The Michele Bachmann presidential campaign--formerly treated as atop-tier juggernaut by Beltway media--has been floundering for weeks. Which makes right now as good a time as any for them to grab some headlines by shouting about liberal media bias.

The Bachmann campaign was furious about email correspondence concerning a possible Bachmann appearance on a CBS Web show after the Saturday night debate.  The network's political director, John Dickerson, was lukewarm on the idea, mentioning that Bachmann's poll numbers are quite low and that she wasn't likely to be much of a factor in the debate.  Even though Dickerson is correct, these are generally not good reasons to exclude candidates, as FAIR has argued over the years.

The value to the Bachmann campaign was pretty clear, as the New York Times reported today:

"Last night, as Michele prepared her plans to debate on CBS, we received concrete evidence confirming what every conservative already knows--the liberal mainstream media elites are manipulating the Republican debates by purposely suppressing our conservative message," Keith Nahigian, Mrs. Bachmann's campaign manager, wrote in an e-mail to supporters.

Back in reality, Bachmann's message was still being suppressed on Sunday morning--as she appeared on NBC's Meet the Press to talk about her candidacy.

The truth is that the corporate media have been remarkably generous, granting Bachmann an extraordinary amount of coverage. And the CBS Sunday morning show Face the Nation, as FAIR noted here, has produced factcheck articles on its website after Bachmann has made appearances on the show--without ever telling its much larger viewing audience about her wildly inaccurate claims.

In case you missed it, Bachmann's Meet the Press appearance included, among other things, a call to make Iraq compensate the families of American servicemembers killed in the invasion of that country. A few million dollars would suffice.

ABC This Week host Christiane Amanpour (11/6/11) kicked the show off with a pretty funny joke:

Clash of the titans in Texas last night, as Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich met for the first of a series of one-on-one Lincoln/Douglas-style debates.

Less funny was the show's very imbalanced roundtable discussion:

So let's bring in our roundtable: George Will, the Huffington Post's Arianna Huffington, former George W. Bush strategist Matthew Dowd, and historian and Newsweek columnist Niall Ferguson, author of the new book Civilization: The West and the Rest.

Three conservatives and the left-liberal Huffington.

But if anything, ABC's panel was teetering leftward.  On NBC's Meet the Press:

Finally, our roundtable will discuss if the state of the Republican race in flux now that the front-runner is engulfed in controversy. Republican strategist Alex Castellanos, Wall Street Journal editorial board member Kim Strassel, author of the new book Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero and host of MSNBC's Hardball Chris Matthews, and Politico senior political writer Maggie Haberman give their views.

Two conservatives, a Beltway reporter and Matthews, who described himself recently as a George W. Bush-voting pragmatist.

And on CBS's Face the Nation:

The guests are Ed Gillespie, former Republican National Committee Chair; Ed Rollins, former Bachmann campaign manager; Ken Blackwell, Perry supporter, Liz Cheney, Republican consultant and John Dickerson, CBS news political analyst.

So four conservatives and a reporter.

There's a piece at the CBS website (9/21/11) by Robert Hendin marking Bob Schieffer's 20 years hosting the network's Sunday morning show Face the Nation. Hendin, a senior producer for the show, writes:

From the get go, Bob made his plans known. "Our aim is to going to be very simple here: to find interesting people from all segments of American life who have something to say and give them a chance to say it," he said that morning.

The piece goes on to reveal--likely by accident--a lot about what they mean by "all segments of American life."

So to celebrate Bob's 20th Anniversary, we went through the files and looked at exactly who he's had on the broadcast. Here's a look at Bob Schieffer's 20 years at Face the Nation by the numbers:

Bob has interviewed:

Three presidents of the United States, four vice presidents, seven secretaries of state, six secretaries of Defense and 45 different cabinet members. He's also interviewed 123 senators and 109 different representatives.

Of those, a few notable names come up more frequently than others: Vice President Joe Biden has been interviewed by Bob on Face the Nation 46 times. House Speaker John Boehner, seven times. Former Vice President Dick Cheney has been on the broadcast 16 times, including this past Sunday's program. By far though, the number one guest of Bob's tenure as host of Face the Nation is none other than Senator John McCain, who has been on the program 76 times.

All segments of American life.  When did they give up on that idea?

Guess who's booked to appear on the CBS Sunday morning chat show Face the Nation this weekend? None other than Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan.

It has, after all, been an eternity since Sunday TV viewers had a chance to listen to Ryan talk about his Medicare-slashing budget plan.

May 22 on Meet the Press, to be exact.

FAIR's new petition to the television networks asks why Ryan's far-right plan has been getting so much more coverage than the People's Budget of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Add your voice today!

As we noted here, there weren't many labor voices booked on the Sunday morning chat shows. One, actually--Richard Trumka from the AFL-CIO.

ABC's This Week featured four governors (two Democrats, two Republicans) talking about their fiscal problems. CBS's Face the Nation had a soft interview with New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie. Host Bob Schieffer asked him one question that began, "You have a reputation as a straight talker, I think...." Schieffer went on to play a clip of Christie bravely calling for Social Security cuts. Instead of questioning Christie's totally inaccurate premise--that you "have to raise the retirement age"--Schieffer asked him, "Should other people be saying that?"

Over at NBC, Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker could at least be challenged by another guest  on the same show. They weren't on at the same time, but NBC viewers could hear Trumka say this:

Well, first of all, this isn't about the budget crisis. Let's look at how this--his arguments migrated.  First he said it was--the budget crisis was caused because workers were paid too much in Wisconsin.  We now have studies that show they're not overpaid, they're underpaid.  In fact, people with a degree in Wisconsin get 25 percent less than their private sector things. 

Then he said it was about the pension.  Now we find out that his pension plan, unlike a lot in the country, is almost fully funded.  The assets match the liabilities. 

And then the employees said, or the members out there said, his workers said, "We'll accept your cuts." And he said: "No.  We won't accept your accepting our cuts." And the most outrageous thing that he did, and he talked about this, was he's now saying to them, "You either have to accept a loss of your rights or I'm going to lay you off." Now, no person should have to face the right of their loss of their job or the loss of their rights.  I know Governor Barbour would never say to his employees, his people down there, "You either have to give up your rights or you have to give up your job."

So there isn't much of a pension crisis in Wisconsin. State workers  aren't overpaid. And those same workers have agreed to many of the concessions Walker is demanding. If this were part of every discussion about Wisconsin, we'd be having a far more sensible discussion.

NBC host David Gregory followed with a popular right-wing argument about public workers' unions--that their political campaign contributions mean that elected officials owe them favors:

You raise a lot of money from public employees.  That goes, goes to finance campaigns to try to get somebody in office that you can do business with.  And ultimately you're supporting someone, in some cases, that you're ultimately negotiating with.  They also know that political employees, rather, public employees are politically active because they're organized by the unions.  And so they make concessions on things like pensions, on healthcare, knowing that the promises don't come due to well down the road.  Isn't this the cycle that we've gotten into that public unions have to take some responsibility for?

In other words, aren't politicians doing favors for you because you help them get elected? How often have CEOs and corporate trade associations--who have far more money than labor to give to politicians--been asked that kind of question?

The Afghanistan documents posted by WikiLeaks were obviously the big story of the week. So how did the network Sunday shows react to these disclosures, which have the potential to open up a real debate about the Afghan War?

NBC's Meet the Press interviewed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen.

ABC's This Week featured an interview with Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

On CBS, Face The Nation had Mike Mullen.

What would state broadcasting look like again?

CBS also had an interview with Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations (formerly of the Bush administration), who urged the U.S. to wage a more traditional counterterrorism war, "where we use drones, we use cruise missiles. We use covert operatives, we use Special Forces."

That would seem to be the kind of criticism of the Afghanistan War that is allowable.

It's worth noting that the new PBS program Need to Know discussed WikiLeaks on Friday. As co-host Alison Stewart put it at the top of the show: "Much ado about nothing or putting lives at risk? The effects of the WikiLeaks on the war in Afghanistan."

Those are the only choices? Need to Knows' guest was Joshua Foust, a blogger/writer who is a critic of WikiLeaks and is generally skeptical that there's much of value in the leaked reports.

Robert Parry (Consortium News, 5/25/09) thinks that "there is no one, it seems, that the U.S. mainstream news media loves more than Colin Powell," and as proof offers "Powell's disingenuous response" to Bob Schieffer's May 24 CBS Face the Nation "question about the ex-secretary of state's knowledge regarding 'enhanced interrogation techniques,' which the International Committee of the Red Cross and virtually all other objective observers say constituted torture": Powell--whom, Parry recalls, "was a member of President George W. Bush's Principals Committee, which oversaw the interrogation policies"--claimed to an unchallenging Schieffer, "to have been kept mostly out of the loop.... He was 'not privy' to the legal memos authorizing the abusive treatment."

Such transparent tripe was left to the renegade Washington Stakeout questioner (and longtime FAIR associate) to take on:

Outside the CBS News' Washington offices after the interview, media analyst Sam Husseini asked Powell what he knew about the torture of al-Qaeda suspect Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who made false claims linking Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaeda, lies that Powell then cited in his infamous pro-invasion speech before the United Nations on February 5, 2003.

"I don't have any details on the al-Libi case," Powell responded.

When asked when he learned that some of the bogus evidence had been extracted by torture, Powell said, "I don't know that. I don't know what information you're referring to. So I can't answer."

And when Husseini explained to Powell "that the information had been publicly discussed by Powell's former chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson," Powell was reduced to a grade school reply of "So what?" All of which leads Parry to some questions of his own--"Did Powell participate in the Principals Committee?... Did he object to the abusive techniques... that he says 'were judged not to be torture'?--and to a pointed conclusion:

For a Washington press corps that has been up in arms challenging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's claim that the CIA obscured key details of the harsh interrogations from congressional leaders, it was impressive to see how little skepticism was evinced by Powell's claim of ignorance from his seat on Bush's Principals Committee.

See the FAIR Media Advisory: "Does the CIA Ever Lie?: Parsing the Pelosi Torture Controversy" (5/20/09)