Steve Roberts

Palin-trashing author Joe McGinniss is booked for several TV interviews this week.  The New York Times reports the list includes Morning Joe, The View, The Joy Behar Show, and The Colbert Report. On CNN's Reliable Sources, Howard Kurtz added Piers Morgan Tonight. "TV seems to have the idea that if it's a book, if it's between hard covers, it has a certain stature that allows it to be covered, but there are a lot of crappy books out there."

Wrong. Tabloidish books about Barack Obama have generally not been featured like McGinniss. But Steve Roberts, a former Washington bureau chief of The New York Times and husband of TV journalist Cokie Roberts, actually argued on CNN that Palin somehow "bears some guilt here" for these tabloid tales, since she's become a celebrity and starred in a reality TV show: 

ABC devoted its entire "This Week" on Easter Sunday to "God and Government," and not surprisingly the question of President Obama's faith prominently entered the discussion.

When it did, Cokie Roberts said, "The bad part about this is that it's acceptable to say that he's a Muslim because the same people won't say, 'I don't like him cause he's black'" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

  Appearing as a guest on Sunday’s Reliable Sources on CNN, Steve Roberts - who has worked for both the New York Times and U.S. News and World Report - after conceding that the Tea Party movement is important, dismissively asserted that the movement "didn’t win. You only won a couple of seats." Roberts:

I think that they are an important part of the American landscape. Now I don't think they're as important as they think they are. I mean, you had people coming into Washington this week and saying, wait, we won. No, you didn't win. You won a couple of seats, and you got to deal with everybody else.

After host Howard Kurtz wondered "did the media kind of turn on" President Obama and claimed that the media had not spent enough time giving credit to Obama for his recent legislative successes, leading to guest Thomas Frank of Harper’s to bring up complaints against Obama by disaffected liberals, Roberts asserted that there is no liberal media bias:

Journalists love the marketplace of ideas until people start selling ideas they find objectionable. The liberal media somehow manages to shout about its right to speak freely while demanding others be silenced.

Glenn Beck is probably the most popular target for the left's demands for censorship. Cokie Roberts and her husband Steve picked up that ball and ran with it today in their joint syndicated column. They dubbed Beck "a traitor to the American values he professes so loudly to defend" and claimed he is "corrupting the very essence of democracy." And all this just by speaking.

Unsurprisingly, the immense damage Beck is doing to the American political process can only be demonstrated anecdotally:

On Sunday, the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz continued his mission of exposing the absurd amount of coverage the media are giving to Barack Obama as compared to John McCain.

On CNN's "Reliable Sources," Kurtz amazingly asked his guests, "Where does journalism get off saying it's OK to give one candidate twice as much coverage -- this week, I would say four times as much coverage -- as the other candidate running for president?"

This followed last Sunday's warning by Kurtz that "there could be a big backlash against news organizations if this trend continues":

I'm not sure what got into Howard Kurtz Sunday morning, but the Washington Post/CNN media analyst, and "Reliable Sources" host, really laid into the press for their horrible coverage of the presidential campaign.

Maybe more surprising, Kurtz voiced his displeasure with both print and television news coverage, as well as what was being written and said about the candidates on both sides of the aisle.

So go get some popcorn, and prepare yourself for a media bashing guaranteed to put a smile on your face: