Today

Watching network morning show anchors interview the Democratic presidential candidates often makes you wonder if you’ve seen tougher interviews on overnight acne-care infomercials. Their questions are often so simple and promotional that you wish they’d just go ahead and wear their "Hillary!" or "Obama ‘08" buttons on the set. There is no pretense of political balance. They are actively rooting…

In a post-Don Imus world, one would think journalists would be on their guard to not say or write anything that could be in any way perceived as racist. Yet, just days after CBS's Andy Rooney made a racial slur concerning Hispanic baseball players, NBC's Matt Lauer actually called outgoing Attorney General Alberto Gonzales a "piñata." Certainly, given Gonzales's ethnic background, and the…

For NBC's "Today" show crew it wasn't enough to label Larry Craig's scandal as a crisis for him personally or even to call it a crisis for the Republican Party, no "Today" went even further as it declared it a "crisis" for conservatives everywhere. NBC's Matt Lauer opened the Tuesday "Today" show asking his viewers: "Can the right wing withstand yet another scandal involving one of its own?"…

On Friday, National Review writer Myrna Blyth unwrapped some of the nuggets in the forthcoming Ed Klein biography of Katie Couric, the one the Katie camp is trying to squash, in very Hillaryesque fashion, as "old news." [Klein appeared Monday night on FNC's Hannity & Colmes.] Before she kindly noted that the MRC has piles and piles of examples of Katie's liberal bias, Blyth dished Klein's…

A ‘Beautiful’ AlarmistNBC’s "Today" show continued its global warming alarmism this week. Reporter Bob Dotson profiled a polar explorer who is teaching, or indoctrinating, today’s youths about global warming. The "Today" crew couldn’t refrain from gushing over this "sobering," "beautiful" message from an "impressive guy." However, NBC doesn’t want viewers to get excited over every issue.…

Matching the theme of NBC Nightly News from the evening before, the Today show on Friday morning portrayed Republican Senator John Warner's call for 5,000 troops to return home by Christmas as “a major defection” and “sharp rebuke” to President Bush, but to the astonishment of co-host Matt Lauer, who described Warner as “a pretty heavy domino” falling against Bush, guest Bill Kristol rejected the…

Chris, How Do You Really Feel? Cable host Chris Matthews reacted to the resignation of top Bush aide Karl Rove by calling the political operative a "bum" and speculating as to whether he would tell all in an autobiography. Matthews sneeringly wondered if "you have to pay to get the truth from Karl Rove." In general, he contributed to the media frothing by hungering for the scalp of the Bush aide…

Of the three morning shows, only ABC’s "Good Morning America" has reported the comment by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama that part of the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan is made up of "air-raiding villages and killing civilians." Both CBS’s "Early Show" and "Today" on NBC have ignored the August 14 comment. On Friday’s GMA, however, reporter David Wright filed a report on the…

As the stock market went up and down over the past few weeks, media coverage also bounced from end-of-the-world rhetoric to rational analysis.CNBC’s Jim Cramer went on an impassioned rant August 6 calling for the Fed to reduce interest rates.“Bernanke needs to open the discount window. That is how bad things are out there … in the fixed income markets we have Armageddon,” said Cramer on “Stop…