Plus, if you look at MSNBC’s lineup after 6 p.m., Fox isn’t the only network that goes heavy on the opinionated hosts.

That of course it the journalistic equivalent of writing that Mrs. Lincoln quite enjoyed the show. MSNBC has a block of 3hrs in the morning hosted by a conservative Republican ex-congressman. It has three opinion shows after 6 hosted by liberals, while another show – Matthews – is hosted by a Washington insider who will hump the leg of the alpha male in the room regardless of party. Compare that to Fox’s 24 hour blast of GOP talking points.

Yes, that’s above the fold. Yes, it’s more space than the Iran story. I’m not attacking the Post for this. In fact, I’m applauding them. This is the biggest local story by far in this region: the epic failure of our most followed local team.

For a change, the Washington Post is on the ball.

If any of you are curious how I reacted on Sunday? THIS GUY.

As I write this, for some reason Jim Zorn is still the head coach of the Washington Redskins. I can’t figure out why.

Karl Rove
Doug Schoen (a Fox News dem)
Dan Schnur – McCain’s communication director
Ed Rogers – Regan/Bush I staffer
Dana Perino – Bush’s press secretary
Linda Chavez – Reaganite
Lanny Davis – PUMA and professor of the school of thought that Dems are too mean

That’s it. That was the panel.

They cannot be serious.

Who are the Post’s sources for this full-scale vindication of Dick Cheney’s defense of torture? “Two sources who described the sessions, speaking on the condition of anonymity because much information about detainee confinement remains classified”; “one former senior intelligence official said this week after being asked about the effect of waterboarding”; “one former U.S. official with detailed knowledge of how the interrogations were carried out said”; “One former agency official.” It’s unclear how much overlap there is in that orgy of pro-Cheney anonymity, but there is not a single on-the-record source to corroborate the Torture-Saved-Us-From-Mass-Death narrative, nor is there even a shred of information about the motives or views of these “officials.”

The House Judiciary Committee has now released over 5400 pages of Bush administration and Republican Party emails (pdf) related to the firings. Several of these emails suggest coordination between Post reporter John Solomon and Bush administration officials on how to managee the Post’s coverage of the widening scandal.

In one email to a White House spokesperson, Solomon even appears to be suggesting what spin to apply in order to minimize damage from the revelations.

‘Thanks for any help you can give on this,’ Solomon wrote to Brian Roehrkasse on the morning of March 2, 2007. ‘I think some tick tock along thse lines will bring some perspective to how the process occurred. Of course, the White House counsel’s office had to sign off. Of course an administration in its last two years looks for some fresh blood to inject into jobs. Of course, DOJ’s analysis of prosecutors goes beyond performance evaluations to achievements or failures on policy issues like immigration. I think we can get this just right with your help.’

In case you wondered if this fits the pattern of John Solomon’s past activity, survey says yes.

(via)

Time for another one of those blogger ethics panels.

Lest you think this is solely an editorial problem, the WaPo’s reporting side has fallen down on the job as well.

When the Washington Post writes stories like this (”An Imperiled Agenda: Anger Over Firm Depletes Obama’s Political Capital”), coming on the heels of them publishing a clearly fraudulent column by George Will, a survey of Washington opinion spanning the right to far-right, and the ongoing advocacy on their part in favor of the Iraq War, I wonder if they too deserve the fate of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News. Let’s not kid ourselves, it ain’t like the Washington Post is thriving.

President Obama’s apparent inability to block executive bonuses at insurance giant AIG has dealt a sharp blow to his young administration and is threatening to derail both public and congressional support for his ambitious political agenda.

Now, this story is a great example of DC establishment journalism and why the mainstream press is regularly disbelieved or taken with a grain of salt, especially by the left. Nowhere, not a single place, in the entire article does the venerable Washington Post cite any data quantifying what they characterize as a “blow” to President Obama. In fact, the entire enterprise sounds as if it could be sketched from a Boehner-Cantor-Limbaugh cocktail party. Nowhere, not a single time, does the article even quote someone in the Democratic or Republican parties taking President Obama to task over the AIG issue (at best it cites Sen. Dodd saying that the entire enterprise is bad, something the President made clear he agreed with). Nor are any independent voices or watchdogs cited. Instead, the article simply states that the President’s agenda is threatened by derailment. It just asserts this, as easily as it could have asserted that the Lincoln Memorial was constructed of Jello.

It just… says.

The entire article is 897 words, but it gives a paltry 37 to the President’s clear and direct statements addressing the issue at hand. And the Post commits this act of cowardice in the hinterlands of paragraph 5.

Now, at the same time The Washington Post wrote this story sans any actual evidence to back up the central assertion of the story comes some data in the form of polls.

From Pew, where the President dropped a few points in overall approval to 59% (Oh by the way, this is supposed to also be catastrophic according to the right. Yes, the same members of the right who would have danced in the streets if Bush had cracked 30% for the last three years of his presidency.) comes this on the economy:

Obama generally receives favorable marks for doing as much as he can to try to fix the economy. Six-in-ten express this view, which is substantially greater than the percentages saying that about George W. Bush in January 2002 (48%) or George H.W. Bush a decade earlier (21% in March 1992). For the most part, the public says that Obama’s economic policies have had no effect on the economic situation so far (64%), with much smaller proportions saying his policies have made economic conditions worse (15%) or better (14%).

Also in this poll congressional Republicans dropped to a 28% approval, compared to a 47% approval for their Democratic counterparts. This did not make A1 of the Post like the story without data did.

CNN’s poll also came out yesterday.

Obama’s job approval rating stands at 64 percent in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Monday. That rating is down 3 percentage points from mid-February.

When asked about the economy, 59 percent of respondents approve of how Obama’s performing, with 40 percent disapproving.

A lot of people, especially on the left, have done some hand-wringing about the state of newspapers now that so many of them are gasping for air and dying. While I feel badly for the people affected, stories like this make it hard to give a damn about an industry so unconcerned about it’s core mission: Collecting and investigating information and presenting it to the public. The news media, and newspapers in particular have given up on this core mission.

I’ve got nothing against an entertaining and lively newspaper, and even when my guy is the subject I’d rather they get to the heart of a matter if the alternative is dreck like this that is simply hyperbole, garment-rending, and whining in search of a Drudge link or a few hours of hashing out on Fox News.

The honeymoon is over. But not for President Obama. It’s between the mainstream media and the audience whose intelligence it abuses with alarming frequency.

If they spent even 1/10th of that effort into making the Washington Post website even semi usable (I dare you to glance at the front page and find the daily chat sessions the Post does – unfindable!) they would make up the likely meager revenue they’re going to rake in for this little trick.

Mr. Obama is a man of supple intelligence, with a nuanced grasp of complex issues and evident skill at conciliation and consensus-building. At home, we believe, he would respond to the economic crisis with a healthy respect for markets tempered by justified dismay over rising inequality and an understanding of the need for focused regulation. Abroad, the best evidence suggests that he would seek to maintain U.S. leadership and engagement, continue the fight against terrorists, and wage vigorous diplomacy on behalf of U.S. values and interests. Mr. Obama has the potential to become a great president. Given the enormous problems he would confront from his first day in office, and the damage wrought over the past eight years, we would settle for very good.

The Washington Post.

And all the other media outlets who write thumbsuckers like this where the dominant theme is “what to do?” The press has what amounts to a simple enough job: Evaluate claims, research them, and provide the readers and viewers with the results of the investigation. Instead, if the mainstream press were a detective it would say “Well, a lot of people commit crimes” as John McCain walked past with his hands covered in blood.

The mainstream press in this country has decided for a long time now to abdicate their role as a watchdog of democracy. I think that this is just basic laziness, but as others have noted it may be out and out malfeasance or bias. Whatever it is, if outlets like the Post devoted half the resources they do to thumbsucking pieces like this one that throw their arms up in confusion, there wouldn’t be the need for these pieces in the first place.

John McCain is a liar. Sarah Palin is a liar. And the Post should say so. If they find that the Democratic candidates are lying they should say so too. But don’t just sit there with your thumb jammed up your rear wondering where truth went when you helped to do the crime.

MORE: God, these people hate our democracy.

First this.

McCain hails from an America that exalted service to country, and he is the scion of a military family who endured five years in enemy captivity and who preaches a mantra of personal honor and of the nation over the individual — “Country First,” as his campaign slogan declares.

Because clearly John McCain’s family is so different from the rest of us in their belief in honor and patriotism. I mean, the rest of us unwashed masses couldn’t dare to hold a candle to their belief, right?

Then it gets worse.

Obama’s embodiment of a newer America begins but hardly ends with the fact that he would be the first black president. In a country where people liked to know where you were from, Obama lacks a ready answer — he is part Hawaii, part Kansas, part Chicago. In a recent speech in Berlin, he declared himself a “citizen of the world.”

OMG BARACK OBAMA’S FAMILY MOVED. Clearly this disqualifies him as a True American^TM. Of course, I’ve moved around a lot too (I even lived in a foreign country!) so I might as well be an alien. As to the quote in Berlin, here’s what Sen. Obama actually said:

I come to Berlin as so many of my countrymen have come before. Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen – a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.

Wow, that’s really… a lot less controversial.

MORE: Why doesn’t the Washington Post read its own paper?

A stack of newspapers, originally uploaded by DRB62.

Dana Millbank fakes a quote from Obama, press and GOP run with it. That dastardly “liberal media”.

Check out how MSNBC handles it:

Per a Democratic source, “[The Post] left out the important first half of the sentence, which was along the lines of: ‘It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign, that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It’s about America. I have just become a symbol…” Regardless of the context now, this narrative has been ready to explode at some point and even a misreported quote was enough to spark this arrogance watch.

(emphasis mine)

That’s right. MSNBC is saying that it doesn’t matter that the quote was manipulated and wrong, it fits an existing press/GOP narrative, so we’re running with it. WTF?

The Washington Post links to this story with the home page headline “McCain Reconsiders Tax Policies”. The press will literally tie themselves into knots in order to carry water for McCain without pointing out the obvious: McCain has flip-flopped on practically every major issue in order to appease the hard-right base of his party. The self-appointed “maverick” of American politics is just another Bush-era Republican.

Did you know that Angelina Jolie has an editorial in today’s Washington Post? That’s excuse enough to run a picture of her.

White House used terror threat to resurrect Cold War-era wiretap powers over Democrat objections.

Wouldn’t the proper phrase be “Democratic objections”? Or is the Post, for the 10,000th time, just carrying water for the GOP again?

In the August 8 edition of his column, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz noted Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) August 6 statement that he “never called for an invasion of Pakistan” in his August 1 foreign policy speech and that “the misreporting that was done needs to be cleared up.” Kurtz described Obama as “blaming the media” and responded: “I sure didn’t see anyone reporting that Obama wanted to invade Pakistan.” Kurtz continued: “I read that he would be willing to conduct raids against al-Qaeda without necessarily getting permission from Pakistan’s sovereign government.” In fact, numerous media outlets have reported that Obama, in the August 1 speech, stated that he was willing to “invade Pakistan.”

If you go to the link, you’ll see a video with all the things Howard Kurtz didn’t – or more likely – wouldn’t see. Don’t trust the mainstream media, they just want to hurt you.