Froomkin wrote the "White House Watch" blog and he was extremely "Liberal" because he generally pointed out the Bush administration lied all the time. (While the rest of the paper's opinion page supported the Iraq War, etc, they really do suck). Here's the paper's shitty explanation:

I think the easiest way to put it is that our editors and research teams are constantly reviewing our columns, blogs and other content to make sure we're giving readers the most value when they are on our site while balancing the need to make the most of our resources. Unfortunately, this means that sometimes features must be eliminated, and this time it was the blog that Dan Froomkin freelanced for washingtonpost.com

Translation: the Washington Post has to be even more conservative now with Obama as president or else they won't be taken "Seriously," by assholes.

[Politico, Wonkette]

He's a particularly annoying and odious Republican, we'll grant that:

During the debate, Ballabon claimed that, after his most recent job in Washington, he became convinced that Democrats are inherently bad people and Republicans are fundamentally good people.
[...]
In fact, it is not atypical of Ballabon to use this kind of extreme partisan rhetoric. During the 2008 election, Ballabon said, "Obama is incredibly dangerous."

So, hey, he's a real big jerk! But come on, he's going to head their media relations and publicity office, he's not reading the news on-air. It's a pretty stupid move to have a rabid partisan neo-con head your PR division right as this wonderful new Obama Era begins (he'll be lobbying the wrong party, guys!), but this is CBS News we're talking about here. It's not bias so much as incompetence!

Man. Liberals today. We should probably go buy a pack of cigarettes before attempting to tackle HuffPo again. (We tried to read a BLOG by Jamie Lee Curtis and it was just insane nonsense.)

Now reporting that "DC-area reporters went out to happy hour and then karaoke with some political hacks" is like reporting that "kittens are adorable" or "that video of Verne Troyer making out with a doll will scar you" or "most prominent journalists have numerous undisclosed damning conflicts of interest that they can explain away only by claiming to be so obviously independent-minded as to require no scrutiny whatsover so lay off."

But still. This is the story of your Mark Salter and Tucker Bounds getting wasted and singing Dylan with your Ana Marie Cox and Michael Scherer. And then next campaign season Tucker Bounds and Mark Salter will explain that their candidate is an outsider who enrages the inside-the-beltway media elite with his authenticity, or something, and we'll all go to hell.

You can see her wearing out the ear of the sympathetic crew on Fox & Friends, who were forced to listen to her even without being outwardly drunk. You can also watch her talking to Harry Smith at CBS below, her key quote being:

"(The book is) basically about how victimhood is rewarded and everyone wants to be a victim," Coulter told CBS News. "It's about the rewards and praise you get for being a victim and the way liberals use victimhood and they oppress others."

All this whining, Ann; you sound like a fucking liberal. Shut the fuck up and go kill something.

Watch CBS Videos Online

No actually Coulter went on Fox's Hannity & Colmes tonight and, reports TVNewser, said the following:

I think I'll accept and then cancel at the last minute... I know the whole thing was a set up to block me from other TV shows.

Right, except Coulter is already booked on CBS' The Early Show.

We think she'll accept, and at the last minute go on the show. It's a much better deal this time around: The appearance has been hyped by Coulter's leaks to Drudge et. al. and, crucially, Coulter won't have to share the green room with Perez Hilton. (Even more crucially, no one will have to share it with the both of them.)

This whole stupid booking foofaraw serves everyone, really: Coulter moves a few extra copies of her dumb book; Today snags a few extra viewers; and the Barack Obama voter gets to shout down the conservative straw-man (err, woman?) on the TV, trying to interrupt America's honeymoon with the pesident-elect.

(Oh, and everyone else gets something to write about during the holiday no-real-news hangover.)

(Fox News Channel image via TVNewser)

These terrible people like Ann became scary powerful slander-dragons back in the 1990s, because of the end of the fairness doctrine, and then Bill Clinton only won a plurality of the vote and there was a large segment of the population willing to believe he was a slimy corrupt Arkansas horndog pretty much from day one. But Barack Obama? He won an actual majority of the popular vote and, most importantly, his pre-inaugural approval ratings are historically high. People want him to succeed. People are exhausted with Bush and Republicans and the entire last 20 years.

Rush and Ann still have lots of listeners and sell lots of books, but they're not driving any sort of national conversation anymore, just throwing meat to increasingly marginalized anger-junkies. The Obama smears didn't catch on last year, and they won't get much traction until he starts fucking up. So it was absurd for NBC to annoy viewers by giving this outdated comedienne a microphone during the already hallucinogenic fourth hour of Today.

Ann's statement involves the words "liberal media bias" but still doesn't even make sense within her own little mythology of persecution, so whatever. Let's let her go away in peace.

(Ha ha wait she's BANNED FOR LIFE and also it was apparently the 7 a.m. hour! And they replaced her with Perez Hilton Jesus Christ you just can't win. But yes the question remains: why would a privately-owned television network wish to promote, for free, the work of someone who virulently criticizes them, all the time? What is Ann complaining about, does she want the government to hand out spots on morning tv? Does she want affirmative action for conservative pundits? Sheesh.)

We know Sarah Palin loves to be interviewed, but only by people who ask simple, open-ended questions that don't involve statesments of fact or policies. On the "tough interviewer" scale, Oprah apparently ranks between Matt Lauer and Katie Couric, with Matt Laurer being slightly tougher than an interview by a seasponge or Sean Hannity. Here's Oprah:

"I said I would be happy to talk to Sarah Palin when the election was over... I went and tried to talk to Sarah Palin and instead she talked to Greta [Van Susteren]. She talked to Matt [Lauer]. She talked to Larry [King]. But she didn't talk to me. But maybe she'll talk to me now that she has a [multi-million dollar] book deal."

That's true, Oprah. Even Sarah Palin's gotta move product.

But daytime and late-night shows have been an underrated factor in this campaign, and an undeniable advantage for Obama. Ellen DeGeneres, David Letterman and panelists on "The View" all confronted McCain, while Obama has basically joked and danced his way through such appearances, including a "Daily Show" stint last week in which Jon Stewart asked him about "the whole socialism/Marxist thing." If anyone doubts there is a liberal entertainment establishment, it has been vividly on display.

Yes, that is right. John McCain, who barbecued with Rachel Ray and did Leno and Letterman and who campaigned with The View's Elisabeth Hasselbeck, is a victim of the liberal entertainment establishment. Poor Senator John McCain, who held the record for most Daily Show appearances ever, was victimized by mean questions on the talk shows he kept appearing on, over and over again, while Obama just shucked and jived—sorry, "joked and danced"—his way to victory, thanks to the liberal bias of Ellen, who was mean to John because he wants to make her marriage illegal.

On the day in which the story was McCain's media appearances, in a campaign that has hinged on those appearances before (he got grilled by Letterman because he ditched Letterman, remember), of course Howard is talking about how Obama got it easy on The View and McCain didn't (except for the first time he did The View, when he did get it easy). And oh, he was obviously not challenged on Leno, because Leno never challenges anyone.

But Ellen and Joy Behar and Dave were mean to John McCain, so the world is unfair.

(This is followed by an item about how there is a double standard because Sarah Palin is accused of hiding from the press even though recently she sat down with Brian Williams, Elizabeth Vargas, Jill Zuckman, and, snort, Sean Hannity [near-daily!]. She's also sat down with her traveling press corps "on several occasions." But mean Joe Biden is "hiding" from the press because he's only on tv multiple times every day, having done 211 interviews with local outlets, morning shows, the New York Times, and CBS, but not his traveling press corps. How is this a double standard? Well, there's a question mark in Kurtz's subhead so maybe he meant it's not a double standard, because to declare one when the evidence suggests an apparent single standard would of course be merely parroting a misleading GOP talking point and fair old Howard Kurtz would never do that.)

My point isn't that these were all terrible mistakes, although some of them may have been. It's that these strategic moves would look very different if Obama was on the verge of losing, while McCain would be garnering praise for, say, throwing himself into the bailout negotiations and rolling the dice with Palin. When a candidate is winning, the media treat his tactical decisions as sheer brilliance. When a candidate is faltering, not so much.

Do you see how much sense that makes? When a candidate is winning, the media makes the campaign look competent and smart! When a candidate is losing, the media keeps talking about the campaign's mistakes! It's almost like the media is biased against tactics that don't work? For some reason, things that get results are better than things that don't! Crazy!

Shafer in 2000:

Jack Shafer, Deputy Editor: Browne.

Many of my friends find themselves bound in game theory knots over whether or not to cast their ballots for Ralph Nader. Nader can't possibly win the election, they are told, and therefore their "wasted vote" will have as much of an effect as a mass demo in front of the White House. Plus, it may end up electing Bush and help destroy abortion rights, the environment, and liberoprogressivism.

To the would-be Nader voters, I offer this advice: Be like me and go ahead and vote your mind, even if the cause is lost. I've wasted every one of my presidential ballots on Libertarian candidates since I first became eligible to vote in 1972. In 1972, I wrote in John Hospers. (He got 3,907 votes.) In 1976, I picked Roger McBride. In 1980, Ed Clark. In 1984, David Bergland. In 1988, Ron Paul. In 1992, Andre Marou. In 1996, Harry Browne. Losers—I don't have to add—all.

With Browne running again this year, I'm geared up to waste my vote an eighth time. Why do I persist? For one thing, I agree with the Libertarian Party platform: much smaller government, much lower taxes, an end to income redistribution, repeal of the drug laws, fewer gun laws, a dismantled welfare state, an end to corporate subsidies, First Amendment absolutism, a scaled-back warfare state. (You get the idea.) For another, by voting for the Libertarian, I leave the voting precinct feeling clean. How many Gore and Bush voters will be able to say the same on Nov. 7?

Lastly, even if voting the way I think and the way I write hasn't resulted in the election of a Libertarian president, I indulge myself in the delusion that my perseverance has had some impact on our politics. Don't give me personal credit for stopping the draft; deregulating the airlines, trucking, communications, and financial markets; legalizing gold ownership; advancing free trade; or expanding the penumbra of the First Amendment. But don't deny me my delusions, either. I know the effort hasn't been a waste.

So, Harry Browne in 2000! And in 2004 and 2008 and 2012, if that's what it takes.

Shafer in 2004!

Jack Shafer, Editor at Large: Michael Badnarik

Every since I became eligible to vote in 1972, I've cast my ballot for the Libertarian Party's presidential candidate. In 1972, the candidate was philosophy professor John Hospers, who I wrote in because he wasn't on the Michigan ballot.

A parade of numbskulls and geniuses have run for president on the Libertarian ticket since then: an oil company lawyer, the heir to Laura Ingalls Wilder's estate, a party gadfly, a member of Congress, a member of the Alaska House of Representatives, and a professional gold bug (twice). This year the nomination went to Michael Badnarik, another party activist, who won on the third ballot. I've already cast my absentee ballot in his favor.

And Shafer this year, facing perhaps the most ridiculous joke of a "Libertarian candidate" ever:

Jack Shafer, Editor at Large: Bob Barr

I've cast a ballot for the Libertarian Party candidate for president in every election since I cast my first, which would be my write-in ballot for John Hospers in 1972. A long line of chowderheads have headed the Libertarian ticket since Hospers (don't ask about the veep candidates), but I've continued to punch Libertarian on my ballot because no other candidate or political party comes close to reflecting my political views of limited government, free markets, civil liberties, and noninterventionist foreign policy.

This year the party put up as its candidate a former Republican House member from Georgia, Bob Barr. As Libertarian candidates go, he's a chowderhead's chowderhead.

Raffi Khatchadourian's profile of Barr in this week's New Yorker depicts him—accurately, I think—as no more Libertarian than your standard Newt Gingrich clone. Barr, Khatchadourian reports, is against the legalization of such illicit drugs as crack and heroin. Khatchadourian continues:

[Barr] wrote the Defense of Marriage Act, voted for a constitutional amendment outlawing flag desecration, and even tried to legislate against Wiccan soldiers who wanted to practice their faith while in the service. A churchgoing Methodist, Barr rarely invoked religion when discussing policy with his aides, but he told constituents that "God's hand" was guiding his votes.

Some libertarian.

There's more bad Barr news. A Cato Institute blog item, reviewing Barr's House votes from 1995 to 2003, tags him an enemy of free trade. In 2003, Reason magazine called Barr "one of the most conservative members of Congress." In his defense, Barr told Newsweek that was then and this is now. He's grown! Since being voted out of Congress, he's laundered his hard-right résumé with a consultancy at the American Civil Liberties Union. He has stated his regrets for having voting for the Patriot Act.

Who is the real Bob Barr? When he was an unrepentant hard-right Republican, he did have notes of libertarianism to him. But in his libertarian rebranding, he can't quite mask his old, musky self. He's a fraud.

This much I know about Barr's opponents: Barack Obama proved in his acceptance speech at the Denver convention that he's a classic Democrat, a proponent of big government and economic intervention—just like George W. Bush, and we know what sort of misery eight years of those policies have brought. I love the way Obama sings but I hate the lyrics.

I'd like to say I have an equivalent sense of what John McCain stands for, but how can I, seeing as he has no clear idea of what he believes beyond what he shed in his last brain spasm? My friends in Arizona have always laughed about how easily the East Coast press fell for his straight-talk bullshit. You'll see, you'll see, they said. And they were right.

Which brings me back to Barr and the absentee ballot I cast for him this morning (Oct. 23). He gets my vote not because he'd be a good president. He wouldn't. He gets my vote not because he has a chance of becoming a president. He doesn't. And I didn't vote for him because he represents my views. He doesn't. I voted for Barr because he happens to stand adjacent to a set of values I cherish and that I've gotten into the habit of resubscribing to every four years—peace, prosperity, and liberty.

You got a problem with that?

So combative! So provocative! Libertarianism is a pretty "fuck-you" philosophy, but still. Jack, you are our favorite press critic, even though we are not friends. And it seems like both the "serious Libertarians" and the "fun-loving Libertarians" have given up on the Libertarian party this year. We suspect you're just doing this now to be difficult, Jack. Just to bug Jacob Weisberg maybe? Voting for Bob Barr is just not something to admit, in public.

The most negative element of the Palin coverage involved scrutiny of her record as Alaska governor, with 64 percent of the stories carrying a negative tone and just 7 percent positive. The coverage of her interview with ABC's Charlie Gibson was a wash, but stories about her subsequent sitdown with CBS's Katie Couric were 57 percent negative and 14 percent positive.

Are journalists actually supposed to write one nice story about how totally pretty Governor Palin is for every piece they file on how she's a petty tinpot PTA mom-from-hell who somehow manages to abuse what little power the governor of Alaska actually has? What purpose does this study serve, Project for Excellence in Journalism, except to encourage John McCain to think it's not fair and it's not his fault and everyone was mean to him?

DC is an incestuous town and everyone knows and is basically friends with everyone else. The media-political complex has lots and lots of intermarried "journalists" and "operatives" and everyone has politely agreed to assume that everyone else is totally professional about it. So they get a bit tetchy when the Columbia Journalism Review is all "disclose your relationships or just be more independent or something" because what do those kids know?

If Tom Brokaw wants to play golf with John McCain that is his business (note: we don't know if John McCain can play golf but the two are still definitely probably friends). The standard argument is that one has to find concrete evidence of "bias" before one can claim these chummy relationships are no good, but honestly the "bias" is so ingrained in the process that it's a useless task and one is best served by appyling a gimlet-eyed suspicion to everyone one sees on the TV and then voting for Ron Paul.

As we all know, NBC news, because of MSNBC, has been taken over by lunatics. Left-wing fanatics like Keith Olbermann and, uh, Rachel Maddow, and just-plain-crazy people like Chris Matthews. The Olbermann-Matthews ticket briefly covered the conventions as if they were real newsanchors and not circus sideshows! This outraged everyone, because they are intemperate and say what they think too much (especially Matthews, who says literally every thought he has, out loud). And no one was more outraged than Brokaw, who politely pulled rank and made his bosses give the serious news back to the serious people.

He had to! John McCain and the Republicans were in open revolt against NBC (and the rest of the media, as always, but "NBC" was what they chanted when they called for media blood). And Brokaw is friends with John McCain! Well, not "friends." It's complicated!

Last week during the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, Mr. Brokaw said, he spoke briefly with Mr. McCain, who has not appeared on “Meet the Press” since Mr. Russert’s death. While Mr. Brokaw said he and the Republican nominee are not personal friends, he did say they are “friendly” and “always had a great relationship.”

Which means, yes, they're friends. In much the same way that the serious-minded people of Washington are all friends with the other serious-minded people of Washington, once they've been there long enough to establish their serious-minded cred. This serious-minded fairness is what makes Brokaw basically useless, of course, but in that he's no different than Matt Cooper and Joe Klein and Richard Cohen and David Broder and Candy Crowley.

He's the sort of guy who'll only say what he feels—or even say what he knows to be true—when the cameras aren't rolling (or when they are, but he's off the air). He reportedly couldn't stand Bush (not only an arch-conservative and a buffoon, but also an impolite interloper into Washington, like the Clintons eight years earlier), but as the consummate professional he and his news organization made sure to give the president the benefit of the doubt, over and over and over again. And honestly, on television at least, that era of simple-minded fairness is over. People want to know when something is bullshit, and Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilley will tell you when something is bullshit, even if it's not.

The odd thing then is you have a Russert or a Brokaw, two steadfast educated liberal coastal elites, who'll bend over backwards to give a fair shake to the Vice President selling a war with obvious lies, because the Vice President is a serious-minded Washingtonian, like them, and they're all doing their jobs.

And McCain? The ultimate in respected elder statesmanship! He is intemperate, increasingly unhinged, and his gaffes and lies are an embarrassment to anyone who wants to take him seriously, but Brokaw remembers that Senator McCain was the independent maverick who never bullshitted the press back in the day (only the voters, remember), and he is a man to be taken seriously. So he apologizes for the wayward unseriousness of his network and promises McCain's camp that Keith and crazy Chris aren't in charge anymore.

"One of the things I was told by this person was that they were so irritated, they said, 'If it's an NBC moderator, for any of these debates, we won't go,' " Mr. Brokaw said. "My name came up, and they said, 'Oh, hell, we have to do it, because it's going to be Brokaw.' "

See? Then everyone wins! Except you, the viewer. But it's your fault for not being born in the Greatest Generation, and for not experiencing the 1960s, the most important decade ever.

The story was on how prominent conservatives like Kathleen Parker are all terrified that the McCain is sending a genial idiot into the White House based purely on her attractiveness to the base. Not revolutionary stuff. But too hot for Fox, apparently.

(Though they did report on Frank Luntz's focus group proclaiming an Obama victory in the debate. No one referenced the group's decision again that night, as far as we know, but the Fox website is still highlighting the video.)

Times editor Bill Keller complains a lot these days about how no one pays enough attention to the Times and their big stories. He blames the internet and a million competing voices for distracting people from the Important Work of Times journalists. He's sorta right! Gone are the days when the Times set the agenda for the national press. Though the slow death of newspapers across the nation has been beneficial to the Times in one important way: they're the only national paper, effectively. A Times investigation reaches more of the country than a Washington Post investigation. So one would expect a story of this size and seeming heft would make a big splash.

But it didn't! Drudge didn't play it up—though as we move closer to the election, he regresses even more to his natural Republican hackdom, so they shouldn't have expected a push from him. And the liberals have no one coherent answer to Drudge, just a million sites trying desperately to push their own often competing agendas. Kos, Talking Points Memo, and the Huffington Post all share an elitist coastal liberal bias and huge audiences, but very different methods of achieving their goals and working the media refs.

But on the other hand... the way the Times dropped the story seems self-defeating. Front page of the Sunday edition, sure. But it went online Saturday night. So by the time Monday morning rolls around, it seems ancient, even though no one actually talked about it over the weekend. Furthermore, it came right after a presidential debate, right before a hugely anticipated vice presidential debate, and right in the midst of a gigantic economic crisis and a desperate attempt by Congress to prevent another Great Depression.

The Times should've had the story go live online on Thursday night (in time for it to be an issue in the debates!), they should've leaked salient details to Drudge beforehand, or they should've waited until the bailout negotiations collapsed or succeeded. The fact that they did none of those things indicates to us that they didn't actually want this story to blow up.

Maybe there's nothing actually to it (though the bit where McCain helped take down Jack Abramoff because he was the competition to McCain's preferred lobbyists seems a bit juicy, right?) or maybe they've actually been cowed by the McCain campaigns attacks on their credibility, or maybe they just don't know what the hell they're doing.

Now, for your edification, some interesting bits from the 100-page Times piece on John McCain's gambling addiction:

• John McCain used the Abramoff investigation to personally attack Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed, two conservative activists who helped destroy McCain's 2000 campaign. "Inside the investigation, the sense of schadenfreude was palpable, according to several people close to the senator."
• McCain helped invent the Indian Casino industry with a 1988 law he drafted with Mo Udall. In 2005 or so, after Abramoff and before his current run for the presidency, McCain declared Indian gambling "out of control" and began declaring the need to restrain the industry.
• McCain does lots of favors for lobbyists, all the time, like every other Senator.
• "In Connecticut that year, when a tribe was looking to open the state’s third casino, staff members on the Indian Affairs Committee provided guidance to lobbyists representing those fighting the casino, e-mail messages and interviews show. The proposed casino, which would have cut into the Pequots’ market share, was opposed by Mr. McCain’s colleagues in Connecticut."

Update: Two more points we missed! The McCain camp began attacking the Times for no real reason last week. They, uh, probably saw this story coming. Did their preemptive attacks cause the paper to bury this piece or cause people to assume the story was biased and discount it? Well, the McCain campaign's media strategy has been desperate and stupid for a month now, so we don't think they have enough muscle to bury this themselves.

But point two, from a reader:

or maybe it was just a lousy lede. Five paragraphs in and facing the decision on whether to continue on to page A4 (or whatever page it was continued on) all the reader knew was that John McCain liked to gamble and did exactly that back in 2001. Not exactly compelling stuff and certainly not compelling enough to follow the story into the bowels of section A1.

Yes. The "McCain gambling at 3 a.m." story was a great atmospheric lede, but it had nothing to do with the news in the story. A wiser editing decision might've been to play up the Abramoff stuff, way more, up top, in easy-to-understand language. "John McCain's lead role in the Abramoff investigations may have been driven by personal animus and the influence of other lobbyists, documents and emails show." You know, like that, but better.

Twice today—twice—McCain surrogates responded not by denying any of it, but rather by... comparing the New York Times to the Huffington Post. Ok, what? Nancy Pfotenhauer tried this line first on MSNBC this afternoon. Then spokesman Michael Goldfarb tried it later in an press release.

That's right, they are saying you can't believe the Times because it's just like the stupid HuffPo with its Nora Ephron blogs and so on. What? Does this argument resonate with anyone who doesn't live online?? Man, the Washington Post is like the "Pink is the New Blog" of newspapers, right?? That MSNBC is pretty much the MediaBistro of television! Nonsensical zing! One understands why they decided to quickly shift gears this afternoon.