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.
 

Last year, banks were “too big to fail” and were arm twisted into taking a federal bailout.  Now that many of them have repaid the TARP money, the media deems their profits to be a betrayal of the taxpayers.

NBC “Today” host Meredith Vieira began the segment on Goldman Sachs by pitting the average American against the big companies, “While you may be struggling financially these days, happy days appear to be here again for some companies on wall street, and now they are getting set to pay out some big bonuses.”

Correspondent Melissa Francis also continued this storyline in her report. “With the nation’s unemployment rate moving closer to ten percent, a housing market still plagued by foreclosures and households struggling to make ends meet, it might be hard for most Americans to believe that it’s back to business as usual on Wall Street,” she said.

On Thursday's Today, Meredith Vieira tossed mostly softballs to Senator-elect Al Franken, offering no hard questions about the disputed 2008 election, instead fawning, "...Are you more worried about becoming a target for the GOP or a target for Saturday Night Live, your old stomping ground?" In regards to the post-election wrangling for the Minnesota Senate seat, the best Vieira could do is to wonder, "It did get a little contentious, didn't it?"

To be fair, she did reference the closeness of the election. Noting Franken's 312 vote margin of victory, Vieira observed, "Are you conscious of that as you head to Washington D.C. next week?" However, there was no mention of the reports of irregularities in the state. If the co-host wished to challenge the incoming senator, she could have read from a July 1 Wall Street Journal editorial which asserted, "Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively stolen an election."

The Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation released on July 1 the “F as in Fat Report,” which studied obesity rates in America While it is certainly worth reporting the facts of the study, NBC managed to take its report to another level. On the July 2 “Today,” host Meredith Vieira interviewed NBC News Chief Medical Editor, Dr. Nancy Snyderman. Snyderman used the report to give her over-the-top personal opinions about America’s role in the world and drive through pharmacies.

Vieira cited study findings, saying that obesity has tripled since 1980 in children and not a single state has decreased its obesity rate in the past year. Snyderman chimed in, “And we know that now almost forty percent of these heavy kids- teenagers- have diabetes, they already have plaque in their arteries, they grow up to be bullies. These are kids who already start to have problems sort of fitting in.”

NBC's Meredith Vieira on Thursday conducted a defensive interview with Fox News contributor Dick Morris, at one point skeptically wondering if "the Republican tactic from this point on" would be "to sit and watch Obama fail." Later, when Morris pointed out the problems with the Canadian health care system, the Today host retorted, "But, the President clearly has said that's not the road he's headed down."

On one level, NBC should be commended for actually featuring Morris to talk about "Catastrophe," his new anti-Obama book. But, the interview didn't air until 8:51am, long after many Americans had left for work. Co-host Matt Lauer dominated most of the program's first two hours, reporting live from the late Michael Jackson's Neverland ranch.

This led Morris to make a dig at the show's excessive coverage. Speaking of Canada's government-run health care, he quipped, "So in Canada, there's a 16 percent higher death rate from cancer than in the United States. And that's not Neverland, that's U.S."

Just last year the government claimed bailouts of major banks like CitiGroup were necessary to prevent economic collapse. But now that banks are turning a profit NBC is returning to attacks on pay.

A June 24 segment of “Today” attacked CitiGroup’s “internal discussions” to raise salaries (by 50 percent in some cases) and other major banks with footage from the 1987 movie “Wall Street,” AIG protest footage and an unemployed Michigan woman.

Meredith Vieira began by stoking class envy saying the story “might make some people hot under the collar.” Citigroup “wants to move away from paying big bonuses by instead giving nearly 300,000 workers large pay increases and it is not alone,” Vieira said.

Over a video montage of frivolous novelty weddings (drive-through, undersea, and "Elvis as pastor" nuptials) NBC's Lee Cowan asserted that that the institution of marriage is going down hill in a hurry.  In the "Today" show's "Today's Relationships" segment on June 22, Cowan did find one bright spot. The only people standing for a responsible, serious understanding of matrimony it seems, are homosexuals. Proponents of same-sex marriage Cowan said, "are still willing to fight for the very institution; defining marriage as a source of a national debate right now."

Cowan explained how, when it comes to relationships and marriage, "rekindling seems unnatural and plenty get so bored with marriage, it seems more like a sexless routine than a romance." Yet he did mention, with a hint of incredulity and with the tagline "The Case Against Marriage" floating on the screen underneath him, how "despite the bad wrap" marriage divorce rates are on the decline . People are investing more and more on marriage help books, but not for the children, their love. or morality. The reason is that, "divorce is painful."

The common, everyday act of swatting a bug is something that happens countless times a day at picnics and ball games across the country, especially during the summer, but when Barack Obama was caught on tape by CNBC's cameras doing it, the fawning liberal press couldn't contain their excitement. All three broadcast network morning shows, on Wednesday, praised the presidential kill as they were impressed by the "ninja" Obama's "precision," and "cat-like quickness."[audio available here]

On NBC's "Today" show substitute-host David Gregory opened the show declaring: "You just have to appreciate the, the concentration and the precision! Just a few things going on in the world but it's as if everything was stopped and at a standstill for the President to lower the boom." On CBS' "The Early Show," Chris Wragge marveled: "We've also just confirmed the President is a Ninja." And on ABC's "Good Morning America," they even brought out the Telestrator to break down the video as Chris Cuomo offered play-by-play: "You see? He stares at the fly. How many times have each of us tried to do this? Look at the hand coming up. The poise. The cupping. And the quick slap...Just knocked it away, very rare."

The following exchanges were aired on the June 17 editions of NBC's "Today" show, ABC's "Good Morning America" and CBS's "The Early Show":

NBC's Matt Lauer and Al Roker, on Tuesday's "Today" show, revealed they enjoyed a "nice" evening at the theater last night, in the presence of Michelle Obama, as she "dazzled New York City for a second time," when she visited the Metropolitan Opera House. After an Amy Robach piece that celebrated Mrs. Obama's return to the Big Apple, Roker and Lauer bragged that they too were in attendance at the American Ballet Theater Spring Gala, along with the First Lady, as Roker gushed: "It was fantastic!"

For her part Robach joined in the Obama family myth-making as she cheered, "Everyone takes notice when the First Lady is out on the town here in the Big Apple and Monday was no exception." Robach, in her piece, even included several soundbites from a delighted New York Times' Jodi Kantor who enthused: "You look at the kind of parties that the Met hosts and if you look at the top ballet galas in New York they always have big celebrities there, but Mrs. Obama is a different order of magnitude."