Mark Kirk

The Washington Post on Friday stuck to its practice of keeping oversight hearings off the front page. On A-3, readers would learn Attorney General Eric Holder testified before the Senate, and the new IRS chief was being questioned about lavish spending in the House.

The Post did lead with the data-mining story (perhaps that’s a Bush/Obama scandal, not an Obama scandal), but also carried front-page stories on an openly gay track star at a local high school and a New York Post-like story on “the puzzling case of the pizzeria patio pilferer.”

Comedy Central’s The Daily Show usually skewers Republicans and conservatives, but last night, regardless of where you stand on the underlying issue of same-sex marriage, the program went beyond the pale with a joke about Republican acceptance of same-sex marriage that involved Sen. Mark Kirk's (R-Ill.) stroke

In an article on the sudden stroke suffered by Senator Mark Kirk, the Associated Press on Monday gratuitously piled on the Republican, currently in intensive care, making sure to note that in his last campaign, questions were raised "about his own honesty." The section has since been removed from the version on the Washington Post's website but can be found below in a screen capture. [Update: The Post has added the paragraphs back.]

After detailing the condition of Kirk, the AP's Sophia Tareen and Tammy Webber devoted three paragraphs to dredging up old attacks: "Kirk was elected to the Senate in 2010, winning the seat formerly held by President Barack Obama after a hard-fought election that often focused on questions about his own honesty."

"You know, the president's been calling for bipartisanship on Capitol Hill, I'm not sure that he meant for the two of you to get together and go up against his signature program," MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell complained at the conclusion of a chat with Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) on today's Andrea Mitchell Reports.

Mitchell had the senators on to discuss their opposition to extending the 2011 payroll tax holiday.

Per MerriamWebster.com -- Gaffe: 1) a social or diplomatic blunder; 2) a noticeable mistake.

The Associated Press's Calvin Woodward has had a few shining analytical moments during the first two years of the Obama administration (examples here and here).

The AP reporter's dispatch on "gaffes and gotchas" Friday morning, which attempted to communicate a sense of bemusement tinged with condescension, both aimed mostly at first-time candidates, is not one of them, and contained its own gaffes:

CBS's local affiliate in Chicago today threatened to stop covering the Illinois Senate race if the Republican candidate continues to harp on an issue extremely damaging to his Democratic opponent.

If a candidate for the United States Senate was a senior loan officer for a bank that made over $20 million in loans to convicted bookies and pimps (while he was employed as a loan officer), is that candidate's opponent in the wrong for harping on the issue?

Chicago's CBS affiliate apparently thinks such connections should be off limits. A reporter from Chicago's CBS Channel 2 told Mark Kirk, the Republican opponent of former Broadway Bank loan officer Alexi Giannoulias that his channel is "not going to cover the Senate race, if it’s consistently only in your terms, is about Broadway Bank." (H/t Big Journalism, via Steve Gutowski)