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Spreading the WordMedia Research Center Founder and President and NewsBusters.org Publisher Brent Bozell issued the following statement on the meteoric rise in the ratings Rush Limbaugh has enjoyed since the inception of the Obama White House and the Democrats' all-out coordinated attack against him.

As announced yesterday, audience numbers surged for Rush-carrying stations across the country, including in several of the nation's largest markets like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston.  Since the orchestrated campaign continued into March, ratings could reach even greater heights for this month.

Bozell:

On the October 1 edition of "The View" Barbara Walters chastised Elisabeth Hasselbeck for allegedly never conceding a point, but never offered such a criticism for left-wing ideologue Joy Behar or even looney conspiracy theorist Rosie O’Donnell. This occurred just as rumors abound that Elisabeth is clashing with her fellow co-hosts.

Responding to more Sarah Palin bashing and Joy Behar labeling the Alaska governor "dumb" (talk about the pot calling the kettle black) Hasselbeck once again rose up as the lone voice on the panel, and even a hostile studio audience, in defending Governor Palin. Apparently taking issue with disputing some co-hosts’ assertion that Palin lacks the intellectual capacity to be vice president, Barbara Walters exclaimed "every single day you never ever say ‘maybe this is another point.’"

Author pictures, as you can obviously see, are back again. I had to rewrite the code from scratch and am testing them in the blog posts only.

If I feel confident in the code, user avatars will come back in the comments but a two restrictions: 1) pics can be no bigger than 3kb in size, 2) they must be exactly 85 pixels high if you don't want them to appear stretched out.

Private messaging is working again also.

Just a quick note: The NB forums are fixed now. Anyone who is registered can now start a discussion. Per Mean Gene Dr. Love's suggestion, we also have added an additional forum, "The Woodshed" where you can move a heated debate instead of getting a comment thread on an article off-track.

Still working on the profile pics and private messages.

 

Please report bugs you see in the new NB here. Thanks!

We're almost finished with a massive back-end upgrade to NB. Feel free to go over today and kick the tires. Among the new features:

• Faster, more reliable
• Improved comments: even/odd coloring, up to 300 per page (existing users must change your setting to enable)
• Better RSS, now includes full text of articles and works in IE7
• More compatible HTML editor
• Pictures in your profile!
• Better search (still not satisfied)
• Need to rebuild your buddylist
• The end to automatic logout! Remember to logout when using a public computer though
• Printer friendly pages
• A new theme that resizes with your browser window

Post your feedback over here, though, since we're test

Here's today's open thread. Oh, and in case you haven't noticed, I've made it easy for everyone to submit NB stories to your favorite social networking web sites. Just click the little icons for whichever site you want and submit.

Show your support for NB and give us a plug!

I think we're good to go with the comments archiving. Please post on this thread if you do not notice a speedup.

How big was the Imus story on this morning's "Today"? The show devoted the entire first half-hour and half of the second to it. Both Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira seemed uncomfortable, struggling to sound the right note. But while Vieira had the gumption to confront Jesse Jackson with his own record of having made a bigoted statement, Lauer tiptoed to the edge and backed off when confronting Al Sharpton about his racially-charged past.

View video here.

In the first half-hour, "Today" simulcast its show with "Imus in the Morning," and had both Imus and Sharpton as guests. Here's how Lauer's brinksmanship, which came at 7:13 AM EDT, went down:

In case you tried to get in earlier today around 9:20 am Eastern or so, NewsBusters was hacked through a vulnerability in our web software. This is the first time it's happened. We'll be doing the upgrade this weekend however it is costing us several thousand dollars to do this. Please consider a donation to help us defray the costs.

Brent Bozell, President of the Media Research Center which operates NewsBusters, appeared Sunday night on FNC's Hannity's America. Sean Hannity set up the February 11 segment by playing an exchange Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had in New Hampshire with a voter who wanted her to apologize for her pro-war resolution vote and to apologize for it. After Hannity ran video clips to contrast Clinton's current distancing from the Iraq war with how before the war she warned of the threat from Iraq and advocated war, Hannity and Bozell discussed how the news media have avoided pointing out such contradictions.

Video clip, including Hannity's collection of Clinton flip-flops (6:50): Real (5.1 MB at 100 kbps) or Windows Media (4.3 MB at 81 kbps), plus MP3 audio (2.4 MB)

Sunday's episode of Showtime's drama centered around the lives of lesbians in Los Angeles, the L word, will feature the “Unauthorized Abortion of W,” a sculpture of a woman's body with an exposed womb displaying George W. Bush's adult face with each of his hands holding onto a rocket labeled “U.S. Air Force.” The rockets are angled to suggest they represent forceps. (Showtime is part of CBS.)

In a promo for the January 28 episode, character “Bette Porter,” the dean of a university's art school played by Jennifer Beals, tells a new character played by Marlee Matlin: “I'm bringing one of our biggest donors to tour the studio. There's a radical sculpture.” Through a male interpreter, the deaf Matlin character, whom the L word's Web site describes as “an artist whose work is politically incendiary,” observes: “He's not going to like that piece.” Porter/Beals confirms “no.” Then as a man comes into view, presumably the big donor, the camera quickly pans the figure of Bush in the womb as Matlin explains: “This is called the 'Unauthorized Abortion of W.'”

Video clip of Showtime's promo for the January 28 episode (45 seconds): Real (1.3 MB) or Windows Media (1.6 MB), plus MP3 audio (275 KB)

Yes, there was a crash. We're back to where we were earlier, minus today's comments that were made before the crash. Sorry for the inconvenience. Our hosting company dropped the ball and we'll soon be switching to a different one.

In case y'all might not have noticed, you can click on a person's name to call up their user info. From that page, you can reach another that has only that user's posts as well as link to that blogger's XML feed (sometimes called RSS).

In addition, the category pages also have XML feeds. This is designed so that people who only want to read news about a particular media outlet/personality can do so more easily.