Readers of  Saturday's New York Times may have noticed this this piece (10/16/10):

Despite Image, Union Leader Backs School Change
By TRIP GABRIEL

In "Waiting for Superman," the new education documentary, the union leader Randi Weingarten is portrayed, in the words of Variety, as "a foaming satanic beast."

At a two-day education summit hosted by NBC News recently, the lopsided panels often featured Ms. Weingarten on one side, facing a murderer's row of charter school founders and urban superintendents. Even Tom Brokaw piled on.

The article actually does a pretty good of explaining how Weingarten and others in the union movement have, contrary to the message of Davis Guggenheim's hit documentary, pushed for real reform efforts across the country. The article even points out that one union-backed charter school in New York was left out of the film:

Yet one scene that the director filmed, but left on the cutting-room floor, showed Ms. Weingarten signing a contract on behalf of teachers at Green Dot, which has had impressive results since it opened in 2008.

Steve Barr, who founded the Green Dot charter school network, lamented that the film ignored examples of charters and unions working together. "It doesn’t help to take the one true open-minded union leader and bash her," he said.

All in all, it's a pretty helpful article for understanding some of the nuances of the "reform" debate. But a better headline (though a totally unlikely one) would have been "Despite Message of Biased Media Coverage, Union Leader Backs School Change." The truth is that it's fairly routine for the press to bash teachers unions, as FAIR documented in this article.

"Even Tom Brokaw piled on" makes you think there's something surprising about a major media figure bashing a teachers' union. In reality, it's pretty common.

Former Bush adviser Karl Rove is making the rounds to promote his new book Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight. He landed on NBC's Meet the Press yesterday (3/14/10), interviewed by Tom Brokaw.  Brokaw asked him about his book's discussion of the Iraq War:

BROKAW:  And in it, you acknowledge when weapons of mass destruction were not found, everyone was startled and not very happy about that.  If that had been the case before war began, you couldn't have gotten congressional authorization.

ROVE:  Nor in all likelihood U.N. approval, as we had as well.

BROKAW:  Would you have launched the war if you had known there were weapons of mass destruction?

ROVE:  Well, as I say in the book, we would not have had either the authorization from Congress nor the U.N., and we probably would have found other ways to constrain his behavior.

There was no U.N. approval for the Iraq War.

The White House always argued that U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 gave them legal cover for the war, but it did not--it warned of "serious consequences" if Iraq failed to disarm.

As the U.N. weapons inspectors were reporting back from Iraq, the White House was seeking a second Security Council vote that would have officially sanctioned military action. That effort was unsuccessful, and the U.S./U.K. attack began without that Security Council approval.

This is not ancient history, nor is particularly obscure; coverage of Iraq and the U.N. weapons inspections in early 2003 was fairly intense, and Brokaw's NBC newscast aired several reports on the U.S. efforts to win U.N. support for a war resolution. (Brokaw himself on March 10, 2003, for example: "Tonight, the French vowed to veto any U.S. war resolution at the U.N., while Secretary of State Powell continued to look for votes and a plan that would allow the United States to go to war with some kind of U.N. approval.")

Rove undoubtedly knows this history, too. What he's counting on is that journalists like Brokaw will either not remember these facts, or will be too polite to bring them up.

Tom Brokaw, the interim host of NBC's Meet the Press, and NBC analyst Chuck Todd expressed bafflement on last Sunday's Meet the Press (10/26/08) at how Latinos had "turned on the Republican Party" and their "friend" John McCain:

TODD: I mean, this, this Hispanic--one of the things we--underreported story of the cycle is how Hispanics have just turned on the Republican Party, hurting John McCain. Frankly....

BROKAW: Who is a friend of theirs.

TODD: Who is a friend of theirs.

BROKAW: Right.

TODD: You know, this is a Shakespearean--you know, the S...

BROKAW:  Right.

It's hard to know exactly where Todd was going in identifying this as "Shakespearean"--perhaps he was likening Latinos turning on and "hurting" their "friend" McCain to the famous scene of betrayal in Julius Caesar, in which the Roman leader's friend Marcus Brutus collaborates in Caesar's assassination?

The analogy suggests that, even as the GOP presidential campaign sputters, McCain is now facing treachery from the very people who were his allies.

Et tu Jose and Maria?

Where would Latinos be if they didn't have pundits like Todd and Brokaw to let them who their friends are!

Back in the real world, where issues have an impact on how people vote--it would appear that the pundits may have the story completely backwards. A new report from the Center for American Progress suggests that Latinos actually stand to lose out economically under McCain's economic policies.

But then, pundits have rarely been known to let actual issues get in the way of their horserace storyline.