill the airwaves with misdirection. Or they heave Hail Mary passes, hoping to connect with their easy-to-anger supporters. In fact, they'll do just about anything except admit to the campaign's shortcomings. So now, they've dragged PBS anchor Gwen Ifill into the crosshairs of their phony efforts at sowing confusion and distraction.

In some ways, this video is even more disturbing than the video of the children singing a tribute to Barack Obama. In this case, we see a bunch of kids dressed in paramilitary uniforms ritualistically shouting out their praise for Obama. Yes, according to the chants, these kids are supposedly inspired to enter various professions all thanks to a certain Chicago Machine politician. This is reminiscent of North Korean kids chanting out their praises for the "Dear Leader." And is this performance by students of Urban Community Leadership Academy of Kansas City, MO even legal?

On Thursday’s "Newsroom" program, CNN anchor Kyra Phillips treated senior Obama adviser/former ABC correspondent Linda Douglass more cordially than McCain supporter/Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, whom she pressed for an answer on the question of whether Sarah Palin is smarter than her opponent Joe Biden: "Is, is she deep enough? Is she smart enough? Is she experienced enough? Do you really think she is better than Joe Biden?"

Phillips had the two on for back-to-back interviews just after the bottom half of the 1 pm Eastern hour of the CNN program. Phillips began her interview of Douglass by asking a softball question: "I just want what to know, as a strong female who's been very successful, is all this talk about, oh, Joe Biden needs to be a gentleman. He needs to watch his manners. He needs to treat Sarah Palin like a lady. Does that bother you in any way that that's even coming up?" Douglass initially responded by exclaiming, "What a good question! You are the first person who has asked that question today." After the Obama adviser completed her answer, Phillips followed-up with a light comment: "Good. But he'll still get the door for her, right?" The two of them shared a laugh over the quip.

On the 5pm edition of Thursday night's "Hardball," Chris Matthews ventured out into the crowd of students on hand for tonight's vice presidential debate at Washington University to see what they were looking for in a candidate. When one student responded: "I'd like a display of knowledge and expertise." Matthews interjected: "So you're on the Obama side, right?"

Matthews then asked a different student, in an apparent shot at Sarah Palin, if a "candidate for Vice President should be able to get into Washington University?"

MP3 Audio

The following exchanges occurred on the October 2, edition of "Hardball:"

This morning, Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, appeared on Fox News's Fox & Friends to answer a few questions about tonight's vice presidential debate between Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and Delaware Senator Joe Biden.

Grabbing the headlines the past few days has been the news that Gwen Ifill, debate moderator, has written a book subtitled "The Age of Obama" which is set to be released on the day of the inauguration of the next president in January. A win by Barack Obama could positively impact book sales and have caused some to question the impartiality of Ifill.

Call it The Palin Witch Project. A really poor parody of The Blair Witch Project that has such bad acting on the part of Rap music star, Diddy, that we laugh at him, not with him, because of the campy clumsiness of his failed attempt at humor. The ABC News site discusses this Diddy video as well as the attitudes of other celebs towards Sarah Palin:

With the first vice presidential debate imminent and Nov. 4 around the corner, Hollywood is refusing to hold its tongue about Sarah Palin. 

Stars' comments about her are getting downright bizarre. Rap music/reality TV/fashion mogul Diddy (real name: Sean Combs) posted a video blog about Palin on his YouTube page today entitled "Sarah Palin Scares Me!!" (Guess which candidate he's supporting?)

Surprise! Joy Behar thinks Gwen Ifill, with her conflict of interest, should step aside from moderating the vice presidential debate. Could it be Joy attempting to establish herself as an independent thinker? Not likely. Joy explained, on the October 2 edition of "The View," that Ifill should not give "Palin’s side any excuse to not step up to the plate."

Earlier in the broadcast, when each panelist posed their hypothetical questions to Senator Biden and Governor Palin, Joy Behar claimed "according to what I [Behar] read" Palin allegedly supported forcing rape victims to pay for their kit due to opposition to the "morning after" pill. Surprisingly, Whoopi Goldberg countered Joy with "it’s not true" and thoroughly explained that Sarah Palin had no say in the rape kit matter.

If Old Media can cook their numbers to make their favored candidate look good, they will.

Earlier today, I covered two cooked AP-GfK polls (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog). The pollster dramatically changed the party-ID makeup of the second poll to include a much higher percentage of Democrats, and watered down the strong-GOP component of the Republicans sampled. As a result, the two poll results, taken together, fabricated an illusion of Barack Obama momentum, and John McCain decline. The results couldn't be more bogus; holding the mix constant from one poll to the next would have caused John McCain's lead from three weeks ago to shrink by about 1%.

Its also seems that if Old Media can't use a poll to fabricate its way to the result it wants, it simply ignores it. Two examples from the same poll will demonstrate this.

On Wednesday, NewsBusters' Scott Whitlock noted that ABC ignored its own national poll conducted with the Washington Post that showed a 4% national edge for Barack Obama -- down from 9% the previous week.

Yesterday, the Washington Post's Jon Cohen and Jennifer Agiesta didn't totally ignore the poll (full results are here). Like ABC, they ignored the topside result just mentioned, which is pictured below:

While the networks scrutinize Republican Sarah Palin’s every comment for evidence that she’s a dimwit unqualified for the vice presidency, there’s been barely any discussion of how alleged foreign policy expert Joe Biden was dreadfully wrong in 2006-2007 in his fierce objection to the troop surge strategy in Iraq, which has led to a massive reduction in U.S. and Iraqi casualties and prevented a complete collapse and civil war.

When Biden was picked in late August, the networks touted Biden’s “wealth of experience” and “long record of accomplishment” on foreign policy (CBS); his “deep foreign policy experience” (NBC); and “foreign policy expertise” (ABC). But only NBC’s Tom Brokaw, interviewing Biden on the September 7 Meet the Press, actually confronted the Democratic vice presidential nominee with his strident opposition to the surge, telling Biden: “All the indications are the surge has worked up to a point.”

At the top of Thursday’s CBS Early Show, correspondent Jeff Glor reported on the upcoming vice presidential debate by declaring: "35-year Senate veteran Joe Biden versus the upstart from Alaska, Sarah Palin, the surprise VP pick, whose credentials have been questioned after a series of attention-grabbing interviews." Despite referring to Palin as an "upstart," Glor also pointed out Biden’s failings: "If Palin has been accused of saying too little since joining the ticket, Biden, in his past, has said too much...Notable foot-in-mouth comments and old plagiarism accusations put pressure on him, too." Glor also played a clip of one of Biden’s well-known gaffes: "You cannot go to a Seven Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent."

In a later segment, co-host Harry Smith interviewed Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill and asked about some of her recent comments regarding Biden’s verbal missteps: "Speaking of Joe Biden putting his foot in his mouth, you said sometime in the last 24 hours or so, I'm getting this off the Kansas City Star website: ‘My friend, Joe Biden, has a tendency to talk forever and sometimes say stuff that's kind of stupid’...how worried are you about him tonight?" McCaskill admited: "Yeah. That was my Joe Biden --that was my Joe Biden moment yesterday." Mentioning Biden’s gaffes helped to balance out co-host Maggie Rodriguez’s hostile interview with Fred Thompson, in which she asked: "The McCain campaign has been spending a lot of time lately having to defend her and a growing number of Republicans are criticizing her for her perceived lack of knowledge, or at least inability to discuss important issues."

Due out from Random House Publishing:

Breakthrough: Politics and Republicanism in the Age of Dewey

Authors: The Editors of the Chicago Daily Tribune.

Publish Date: January 20th, 1949.

Thoughts from the authors:

Former Clinton Administration officials and liberal news media personalities who have been sharply critical of the "The Path to 9/11" miniseries fail to point out that top executives, editors and researchers connected with the docudrama ,who are actually quite left of center themselves, were supportive of the project, according to a new film that explores the controversy.

"The Path to 9/11" is a two part ABC television miniseries that aired on Sept. 10 and 11 in 2006. It is based in part on the 9/11 commission report and presents viewers with a dramatization of the events that lead up to the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington D.C. in 2001. The film highlights the U.S. government's ineffective response to terrorism in the 1990s and in the first few months of the Bush administration.

To suggest the "The Path" was conceived for the purpose of singling out and smearing the former president as part of a "right wing hit piece" aimed against the former president simply does not square with reality, since the project was launched and conceived by several openly liberal ABC executives the new film explains.

On Wednesday's "Good Morning America," the program completely skipped an ABC poll that showed a tight, four percent national lead for Barack Obama. Thursday's show, however, prominently featured a new ABC survey that claimed 60 percent of Americans think that Sarah Palin does not have the experience to be president.

Former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos, now the host of "This Week," proclaimed the results suggest that "Sarah Palin is becoming more and more of a drag on Senator John McCain as she heads into this debate tonight." He then authoritatively asserted, "If she has another moment like she had in her interviews with Charlie Gibson and her interviews with Katie Couric where she draws a blank or makes a significant mistake, that could be nearly fatal to the McCain campaign..."