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Tiger Woods' "transgressions" sparked conversations about why men cheat but it took a comedian to pinpoint the basic reason - lack of character.

Comedian Chuck Nice appeared on the "All Guy Panel" during the fourth hour of Thursday morning's "Today" and blasted men who engage in extramarital affairs.

"I've said this before and I will say it again. And no one wants to accept this as an answer, but here is the reason why men cheat. It is a failure of character. That is it," Nice exclaimed.

"End of story. It's a failure of character," he continued. "A man who has the strong, spiritual conviction to say that although I want to do this, I will rely upon a higher power to make sure and strengthen me so that I am able to stand for my vows is the man who will not cheat. Now, that's the end of it."

NBC's Brian Williams took time Thursday night to show video a statue of President Barack Obama at age 10, then known as Barry, being unveiled in Jakarta, near where he attended school at that age. “The statue was put there to remind children in Indonesia to follow their dreams and remind them their future is without limits,” Williams helpfully explained.

The life-size bronze replica of Obama in a T-shirt and shorts is adorned with what Politico suggested “appears to be a Nobel medal around his neck” and what the AP described as “the young Obama smiling at a butterfly that has landed on his upheld left thumb.” The AP dispatch also reported: “The statue's pedestal carries an paraphrased quote from former U.S. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt reading, 'The future belongs to those who believe in the power of their dreams.'”

This wasn't the first time the NBC Nightly News found inspiration in Obama's time in Indonesia. Back during the campaign in March of 2008, the newscast ran a celebratory piece about how excited Obama's childhood friends in Indonesia were about his candidacy in a story which began and ended with a picture of Obama's classmates in front of huge “Good Luck Barry!” lettering.

“Barack Obama as a person is a fantastic individual, but Barack Obama as an idea marks an evolutionary flash point for humanity,” gushed actor Will Smith (IMDb page), who will co-host Friday's Nobel Peace Prize Concert in Oslo. His idealization of Obama came during a recorded interview, from Norway, with CNN's Dan Lothian run shortly before 5 PM EST on Thursday's The Situation Room.

Asked if Obama had really earned the peace prize, Smith's wife, actress Jada Pickett Smith who will co-host the concert with her husband, insisted: “All I can say is that our President has opened his arms to the world and he has been a huge symbol of change himself. So, I have to say that I was quite honored when he was bestowed the Nobel Peace Prize.” Will Smith chimed in with how “they've been giving out that award for a hundred and some years, so they get kind of good at picking” the honoree.

Audio: MP3 clip (30 seconds)

There has been a lot of media focus dedicated to the alleged Tiger Woods scandal - even so much that when examined quantitatively, it overshadows more serious issues.

So what will the net result of this media scrutiny be for Tiger? CNBC's sports reporter, Darren Rovell, took a crack at answering that on the Dec. 10 broadcast of "Squawk Box."

"It's 12 straight days in the [New York] Post right now," Rovell said. "Everyday since Nov. 29, there's been a Tiger Woods story. When does it end? We don't know. I'm not going to get into the details of this, but from a business standpoint - how about Donald Trump on 'Extra' yesterday?"

CNN’s Christiane Amanpour lashed out at the widespread criticism of the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama on Thursday’s American Morning: “Can I just say, I think it’s overdone, this pushing back against his award. He’s obviously done something very significant, and that is...the United States has now had a new relationship with the rest of the world” [audio clip from the segment available here].

Amanpour and CNN senior political analyst David Gergen appeared just after the beginning of the 7 am Eastern hour, about an hour before the President formally received his Nobel in Oslo. Anchor Kiran Chetry asked the chief international correspondent, “[W]e received some of the embargoed remarks, and he [President Obama] does acknowledge quite soon in this delivery the controversy surrounding it, that perhaps he’s at the beginning and not the end of his labors on the world stage. How do you think that’s being received?”

The Iranian-born journalist immediately launched into her critique: “You know what? Can I just say, I think it’s overdone, this pushing back against his award. He’s obviously done something very significant, and that is, after eight years in which the United States was really held in contempt around the world, the United States has now had a new relationship with the rest of the world. This is what the Nobel Committee has rewarded and has accepted. This is what the polls around the world are showing.”

Chris Wallace, host of "Fox News Sunday" is the latest in a long line of observers to note the essentially religious fervor of those who believe man is responsible for global warming, and the blind faith with which they cling to the science behind it.  

Wallace, appearing on the Fox Business Network's Dec. 10 "Imus in the Morning" program to discuss the President's European trip with stops in Oslo and Copenhagen, said the religious conviction is evident in the way climate change alarmists treat those who challenge the theory.

"The President's going to Copenhagen - so he's flying all over the world leaving a Sasquatch-like carbon footprint," host Don Imus said. "So what's that all about?"

There's certainly an argument to be made that college football's Bowl Championship Series (BCS) isn't an ideal system, but just to what degree should the federal government come in and regulate this multi-billion dollar industry?

According to Andy Staples, a writer for Sports Illustrated's Web site, SI.com who appeared on the Fox News Channel's Dec. 9 "Studio B," the industry should be revamped from a regulatory aspect because of an issue of "fairness." He was asked by host Shepard Smith why it is appropriate for Congress to be meddling in the college football.

"It is funny because everybody says, ‘Why is Congress wasting its time on this?'" Staples said. "It is a multi-billion dollar business involving more than 100 publicly funded universities. That is probably something Congress might want to dabble in if there is a question about it, and there are some questions about it."

Sarah Palin isn't getting much of a break these days from anyone on the left end of the political spectrum.

In the Dec. 9 Washington Post, an op-ed appeared by the former Alaska governor, in which she called on President Barack Obama to boycott the current Copenhagen climate summit in the wake of the "Climategate" e-mail leak.

"Without trustworthy science and with so much at stake, Americans should be wary about what comes out of this politicized conference," Palin wrote. "The president should boycott Copenhagen."

The op-ed, specifically that paragraph, drew the ire of some prominent lefties, including The Daily Beast's Editor in Chief Tina Brown and Time magazine political columnist Joe Klein. Brown said Palin's call on Obama to boycott was "grandstanding" without basis on MSNBC's Dec. 9 broadcast of "Morning Joe."

“Morning Joe” was a little tense this morning.

Fresh off Donny Deutsch’s defense of Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) slavery analogy, Mike Barnicle asked GOP Chairman Michael Steele about what proposals the GOP favored for health-care reform.  Along the way, however, he used an unfortunate choice of words:

MIKE BARNICLE: [...] What are you people for?

MICHAEL STEELE: You people? [starts laughing] Who are 'you people?'

Each year the Business & Media Institute looks back on the year's news and selects the top 10 worst economic myths. Here is our 2009 list:

10. CBS, NY Times Support Ecuadorian Shakedown of U.S. oil company
9. Media Fail to Scrutinize Obama's Job Claims  
8. Government Stimulus is the Answer to Our Economic Problems
7. No Tax Increases for the Middle Class
6. The Recession was Over ... by July.
5. Cash for Clunkers was a ‘Success'
4. Reagan vs. Obama on Jobs: Same Rate, Different Story
3. Health Care Reform will be ‘Deficit Neutral'
2. Tea Parties aren't made up of grassroots protestors; they're just ‘Astroturf.'
1. ClimateGate

10. CBS, NY Times Support Ecuadorian Shakedown of U.S. oil company.

Media myth: Chevron is responsible for abandoned oil wells across Ecuador.

A South American country is trying to squeeze $27 billion out of Chevron for environmental cleanup from discarded oil wells - all with the help of the U.S. news media.

CBS "60 Minutes" and The New York Times took the side of "eco-radicals" at the Amazon Defense Coalition who have filed suit against Chevron, even though the government of Ecuador signed off on the company's cleanup actions more than 10 years ago.

Surely no one would be foolish enough to defend Harry Reid's statement analogizing ObamaCare opponents to those who resisted the abolition of slavery, right? Um, may I introduce you to Donny Deutsch?

On Morning Joe today, the ad man suggested to RNC Chairman Michael Steele that there was nothing wrong with Reid's analogy.  When Steele didn't deign to dignify Deutsch's absurdity with a response, a nasty little stand-off ensued . . .

“Facing a clock some say has ticked down to zero, today 192 nations came together to take on a potential global catastrophe,” a dire ABC reporter Bob Woodruff ominously intoned from Copenhagen on Monday’s World News with “Saving the Planet?” on screen.

Those attending the conference on climate change “where an official said today the clock has ticked down to zero and it's time to act,” NBC anchor Brian Williams warned, “say it's so late in the game, so much damage has been done, they fear they can already see how this ends.” Anne Thompson then declared: “This is about life or death -- 192 countries are here in Copenhagen to cut the carbon emissions changing the climate and threatening the very existence of some nations and their people.”

Echoing that theme, CBS’s Mark Phillips stood in water up to his neck and then became completely submerged to illustrate the feared impact of rising sea levels: “The Maldives have become the canary in the global warming coal mine.”

NBC and ABC raised “ClimateGate” in passing – without actually using the term – only to dismiss the revelations. “The man who leads the U.N. panel that blames human activity for climate change said the science is broad and consistent,” Thompson reassured NBC viewers. Woodruff applied the “denier” pejorative as he asserted “climate change deniers say these e-mails are proof humans aren't causing global warming,” but “U.S. officials say the evidence proves otherwise.”

If ABC, NBC and CBS's judgment is correct, Tiger Woods's infidelity is more important than a climate change scandal involving high profile scientists, potentially ‘manipulated' data, and censorship of skeptics among the scientific community.

How much more important? Over 15 times. Despite the impending Copenhagen climate conference, the networks ignored the ClimateGate scandal for 13 straight days on morning and evening news programs. Finally, they got around to mentioning it in four stories during the weekend of Dec. 4 - Dec. 6 as reported on Newsbusters

Even in those climate stories reporters made sure to inform the public that, despite the Climategate revelations, "the science is solid" and "the evidence is overwhelming that man is behind climate change." On ABC, Clayton Sandell mentioned the e-mails stolen from the University of East Anglia Dec. 6, but without including any of the disturbing quotes about using a "trick" to "hide the decline" in temperature, or bullying scientific publications to keep skeptics' work from being peer reviewed.

Even the BBC didn't let this scoop get away.

A segment on the Dec. 3 broadcast of BBC's "Newsnight," showed the implications of the story behind the so-called "ClimateGate" scandal are more than just e-mails concealing data, but an incompetence analyzing the data by way of faulty computer code.

John Graham-Cumming, a British programmer known for the open source "POPFile email filtering program" explained how the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) had wholesale problems with its computer programming analyzing climate change data, with billion, if not even trillions of dollars, on the line.

On Dec. 4, the Australian actress Portia de Rossi, wife of Ellen DeGeneres, appeared on both ABC's "Good Morning America" and "The View" to promote her ABC sitcom ‘Better off Ted" ... well, supposedly. In reality, ABC simply offered de Rossi a soapbox to rant about gay rights.

During his interview with de Rossi, GMA correspondent Bill Weir called DeGeneres and de Rossi a "beautiful couple" and gushed, "Every time we see you two together the affection is still so obvious."

Weir then asked de Rossi a long-winded question about legalizing gay marriage, which included a prophecy of his own.

"And you're a testament for this sort of thing," Weir began, "and - I don't want to get too political on you but there probably will be a day when this is not a novelty - but when you see sort of the votes that happen - some setbacks politically - how do you think about that in your house?"

We're heading into the fourteenth day that the networks have deliberately ignored the Climategate scandal. And it's understandable. After all, air time is valuable and there are so many pressing issues to cover. Like ... um ...

Well, on Dec. 4, NBC's four-hour "Today" show couldn't squeeze in a single reference to Climategate, but it did find the time to discuss a British couple that's financing their wedding by producing their own porn movies.

"They have made some money already off their porn movies," NBC's Hoda Kotb said.

"Yes," said Kotb's co-host Kathie Lee Gifford. "They've made $2,155 making three of their own X-rated movies ... They plan to make four more, and they want to finance their romantic wedding beach ceremony in Cancun, Mexico next June."

Important stories ...

Please enjoy the video below the fold.

gyp Slang
vb gyps, gypping, gypped, gips gipping, gipped
(tr) to swindle, cheat, or defraud
[back formation from Gypsy]

Someone call the PC police. At a town hall in Allentown, PA today, Pres. Obama said he is seeking to regulate health insurance companies to make sure that people don't get "gypped."

Perhaps PBO thought the term would appeal to the crowd.  This was Pennsylvania, after all, the state PBO imagines to be filled with bitter people clinging to "antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment."

What's $200 billion annually, or roughly $1,761 per family per year, if it means lowering by 10 percent the chance that the world is going to end? It's a pittance to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

Friedman made an appearance on CNN's Dec. 3 "Campbell Brown" to promote the paperback release of his book, "Hot, Flat, and Crowded." Brown asked Friedman for his take on the ClimateGate scandal, and he insisted there should be transparency as far as the data is concerned.

"Well, these were hacked e-mails from one of the important climate research centers over in the U.K.," Friedman said. "And, frankly, Campbell, as someone who follows this issue, cares about it, I found some of those e-mails disappointing, frankly in the kind of way in which it seemed that they were trying to keep certain research out, you know, of the discussion, because I think transparency here is really ... is everything. OK. You say this. I say that. Here is my data. Here is your data."

Norah O'Donnell just can't stop condescending to supporters of Sarah Palin.  Appearing on Morning Joe today, the MSNBC correspondent rehashed a line she has used before: that fans of Sarah Palin are just too darn busy to know what's happening in the world.  According to O'Donnell, Sarah supporters don't have "30 minutes to an hour to read the newspaper."

As I reported here, O'Donnell sounded the same theme a couple weeks ago, when interviewing Palin fans waiting on line at a book-signing in Michigan.  By coincidence, Jackie Seal, a high school senior and Palin supporter whom Norah had ambushed with some prepared notes, was a guest last night on Right Angle, the local TV show this NewsBuster hosts.  We discussed O'Donnell's condescension, Jackie making the point that most supporters are well-informed about Palin's positions.

View the Right Angle segment after the break.

When O'Donnell began dispensing her slur on Sarah supporters, Mika Brzezinski tried to warn her of the reaction sure to come . .  .

Fake but accurate rides again!  The same lame defense Dan Rather used in Memogate has been trotted out on ClimateGate by Columbia Univ. Prof. Jeffrey Sachs.  

Appearing on Morning Joe today, the author of Common Wealth [note play on words: your money is our money] alleged that the real victims in this scandal are . . . the number-fudging scientists. People are attempting to "Swiftboat" those poor CRU guys, sighed Sachs.  For good measure, the good professor asserted that what the fudgesters did "is not a very big deal."

[Update, 9:15 pm: Video added below the fold.]

CNN anchor Rick Sanchez fairly moderated a debate between glacier photographer James Balog and Marc Morano of ClimateDepot.com on Thursday’s Newsroom about the issue of climate change. Sanchez did not side with either one of the debaters in his questions during the segment, and asked both reasonable questions [audio clip from the segment available here].

The CNN anchor led the 3 pm Eastern hour with a preview of the debate segment, as he played a video clip from Balog of a glacier in Alaska, and made his first hint that the ClimateGate scandal was going to be mentioned later: “The man who shot this video used to think global warming wasn’t real. He’s changed his mind. But leaked e-mails from prominent climate scientists tell a different story. You’re going to hear both sides.”

Before introducing both of his guests in the last segment of the hour, Sanchez played more glacier video from the photographer, as he further detailed the climate change controversy, and made another indirect reference to the ClimateGate e-mail scandal:

Yesterday at the daily White House press briefing, press secretary Robert Gibbs talked down to reporter April Ryan of American Urban Radio Networks (AURN), a  journalist with nearly a quarter-century of experience.

Ryan was pressing Gibbs over whether Desiree Rogers, the White House social secretary, essentially "invited herself" to last week's state dinner in honor of the Indian Prime Minister. Rogers has come under scrutiny for failing to have either herself or other social office staffers accompany Secret Service staffers who conducted security screenings for the dinner.

Gibbs, annoyed by Ryan pressing the matter, chided Ryan to calm down and suggesting that she was throwing a tantrum much like his son sometimes does.

I've included a partial transcript and CSPAN's video embed below the page break. Advance the embedded video above to about the 31:00 timestamp to see the relevant exchange (h/t Tim Graham):

Every once in a while, a liberal cuts right through the hemming and hawing and verbalizes his true world view. Like Hollywood producer Gavin Polone commenting on the Tiger Woods episode: If you can't live up to the terms and responsibilities of an institution, the institution must change. That's essentially the lesson Polone  believes Tiger should draw from his adultery disgrace.

Marriage, you see, is an anachronism that doesn't fit with how we moderns live our lives - or at least, how the important people in Hollywood live theirs.

"I know a lot of famous people," Polone said on Dec. 3 during an interview on MSNBC's "Morning Meeting." "And actually the norm is that they cheat."

Polone, who produced the 2009 movie "Zombieland," argued that it isn't fair for stars like Tiger Woods who are "in the public eye" to be "called to task for their behavior" - behavior that Polone said is "probably pretty natural behavior given what they're going through."

The real problem lies with society's idea of marriage. As a people, he said, we need to "rethink the idea of locking into someone for what one would call a lifetime marriage."

Yesterday at noon, Media Research Center President Bozell hosted the first in a new series of Webcasts entitled "MRC Live! with Brent Bozell," in which the NewsBusters publisher answers questions submitted by members of the MRC Action Team. We expect to hold the next Webcast sometime in mid-January. We'll bring you more details when we have the date nailed down.

[Click here for information on how to join the MRC Action Team. You can view yesterday's Webcast in the video embed at right.]

Among other questions fielded, Bozell addressed the "why" in the perennial question, why are the mainstream media so liberal:

The media might finally be tiring of the profane, misogynistic blogger Perez Hilton. On his Dec. 2 interview on "The View," the five female hosts of the show relentlessly fired at him from every angle, ranging from his exploitation of children to his infamous reputation of outing gays. This was especially surprising considering the way Hilton has been treated by the media elite in the past.

For years, broadcast and cable networks and even newspapers have presented Hilton's offensive blog - dubbed a "tastemaker" by the LA Times - as harmless and entertaining. In 2007, ABC's Jake Tapper called it "snarky, amusing, cool and fishy," and, in 2009, CBS correspondent Erica Hill called Hilton's commentary "a little tongue-in-cheek, maybe some snide remarks here about some perhaps not so flattering moments."

Yesterday, though, during his appearance on "The View," Hilton might have finally realized that his love affair with the media won't last forever.

The seemingly creepy fixation some MSNBC on-air personalities have with Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann just continues to persist on the cable network.

The latest installment involves MSNBC's "Ed Show" host Ed Schultz relying on a left-wing publication, The Minnesota Independent, which found a high rate of foreclosures relative in Bachmann's district relative to the rest of the state of Minnesota. Schultz, on his Dec. 2 program, contended Bachmann was spending too much time as a conservative activist and not enough time focusing on the problems of her district. But it turns out the data might not be at all accurate.

"One last page in my playbook tonight," Schultz said. "It looks like Minnesota congresswoman and ‘Psycho Talk' regular Michele Bachmann needs to spend a little bit more time riling up the right-wing nut job partiers out there and focus on her own back yard." 

In a perverse advertisement currently on the its Web site, CBS is trying to cross market the crass television show "How I Met Your Mother" with the children's holiday classic "Frosty the Snowman" (and the not-so-classic "Frosty Returns").

The disgusting result was the video "Frosty the Inappropriate Snowman," in which Neil Patrick Harris's voice (in character from the sitcom "How I Met Your Mother") was dubbed over Frosty footage.

Harris' Frosty said things like, "We've got to have a bros' night at a strip club" because it's "healthy" and "harmless." He also discussed his "porn collection" and "the Dominator 8000 - the best bull whip on the market."

Well-known scenes of the classic Frosty delighting children by coming to life were perverted by the ad which included Frosty saying, "I have been with a lot of women. Blondes. Brunettes. Redheads. Big boobs. Small boobs. Medium boobs. Some boobs that were big but kind of in a bad way."

Media Research Center President and NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell will appear on a live 20 to 30-minute-long Web cast starting at noon EST. You can submit a comment or question in the comments field below the video window there.

Be sure to catch the Webcast, hosted by Heritage New Media Partners, live at live.mrc.org.

It's perhaps indicative of the culture, but there has been a media obsession with the scandalous aspects of Michaele and Tareq Salahi crashing a White House State Dinner on Nov. 24. 

However, the incident also demonstrated how vulnerable President Barack Obama could be to outside intruders, and that fact isn't getting the lion's share of the attention. Instead, coverage like that from NBC's "Today" show has been about reality TV and exclusive interviews. This soft focus, argued Fox News host Glenn Beck on his Dec. 1 broadcast, could have repercussions.

"Let me ask you, what's more reasonable: people walking by the Secret Service, and they're just, like, I don't know, sleeping - zzzz ... Really?" Beck said. "Or this is a publicity stunt? I don't think either of these are reasonable, but given the choice just between those two, I think I'd probably go with the publicity stunt."

There's something about these big events that cause MSNBC "Hardball" host Chris Matthews to go off script and say something seemingly ridiculous.

Matthews has publicly admitted President Barack Obama has given him a thrill up his leg after a campaign speech in Feb. 2008, and uttered "oh God," earlier this year after an Obama address to Congress, prior to the Republican response from Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal earlier this year. And on Dec. 1, he referred to West Point as "the enemy camp" in coverage following a speech from Obama announcing his intentions to increase troops in Afghanistan. And, later that night - Matthews took a shot at former Vice President Dick Cheney (emphasis added).

"The president said tonight that we're fighting in Afghanistan because al Qaeda is in Pakistan," Matthews said. "Is that what this is all about? Is that why we're fighting and some are dying in Afghanistan? To deliver the message to the government over in Pakistan to fight harder against al Qaeda. It sounds more Rube Goldberg than ‘Remember the Alamo.' Also try tonight to workout whether the president's goals in Afghanistan are achievable. Are they? And of course, there's always Dick Cheney who jumped it from under his bridge to bite the president's ankle even before he made the speech tonight."