From a damning New Yorker article

At MSNBC, Phil Griffin was worried, and with good reason. The average “Countdown” viewer is fifty-nine years old, and forty-five per cent of the viewers are women, presumably Democratic—a fair description of a Hillary Clinton supporter. Griffin believed that Olbermann was beginning to alienate his core audience, and asked him to ease up a bit on Clinton, and possibly even make some conciliatory gesture to the Clinton camp. Olbermann was offended by the suggestion. “I can’t do that!” he says, recalling that conversation. “Me doing a commentary against my own opinion is pandering. Black and white. And I’m not going to do it. Would I pull back a little bit, or think long and hard about whether or not I want to knowingly alienate part of the audience? Yeah. And I did. I mean, I held fire on Senator Clinton for quite a while after she began to really scare me, with some of these tactics.”

(Emphasis supplied.) More . . .

Frank Rich writes:

You’d never know that [McCain's] new campaign blogger, recruited from The Weekly Standard, had shown his genuine affection for Mrs. Clinton earlier this year by portraying her as a liar and whiner and by piling on with a locker-room jeer after she’d been called a monster. “Tell us something we don’t know,” he wrote.

Which makes McCain's new campaign blogger different than Frank Rich in what way? In this way, at least he is praising Hillary Clinton now. Frank Rich can not even fake it. I tell you, with supporters like Frank Rich, Obama needs no enemies.

BTW, Rich was singing a different tune about a "Democratic Civil War" in March:

According to Tim Russert's son Luke, his dad's favorite music was what Russert called "geezer rock" and included “Springsteen, Fogerty, Van Morrison and James Taylor.”

Watching the media coverage tonight, you can't help but feel touched by how much his colleagues respected him and will miss him. This is for them.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

RIP, Tim Russert.

Tim Russert, NBC News’ Washington bureau chief and the moderator of “Meet the Press,” died Friday after a sudden heart attack at the bureau, NBC News said Friday. He was 58.

Russert was recording voiceovers for Sunday’s “Meet the Press” program when he collapsed, the network said.

While we're pondering the topic of obnoxious media coverage of the campaign, consider this:

[Fox News Channel] has released a statement saying it should not have referred to Mr. Obama’s wife, Michelle, as "Obama’s Baby Mama," as it did on Wednesday in an on-screen headline commonly called a "chyron." ... The chyron appeared during a discussion between the conservative columnist Michelle Malkin and the Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly about political attacks against Mrs. Obama. It read in full, "Outraged Liberals: Stop picking on Obama’s baby mama!" ...

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term as one "chiefly in African-American usage" that refers to, "The mother of a man’s child, who is not his wife nor (in most cases) his current or exclusive partner."

Earlier this week, the Fox News anchor E.D. Hill had apologized for raising the possibility that the Obamas affectionate fist bump during the senator’s victory rally in St. Paul on June 3 was "a terrorist fist jab." Two weeks prior, the Fox News analyst Liz Trotta said she regretted making a joke about a possible assassination of Mr. Obama.

Many of us do not respond well to criticism.

Yesterday, Rachel Sklar criticized Keith Olbermann's denial of sexism in the Media. It seemed to me Sklar made a good case.

When asked about it in his daily kos Special Comment diary, Olbermann responded:

Ellen Goodman writes:

It wasn't just the ugly stuff coming out from under the rocks - "Life's a B - -, Don't Elect One." Nor was it just the sleazy shout-outs of the new boys' blogosphere. What shocked even the slur-hardened feminists was that, as Ellen Malcolm of Emily's List said, "it seemed to be so acceptable. And it was shameful." Where was the DNC's voice of protest? Where were the big feet and CEOs of the media? Why do sexist slurs get a laugh while racist slurs end careers? Getting even is, finally, shaming the media messengers.

(Emphasis supplied.) The Left blogs used to see themselves as watchdogs against the Media. They abdicated that role in this campaign, blinded by their hatred of Hillary Clinton. Instead of denouncing the sexism and misogyny, they were silent. They malignly accepted the sexism and misogyny. They have been stained by their silence. More . .

In a front page NYTimes story, NBC reacts to charges of unfairness and sexism in its political coverage of Hillary Clinton:

Phil Griffin, senior vice president of NBC News and the executive in charge of MSNBC, a particular target of criticism, said that although a few mistakes had been made, that they had been corrected quickly and that the network’s overall coverage was fair. “I get it, that in this 24-hour media world, you’ve got to be on your game and there’s very little room for mistakes,” Mr. Griffin said. “But the Clinton campaign saw an opportunity to use it for their advantage. They were trying to rally a certain demographic, and women were behind it.

Ha! The Obama News Network claims it was fair. Hilarious. Oh and the sexism consistently exhibited by its main newsreaders and commenters? Just a Hillary Clinton ploy. More . . .

Via Somerby, Nancy Giles, who claims to be a Democratic political strategist (NOTE: Apparently not. Just a random Democrat. Which begs the question, why is she on TV?):

ABRAMS (6/11/08): Well, let me ask you this. Nancy, if the numbers show—if it’s close by the time he has to make the decision, and the numbers show in the polls that Hillary could make the difference, would that make the difference to you?

GILES: No. [. . .] No, it’s not worth losing over because I don’t think he’ll lose...I think it would be a real liability. But his whole campaign is new—change, not old politics. And Hillary—look, if he gets Hillary as his VP, he’s got to hire somebody to be the official presidential taster because you don’t know what`s going to be in your food. You don’t know what could happen. I literally feel that way.

(Emphasis supplied.) She literally feels that way. Oy. What synonyms can be used for the words disgusting and idiotic? Because I am not allowed to name call at Talk Left.

Speaking for me only

There is irony in this from Josh Marshall on John McCain's Iraq gaffe today:

This highly strained argument seems premised on the assumption that journalists should report not what you say but your own highly generous after-the-fact interpretation of what you said.

Talk Left readers know what I am talking about.

Speaking for me only

This is pretty funny from someone who joined the League of Outraged Bloggers Against Hillary Clinton:

. . . [W]e're right now in the middle of a major presidential campaign. The campaign, as campaigns tend to be, is waged by big league politicians. And I've heard Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, John McCain, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and all the rest all try to mislead the voters on a whole variety of subjects over the course of the months. Nobody finds this particularly shocking. Indeed, anyone who doesn't recognize that there's a lot of BS and hocus pocus out there on the campaign trail would be dismissed as a naive child.

(Emphasis supplied.) Best check the archives of the A-List Obama blogs for the past 6 months. Seems like there were a lot of naive children blogging out there.

Speaking for me only

Might as well stick with the theme of the day.

This is an open thread.