The three morning shows on Thursday reacted to Barack Obama’s State of the Union address by highlighting the risk Republicans run in continuing to oppose the President’s agenda. On NBC’s Today, Meredith Vieira fretted to Joe Biden, "What risk do the Republicans run by continuing to say no, by being the party of no?" NBC put the happiest spin on the speech, featuring a graphic that trumpeted, "‘Never More Hopeful’: Obama’s Renewed Message of Hope for America."

Chuck Todd cooed, "The President took pains to talk about hope at a time when so many Americans seemed to have so little." On the Early Show, Maggie Rodriguez pressed Senator John McCain on GOP accommodation. She wondered if "we are going to hear" more yes answers and fewer no replies from the Republicans. The co-host then chided McCain, "But will you compromise?"

In an amusing moment on Today, Vieira asked Biden what Americans could expect for the economy in the new year. He replied, "Well, I say, they’re going to start to see unemployment grow this spring." Vieira quickly jumped in and corrected, "You mean employment?" [Audio available here.]

NBC's Meredith Vieira, on Wednesday's Today show, rained on Scott Brown's parade as she wondered if the Senator-Elect's post-victory call to Ted Kennedy's widow Vicki was an awkward moment since, as the Today co-anchor pressed, "You plan to do whatever you can to derail...the cause of his lifetime?" [Audio available here]

MEREDITH VIEIRA: You know on a personal note, you said last night the first call you made after your victory was to Ted Kennedy's widow, Vicki.

SCOTT BROWN: That's right.

VIEIRA: How comfortable was that for both of you, knowing that you plan to do whatever you can to derail what Ted Kennedy called, called "the cause of his lifetime," which is health care reform?

Andrea Lyon, the attorney for accused child murderer Casey Anthony, was invited on Thursday's Today show to discuss the case and promote her new book and was given a platform to call the death penalty "A barbaric institution," and to spout that the U.S. is in the "company of Iraq and Iran and China."

NBC's Meredith Vieira conducted the live interview with Lyon but not before Kerry Sanders set the table in a story accompanied by a headline that championed: "Angel of Death Row, Casey Anthony's Lawyer Takes On The System." In his piece Sanders touted: "The once tie-dyed idealist from the '60s has one agenda: preventing any one from ever being executed." Near the end of Vieira's in-studio interview with Lyon the Today co-anchor prompted the attorney to criticize capital punishment, as seen in the following exchange:

Meredith Vieira peppered RNC chair Michael Steele, on Tuesday's Today show, with a line of questioning that made the GOP out to be "partisan" in its criticisms of Obama's national security policies and questioned recent comments by Dick Cheney's were "hurting the Republicans."

Vieira began the interview by questioning if a Peter Hoekstra fundraising letter was an example of the GOP playing politics with terrorism, even reciting the Democratic spin, as if the Democrats never raised money with that issue during the Bush years:

NBC's Today show invited on Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Census Bureau Director Robert Groves to promote their Portrait of America road tour as a way to encourage people to fill out the Census forms or risk, as Locke warned, miss out on "$400 billion of federal funds," to which Matt Lauer underlined, "This is vitally important to communities."

The entire Today cast braved 20 degree weather outside to stand alongside one of the vans set to tour the country to publicize the Census that, as the former Democratic Governor of Washington state alerted viewers, "will determine the allocation of federal funds to their communities for the next 10 years and could actually give them more political power in the United States Congress."

The following segment was aired on the January 4 Today show:

In advance of Time magazine's Person of the Year choice being revealed on Wednesday's show, NBC's Today show brought on managing editor Richard Stengel yesterday, to reveal the seven finalists, and on Tuesday's show NBC's Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira gave the results of an on-line poll of their viewer's picks and it wasn't good news for Nancy Pelosi. The Speaker of the House finished dead last among the seven candidates but Lauer pitied Pelosi as he cheered on: "C'mon Nancy you can do better."

The following exchange was aired on the December 15, Today show:

Time's managing editor Richard Stengel joined Meredith, Matt, Ann and Al, on Monday's Today, to play a guessing game of who will become his magazine's Person of the Year and praised one of the finalists, Nancy Pelosi, as the "strongest Speaker of the House in decades," who has "piloted what is probably the most important legislation in decades."

Others making the final list included Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, General Stanley McChrystal, the Chinese (not the American) worker and of course Barack Obama, as Today co-anchor Meredith Vieira pointed out, "was the choice last year," and pressed, "Have you ever had that, where somebody has won twice and consecutively?"

The following is the full transcript of the segment as it was aired on the December 14 Today show:

Prompted by NBC's Meredith Vieira, on Monday's Today show, Avatar director James Cameron revealed the liberal undertones in his new blockbuster as he told the Today co-anchor the plot centers on how greed and imperialism "tends to destroy the environment..." and how the human characters in the sci-fi flick "are doing the same thing on another pristine planet that we've done on earth." [audio available here]

Big Hollywood's John Nolte reports, in his review of the film, "Avatar is a thinly disguised, heavy-handed and simplistic sci-fi fantasy/allegory critical of America from our founding straight through to the Iraq War," in which the human characters want to "strip mine" the alien planet for its resources.

Vieira first broached the politics of Avatar with Cameron by noting, "There's a message about, you know, greed and when people want a lot of things, imperialism. All of that," to which Cameron espoused, "And how that tends to destroy the environment and so on."

The following is the relevant exchange as it was aired on the December 14 Today show:

NBC's Meredith Vieira, on Wednesday's Today, invited on radical leftist Howard Zinn to promote a new History Channel documentary, The People Speak (based on his revisionist book A People's History of the United States), in which the Today co-anchor pointed out Zinn makes "a very interesting point that the Declaration of Independence was a, was a statement of, you know, hope and, and positive democracy. And then the Constitution came along and sort of negated that." [audio available here]

Vieira offered Zinn and his co-producer Chris Moore a platform to toss our their left-wing version of history and even make anti-war proclamations, which was awkward considering that the Today show's Matt Lauer and Al Roker are visiting the troops in Afghanistan all this week, something that Vieira pointed out in the following exchange:

As part of an ongoing series called Today's Buzziest Stories of the Decade, NBC's Meredith Vieira, on Monday's Today, featured a segment with former Iraq war POW Jessica Lynch, and with it brought back some of the "Buzziest" bias of the decade as Vieira declared Lynch's story was "exaggerated to sell a war hard up for appealing heroes," and described Lynch as a "pawn of the military that was trying to sell, some said, a war to the American public." While the stories of Lynch's ordeal were indeed exaggerated, something Lynch decried in the segment, for Vieira to claim the war was "hard up for appealing heroes," was a gross exaggeration in itself.

As the MRC's Rich Noyes pointed out in his 2005 Special Report, "TV's Bad News Brigade," there were plenty of stories of heroism for the media to tell, that they all too frequently ignored. Interestingly enough Vieira's own colleague, Andrea Mitchell, on April 4, 2005 did mention the story of one "appealing" hero, that of the late Sergeant Paul Smith who earned the Medal of Honor, as Mitchell recounted then:

NBC's Anne Thompson, on Monday's Today, covered the Climategate story only to essentially dismiss it in a nothing-to-see here, move along fashion. CBS's The Early Show had a brief mention of it, and ABC's Good Morning America did nothing. Thompson, reporting live from Copenhagen, opened her piece declaring that delegates determined "this could be their last best chance to deal with the consequences of climate change," but then added "overshadowing all of this is a scandal involving some stolen e-mails that has skeptics, once again, questioning the whole idea of global warming." 

Thompson went on to air criticism from Professor Ian Plimer, of the University of Adelaide who charged, "There's data being massaged," but then devoted the rest of her piece to confirming the existence of climate change, even allowing a Penn State scientist, who appeared in the e-mail exchange, to defend the use of the term "trick," by a colleague as he claimed: "What the person meant was it was a clever approach to the problem."

NBC's Dr. Nancy Snyderman, on Thursday's Today, couldn’t let a segment on advances in cerebral palsy treatments go without tipping her hat to the Obama administration’s change in stem cell policy. After Today co-anchor Vieira prompted Snyderman to list new therapies "on the horizon," Snyderman took the opportunity to celebrate Obama as she hailed: "On the horizon? Keep your eyes open for stem cells, especially now that we have new stem cell lines under this new administration."

The following is the relevant exchange as it was aired on the December 3, Today:

While ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s Today questioned Obama White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett on the breach of security at last week’s state dinner, her appearance was conspicuously absent from the CBS Early Show on Thursday. The CBS morning show has made a consistent effort to downplay the administration’s role in party crashing scandal.

On Good Morning America, co-host Robin Roberts wondered why White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers would not be testifying before Congress on the issue: “But, first, I want to ask you about the congressional hearing today. And ask you why isn't the social secretary, Desiree Rogers, testifying today before Congress?....you know that leaves people thinking, Valerie, that there’s something more.”

Similarly, on Today, co-host Meredith Vieira asked Jarrett: “White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers. She was the point person for that event. She is the one who failed to assign aides to vet guests at those checkpoints. She’s the one who named herself a guest instead of a staffer, and yet, she is not being investigated. The Secret Service is, but not her. Do you think she should be investigated?”

NBC’s Meredith Vieira used a liberal talking point against the Bush administration on the Today show on Tuesday. Vieira asked  Inez Tenenbaum, the head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, “Under President Bush, the Consumer Products Safety Commission was criticized for being too cozy with business- essentially, toothless. How do you assure the American public...that that’s no longer the case?”

The NBC morning anchor interviewed Commisioner Tenenbaum just after the beginning of the 7 am Eastern hour on the CPSC’s recall of 2.1 million drop-side baby cribs on November 23. Vieira tied-in the concerns of new parents about the safety of the cribs as she included the left-wing criticism of the government agency during the Bush era in her last question to the Obama appointee: “Under President Bush, the Consumer Products Safety Commission was criticized for being too cozy with business- essentially, toothless. How do you assure the American public, particularly parents out there that are worried, that that’s no longer the case?”

At first glance it appeared that NBC's Meredith Vieira and David Gregory, on Friday's Today show, did a decent job of recounting all of the struggles the Obama administration is dealing with from unemployment to foreign policy, but ultimately the pair concluded, in every instance, they weren't actual problems, but merely problems of "perception." First up Vieira mentioned Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner being criticized on Capitol Hill for 10.2 percent unemployment, something that Gregory wrote off as simply "a perception problem that the administration has to deal with." Then on Obama's recent trip overseas Vieira queried Gregory: "Speaking about perception problems, President Obama just returned from a eight-day trip overseas to Asia. Some critics are saying that it was a failure, more style and no substance. Is that a fair analysis?" To which Gregory responded the Obama team just needed to do a better job of "winning the perception battle."

The following is a transcript of the segment as it was aired on the November 20, Today show:

Invited on Tuesday's Today show to promote her new book, Carrie Prejean defended the latest scrutiny surrounding her as the latest example of "liberal bias in the media," of "conservative women" being attacked. When confronted by Today co-anchor Meredith Vieira about her assertion she's been "Palinized," Prejean threw back "Do you think Sarah Palin has been attacked," to which Vieira dodged the liberal bias charge simply stating: "I think Sarah Palin has certainly been criticized, absolutely, by a lot people, as have many politicians." Prejean then slammed Vieira's NBC colleague Keith Olbermann:

CARRIE PREJEAN: And there is a double standard out there. There is an extreme double standard that conservative women are under attack for whatever it is. I mean if Sean Hannity went out there and said some of the things that Keith Olbermann has said about me, you know, if he said anything about Sonia Sotomayor or Michelle Obama, he would be off the air. Why is there this double standard? And that's the reason why I wrote this book. [audio available here]

The following is the relevant exchange from the November 10 Today show:

NBC's David Gregory, on Wednesday's Today show, downplayed the huge GOP wins in New Jersey and Virginia as merely reflecting the "anti-incumbency mood," and "the change message that Obama" started last year. Gregory, however, did play up Democrat Bill Owens' win over Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman in the New York 23 congressional race, and even more absurdly Bob McDonnell's win in Virginia as evidence that the Republican's path to victory is to go moderate, as the Meet the Press host postulated: "What's striking is you have the results in New York 23, which Democrats will hold up as a great result for them, but then you have McDonnell winning in Virginia, a purple state. He's a social conservative for his political career, yet he runs more as a pragmatist, as more of a centrist and look at the result. He wins big, wins big among independent voters."

The following is the full Gregory segment with Meredith Vieira as it was aired on the November 4, Today show:

Comedian Wanda Sykes, invited on Thursday’s "Today" show to plug her HBO comedy special and new late night talk show, was pressed by co-host Meredith Vieira to comment about her crass remark at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner that she hoped Rush Limbaugh’s kidneys would fail. The stand-up comic initially defended her Limbaugh death wish as she claimed, "I was having fun...and I meant what I said," but did admit that perhaps it was "a little too much," however she concluded, "it was just a joke."

MEREDITH VIEIRA: Last year, a good year in many ways for you but also controversial. Beginning with the White House Correspondents Dinner where you talked about Rush Limbaugh.

WANDA SYKES: Right.

VIEIRA: You compared him to Osama Bin Laden. You got a lot of grief for that. In retrospect you wish you hadn't done that or are you saying, "No, I mean what I said I was having fun."

SYKES: Oh no! I meant what I said. I thought I was having, you know, I was having fun. And, and I meant what I said. I think people were more upset with the tagline when I said, "You know he hopes America fail," and I said "well I hope his kidneys fail."

Even Barack Obama’s fan club on NBC’s Today were stunned at the President’s winning of the Nobel Peace Prize. Co-host Matt Lauer found it baffling: “We’re less than a year into the first term of this president and there are no -- I'm not trying to be, you know, rude here -- no major foreign policy achievements, to date.”

Meet the Press moderator David Gregory felt the need to point out the “left-leaning” impulse of the Europeans who christened Obama as the world’s leading peacemaker for 2009: “This is a lot more about tone than it is substantive accomplishment. In many ways, this is a European body who is more left-leaning, certainly, and opposed to the administration of George W. Bush.”

Lauer followed up: “So, what you're saying in some ways and, again, not to be rude here or sarcastic, that in some ways he wins this award for not being George W. Bush?”

Move over Al Gore, NBC's Meredith Vieira and Natalie Morales have discovered the new face of global warming and it's a glacier. In the latest bit of goofy global warming nonsense Morales reported, on Thursday's "Today", that a photographer in Norway caught a picture of "what appears to be a face crying a river of tears as a glacier melts into the sea." To which "Today" co-host Vieira exclaimed, "That's gonna be the new image of global warming, right there." [audio available here]

The following exchange was aired on the September 3, "Today" show:

NBC's Andrea Mitchell, on Thursday's, "Today" show cheered an added benefit to the release of Euna Lee and Laura Ling from North Korea, was that it reunited Bill Clinton and Al Gore. In a segment headlined, "Together Again, Clinton and Gore's Emotional Reunion," Mitchell -- who is traveling with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wherever she goes these days -- hailed that the event brought back the "Boomer buddy team," and gushed "Both are now international superstars."

Before the Mitchell story, "Today" anchor Meredith Vieira, gleefully teased, "It was like a flashback to the nineties," and observed that both Gore and Clinton were, "Smiling. It was good." [audio available here]

The following teaser and then Mitchell report were aired on the August 6, "Today" show:

"Don't get me wrapped up in a menage-a-trois here."

That's how NBC "Today" show co-host Meredith Vieira cracked a tasteless joke to prevent viewers from mistakenly assuming she is married to former NBC "Nightly News" anchor Tom Brokaw.

The comment came shortly before 9 a.m. on the August 3 program, following the close of an "American Character" piece narrated by Brokaw from Cincinnati, Ohio, some "642 miles down" and "2,431 to go" along historic U.S. Route 50.:

Hats off to “Today.” Oh wait, maybe that should be “Tops off.” On August 3, the morning show promoted the book “Uncovered,” by Jordan Matter, despite what the book covered, or rather, what the book did not cover.

The book is a collection of photographs of, as Meredith Vieira explained, “average women willing to bare it all for the sake of equality.” And NBC had no qualms about devoting a more than five minute segment to promoting Matter’s “art.”

 It began when “photographer Jordan Matter set out to see how his fellow New Yorkers would handle a little breast.”

“There was this whole taboo issue around women’s bodies,” Matter explained, “and the most public way to address that issue would be to photograph it publicly.”

As the DOW hit 9000 for the first time since January, NBC’s “Today” refused to give up its crusade against big banks. Dylan Ratigan of MSNBC appeared on July 24 to offer his opinion on what caused the economic crisis and what needs to be done in order to prevent another.

Not surprisingly, his answer to one of these questions was government regulation. And here’s a shocker, it was not the answer to the first. Ratigan came out swinging against the bank’s greed that supposedly brought the American economy into “total collapse, essentially” as host Meredith Vieira worded it.

The banks are profiting once again and Meredith Vieira is livid about it. During her July 21 interview with President Obama, Vieira questioned Obama about the banks having the audacity to do what taxpayers bailed them out to do: profit.
 
“You know I wanted to ask you about Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan reporting these big profits in the second quarter,” Vieira told Obama as they walked through the White House. “And they're talking about bonuses for their employees. People hear that, taxpayers, and they're very frustrated.”

One has to wonder though if it is the taxpayer’s frustration she was expressing, or rather the frustration of the hosts of “Today,” since this anger at banks has become a common theme on the show.