On the one hand, NBC's Meet the Press gives us Republican Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (2/5/12):

DAVID GREGORY: Governor Daniels, one of the things you hear from the campaign trail, Mitt Romney said it just the other day, is that the recovery should have been so much stronger. You know, it's very difficult to prove something like that, just like it's difficult for the president to prove the economy would've been weaker if not for his particular policies. How could it have been stronger had a Republican been in president, in your judgment? Been in the White House, I should say.

DANIELS: Well, for one thing, for one thing, national policy wouldn't have been so relentlessly anti-enterprise as it's been. If you'd assembled a team of Nobel economists and said design us a policy to stifle and strangle investments and small business growth and innovation in this economy, you couldn't have done better than what's happened the last three years. The mindless piling on of new regulations, every one of them very expensive, and in the aggregate extraordinarily so, that's all drained away dollars that could've been used to hire someone. New taxes and the threat of more, all the uncertainty that's come with that. What we know is this, David, I don't have--no one can prove what might have happened, but this is the weakest recovery, by far, from a deep recession that we have in--since the records have been kept, and I don't think that's an accident.

Wow--anti-enterprise tax-hiking regulatory excess!

Instead of the reporter in the room quizzing his guest on what he's talking about, let's get another guest to weigh in.

Like, say, a billionaire mayor:

GREGORY: Mayor Bloomberg, as an independent voice in all of this, is that your judgment as well, that that's a fair criticism?

MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: I think I agree with most of what Mitch said. I think if you want to have growth, number one, you have to have the financial industry be strong and willing to take risks. And this relentless criticism and investigation of them, whether--regardless of the facts in the past, if we want to have a future, we have to have people have confidence.

Three moments, actually:

--NBC's Chuck Todd yesterday on Meet the Press (12/10/11), commenting on Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich:

Well, first of all, those are a couple of nimble debaters. They are pretty good.  I think we have seen it.  This is the final two.

I'm old enough to remember when Todd had the campaign narrowed down to a Top Three, way back in August:  "We have a top tier. It is Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann."

--ABC host Diane Sawyer, asked to describe (This Week, 12/11/11) the most revealing lesson she learned about the candidates after she moderated a debate this weekend:

The vitality on the stage. We said at the beginning the marathon run it is to run for president. But I have to tell you, first of all, they have great immune systems.... They came out strapping, they came out ready.... I think you can't always experience on television just the sheer physical vitality of all these candidates.

--The New York Times reports (12/11/11) that a story about Newt Gingrich featured an anonymous source rebutting criticisms of him. Turns out that source was... Newt Gingrich.

Even though Mr. Gingrich publicly insists that he will take the high road with a positive campaign that does not criticize other Republicans, he recently strayed from that vow, offering himself as an anonymous source in a New Hampshire newspaper last week to reply to criticism by John H. Sununu, a former aide to President George H.W. Bush who, as a Romney surrogate, has called Mr. Gingrich "untrustworthy and unprincipled."

Mr. Sununu told the newspaper, the Union Leader, that Mr. Gingrich supported a tax increase deal that the first President Bush made with Democrats in 1990, then reversed himself. The newspaper, quoting a source identified as "a senior aide in the Gingrich campaign," elaborately rebutted this account.

[Gingrich spokesman R.C] Hammond said the source was actually Mr. Gingrich, who did not want to be identified to avoid the impression he was getting into a fight with the Romney camp.

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 an old joke about how the pundit spectrum in corporate media debates goes from GE all the way to GM. On Sunday's Meet the Press, viewers got a chance to see that joke come to life.

On the panel was conservative former GE CEO Jack Welch, conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks and NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell. The left end of the spectrum must have been former Democratic Rep. Harold Ford Jr., best known for his time leading the center-right Democratic Leadership Council. Nowadays Ford is a TV pundit (the "liberal" who advises Democrats to move further right) and works as a managing director at Morgan Stanley--a move from his previous gig at Bank of America.

As for the actual debate, Welch praised Herman Cain's tax plan, called for more domestic oil drilling and complained about the White House's anti-business regulatory policies. Ford, as the TV liberal, pointed out that the administration thankfully did not pursue progressive policy goals like card check, and that the White House deserves credit for reining in some EPA regulation. Ford also included a slam of Occupy Wall Street:

We Democrats can't criticize Republicans for catering to the Tea Party and not say to our Democratic Party you got to look beyond Occupy and be willing to do what's in the best interest of the country.

Given his current job, this is not surprising--though NBC viewers may have wanted to know that the "liberal" in the debate has been working for several banks. Or maybe David Brooks was the liberal here...

On his MSNBC show (10/15/11), Chris Hayes went through the NBC archives to look at Martin Luther King's appearances on Meet the Press. He was struck by the tone of the questions King was asked--and the show put together this clip reel (apologies for the ad you're likely to be forced to watch before the clips play; it's mercifully brief):

Squint or you'll miss it--the Sunday front page of the Washington Post:

In case you're having trouble finding it, it's in the lower right-hand corner: a blurb approximately one column inch long, directing people to page A20 to find news about protests in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street in "more than 900 cities in Europe, Africa and Asia."

It wasn't just the Post that was having trouble finding the news in hundreds of protests around the world. NBC's Meet the Press featured Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, former Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty and Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote yesterday (10/16/11), "I do hope that the protesters have lofted the issue of inequality onto our national agenda to stay." Not if the people who set the national agenda have anything to say about it.

NBC Meet the Press host David Gregory, interviewing Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Sunday (10/10/11):

GREGORY: What's going on in the streets of Occupy Wall Street?

EMANUEL: Yeah.

GREGORY: Complaining about the unfairness, railing against Wall Street. The president has sympathized with those protesters in the street.  Is demonizing Wall Street the way to create an environment...

EMANUEL: Well...

GREGORY: ...to get the banks to hire?

EMANUEL: The--it's not...

GREGORY: Is this not a reverse tea party tactic?

At the top of Meet the Press yesterday (9/25/11), NBC anchor David Gregory announced one of the topics to come:

Is the president's plan basic fairness or class warfare?

As with too many other media debates, an absurd proposition--that returning tax rates for certain wealthy people to levels seen in the 1980s and 1990s is a declaration of war--is treated as one of the two possible answers to a question. Gregory manages to make things worse by getting the only answer on the show from billionaire New York mayor (and media tycoon) Michael Bloomberg:

GREGORY: Does that trouble you?

BLOOMBERG: It does trouble me. You can't define what's middle class, what is wealthy, what is poor. Every time you have a jump, people play games to get on one side or another. And I think it's not fair to say that wealthy people don't pay their fair share. They pay a much higher percentage of their income. They have a higher rate than people who make less. The Buffett thing is just theatrics. If Warren Buffett made his money from ordinary income rather than capital gains, his tax rate would be a lot higher than his secretary's. And, in fact, a very small percentage of people in this country pay a big chunk on their taxes.

Bloomberg's response is incoherent. Of course definitions of what makes someone  "wealthy" or "poor" differ, but there's no reason people can't make such distinctions.

And Buffett's tax burden has nothing to do with "theatrics." Bloomberg says, "If Warren Buffett made his money from ordinary income rather than capital gains, his tax rate would be a lot higher."

Well, yeah. THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT of Buffett's argument.

If Meet the Press is going to actually engage this discussion, it might make sense to invite some guests who know something about the issue--perhaps even a non-billionaire.

There is growing Congressional opposition to the Libya war. Two House votes this month sought to challenge the White House policy-- one of which passed by a wide margin.  On Saturday (6/18/11) Charlie Savage reported in the New York Times that the Office of Legal Counsel's advice to Obama was that he needed to comply with the War Powers Act. Obama rejected their advice, which as Savage reported is "extraordinarily rare."

Congress will be taking up more Libya debates this week, with a potential vote scheduled to stop the funding of the war. And the recent Republican presidential debate showed that many candidates are speaking out against the Libya policy.

That's a lot to work with for the Sunday shows. But they mostly skipped the chance to present serious criticism of the White House. On NBC's Meet the Press (6/19/11), viewers heard from Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who wants a more aggressive war:

The War Powers Act is unconstitutional, not worth the paper it's written on.... The president's done a lousy job of communicating and managing our involvement in Libya, but I will be no part of an effort to defund Libya or to try to cut off our efforts to bring Gadhafi down.  If we fail against Gadhafi, that's the end of NATO.  Egypt's going to be overrun and the 'Mad Dog of the Mideast,' what Ronald Reagan called Gadhafi, if he survives this, you're going to have double the price of oil that you have today because he will take the whole region and put it in, into chaos.... So from my Republican point of view, the president needs to step up his game in Libya, but Congress should sort of shut up and not empower Gadhafi.

And the Democratic view, courtesy of Senator Dick Durbin:

The president's doing the right thing.  What we have here, this would be 'Butcher of Benghazi,' Gadhafi, needs to be stopped so he doesn't kill innocent people.  The president brought together the Arab League, the United Nations, and NATO and said we are going to play a supportive rule--role, no ground troops.  We're going to have a limited duration conflict to stop Gadhafi.  That was the right thing.  But I think that the War Powers Act and Constitution make it clear that hostilities by remote control are still hostilities.... What we should do is act on a timely basis to pass congressional authorization under the War Powers Act.  I reject the Republican approach, which has been suggested by Speaker Boehner and others to cut off the troops.  It would give solace to Gadhafi.  It would undermine the people who are resisting him in that nation, and I agree completely with Lindsey Graham.  It would call into question the future of NATO.

So while they differ on War Powers Act-- and on which nickname to use for Gadhafi-- they both support the war.

As did NBC reporter Richard Engel, who said this during the program's roundtable segment:

I just came from Libya before I came here, and the fact of the matter is the war in Libya right now is not very serious, that NATO is not doing a terribly good job.  The rebels need a lot more help.  The bombing campaign in Tripoli barely exists.  Every once in a while there's a few bombs on mostly empty compounds, and people go about their lives more or less unaffected.  It's not the kind of thing that's going to drive Gadhafi from power.  And a, a lot of European nations who are now trying to lead this, this fight, which--and are, and are struggling to do it, are looking at this debate in--within the--in the United States to end the U.S. support for NATO.  If the U.S. ended its support for NATO in Libya, NATO really is dead.

It's rather odd for a reporter to offer policy advice like that. One has to wonder if NBC would be pleased if Engel were speaking out against the war.

It wasn't just Meet the Press, though. Fox News Sunday featured outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who defended the war (and the White House's legal explanation for it). And ABC's This Week took the  apparent upswing in antiwar sentiment to interview pro-war Senator John McCain. A short comment from Libya War critic George Will could be heard during the roundtable.

One of the chief criticisms of the Sunday show is that they're way too obsessed with Beltway posturing and politics. That's obviously true, but in this case there would seem to be a lot happening in that world to push back against the war-- and the shows seem to think their role is to man the ramparts.

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!

There have been a lot of complaints about New York Times business reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin being too cozy with the Wall Street powers that he's covering. Some of those critics are in-house; a New York magazine article went so far as to quote a Times staffer who (like several others at the paper) likened Sorkin to disgraced WMD reporter Judith Miller.

Sorkin was on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, part of a roundtable discussion that followed an appearance by Republican Paul Ryan. And that's where Sorkin said this:

SORKIN: I got to tell you, I got an email while the show was going on, while Ryan was just speaking, and even though the Medicare plan may be unpopular, the view by a Wall Street CEO was this guy at least is proposing something.

GREGORY: Yeah.

SORKIN: I think they like the idea of leadership.  They want to get behind that.

Huh--Wall Street CEOs like a plan that gives them tax cuts and makes seniors pay more for healthcare. What other surprises are lurking in his email?

Perhaps someone from the Progressive Caucus should email him about the People's Budget, since he doesn't seem to know about it.

Labor journalist Mike Elk (In These Times, 5/16/11) made an excellent point after watching NBC host David Gregory interview Newt Gingrich on Sunday's Meet the Press (5/15/11). Elk wrote:

Speaking yesterday on Meet the Press, Republican presidential candidate and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said that "the Obama system of the National Labor Relations Board [NLRB] is basically breaking the law to try to punish Boeing and to threaten every right-to-work state."

While Meet the Press host David Gregory vigorously challenged Newt Gingrich on details of his personal life, he failed to challenge Gingrich on his false assertion that the NLRB was breaking the law by finding that Boeing punished workers for striking in Washington state by moving a planned new production line there to nonunion South Carolina. Despite the NLRB complaint against Boeing being one of the most high-profile NLRB cases in decades and entirely consistent with past legal precedent, Gregory failed to say anything.

His decision not to challenge Gingrich on the Boeing case is especially troubling since the main sponsor of Meet the Press is none other than Boeing. The top of Meet the Press' website proudly boasts that the show is "sponsored by Boeing."  No other corporation is listed so prominently as a sponsor on the website. In addition, Boeing is the exclusive sponsor of Meet the Press'  iPhone app.

This reminded me of Gregory's response last year when ABC's This Week started posting factchecks (courtesy of Politifact) of their guests on their website:

An "interesting idea," Gregory allows, but not one the NBC show will be emulating. "People can factcheck Meet the Press every week on their own terms."

I guess that's especially true when the subject is a sponsor.

From Meet the Press (3/27/11):

GREGORY: I'll start with you, Ted Koppel. You spent time, in your early days as a correspondent, with Henry Kissinger.

KOPPEL: I did.

GREGORY: Who knew something about the big ideas for the world.  Is this administration getting the big ideas right in the--in the tumult of the Middle East?

Who knows what those "big ideas" might be. But if you want to make Ted Koppel feel comfortable, it's good to praise Henry Kissinger-- as we noted recently:

Koppel once boasted of Kissinger: "Henry Kissinger is, plain and simply, the best secretary of state we have had in 20, maybe 30 years.... I'm proud to be a friend of Henry Kissinger. He is an extraordinary man. This country has lost a lot by not having him in a position of influence and authority."

For another view of the value of Kissinger and his "big ideas," see my article from Extra! Update: "Questions for Kissinger Go Unasked: Journalists Show 'Sensitivity' to War-Crime Suspect's Feelings" (8/01).

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?