Indeed, for more than a year Beck has been portraying the progressive organization as a central player in a larger, nefarious cabal of Marxist/socialist/Nazi Obama-loving outlets determined to destroy democracy in America. Beck has routinely smeared the low-profile entity for being staffed by “thugs” and “bullies” and involved in “the nasty of the nastiest,” like indoctrinating schoolchildren and creating a “mass organization to seize power.”

As Media Matters reported, the conspiratorial host had mentioned (read: attacked) the little-known progressive organization nearly 30 times on his Fox program alone since it premiered in 2009, including several mentions in the last month. (Beck is the only TV talker who regularly references the foundation, according to our Nexis searches.)

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It takes commercial airliners 10 hours to make the trip; email circles the globe in just seconds. On June 20, 2008, a news release from the Obama campaign landed in the email in‑box of Glenn Greenwald, who blogged from his widely read netroots home base, Unclaimed Territory. Although he's an A‑list blogger who helps the netroots formulate its agenda each day for the ongoing combat of U.S. politics, Greenwald actually works out of his first-floor home office in Rio de Janeiro. When he clicked on the Obama release after it traveled more than 5,000 miles that June day, the blogger was appalled.

Obama's statement addressing pending legislation regarding government-sponsored wiretapping did not create much interest among the Beltway press corps, but it lit a fuse within the blogosphere. In June 2008 a congressional agreement was being crafted to rewrite the nation's electronic surveillance laws at the request of the Bush White House, which demanded extraordinary executive powers in its pursuit of terrorist suspects, including the right to wiretap some U.S. citizens without the need of a warrant.

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Let's take an extended multiple choice quiz. Right now, which of the following topics is likely causing the discomfort inside Ailes' Fox News empire?

A) CNN's resurgence as the go-to cable destination for election coverage.
B) The unmistakably sunken candidacy of Fox News' favored son, Rudy Giuliani.
C) The still-standing candidacy of Fox News nemesis and well-funded antiwar GOP candidate Rep. Ron Paul.
D) The Democratic candidates' blanket refusal to debate on Fox News during the primary season.
E) Host Bill O'Reilly being so desperate for an interview from a Democratic contender that he had to schlep all the way to New Hampshire, where he shoved an aide to Sen. Barack Obama and then had to be calmed down by Secret Service agents.
F) Former Fox News architect and Ailes confidant Dan Cooper posting chapters from his wildly unflattering tell-all book about his old boss. ("The best thing that ever happened to Roger Ailes was 9/11.")
G) The fledgling Fox Business Network, whose anemic ratings are in danger of being surpassed by some large city public access channels.
H) Host John Gibson's recent heartless attacks on Heath Ledger, just hours after the young actor was found dead.
I) Fox News reporter Major Garrett botching his "exclusive" that Paul Begala and James Carville were going to join Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign, and then refusing to correct the record.

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If anxious viewers at home were hoping for some last-minute insight from Bush to help ease their doubts about the imminent war, why it had to be fought now, and why so many of the United States' longtime allies around the world refused to support it, those viewers were likely disappointed as the president stuck to his well-worn talking points ("Saddam Hussein has had twelve years to disarm. He is deceiving people"). And for any viewers who held out hope that members of the assembled mainstream media (hereafter, "MSM") would firmly, yet respectfully, press Bush for answers to tough questions about the pending invasion, they could have turned their TVs off at 8:05 p.m.

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Their poignant outbursts have been noted, and in some cases toasted, by the New York Times, the New York Observer, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the BBC, Slate and Salon, among others, as signs of a renewed media vigor. "Amidst the horror, American broadcast journalism just might have grown its spine back, thanks to Katrina," the BBC declared.

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A less obvious what-might-have-been worth considering is, what if Katrina had struck during an election year? Would the Bush administration have swooped in with a more muscular, proactive response to the catastrophe? After all, the administration's previous track record on hurricane relief might lead one to believe its performance this time could have been far superior.

FEMA's often invisible and incompetent reaction to the devastation in New Orleans stands in sharp contrast to the way the relief agency and the entire Bush administration sprang into action last summer as a series of deadly hurricanes -- Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne -- battered the crucial swing state of Florida just weeks before Election Day.

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Taking peculiar pleasure in trying to discredit the small-town mother, right-wingers have been in a tizzy over what they perceive as a flip-flop by Sheehan on Iraq. They excitedly reassure themselves that her alleged inconsistency about the war ought to disqualify her from being a legitimate war critic. Problem is, the oddly playful bloggers, busy mocking Sheehan as a "crazy," "exploited," "left-wing moonbat," aren't really staring down a lone mother who may or may not have shifted her opinion about Bush and the war since 2004.

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Luskin, whose client nearly got Time magazine's Matthew Cooper thrown in jail because Cooper was determined for two years to protect Rove's identity as a confidential source, has now turned around to claim it was Cooper who "burned" Rove.

Luskin's beef: The language Cooper used in a July 17, 2003, Time.com story about Joseph Wilson was misleading. (The article appeared just days after Robert Novak outed Wilson's wife in his column, which sparked the federal grand jury whodunit.) Luskin, citing the narrow scope of the conversation Rove and Cooper had, denies the White House ever declared a "war on Wilson," as Cooper's article suggested.

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AP certainly wasn't alone. An analysis conducted last week by Salon showed a shocking lack of mainstream media interest in the story during the entire month of May and into early June. There was a near blackout of the story on television, and just a handful of print outlets even reported the breaking news. Among the few media outlets with national reach to cover the story in real time was the Washington bureau of the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, which provided wire copy for the company's newspapers with a May 5 comprehensive story about the leaked memo.

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That FCC push, spearheaded by then-chairman Micahel Powell, ran into fierce grassroots opposition, which translated into an unusual bipartisan coalition of politicians who also opposed granting media companies almost limitless access to cross-ownership possibilities. In June 2003, Powell pushed though a partisan 3-2 vote among the FCC commissioners. But in June 2004, the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the FCC's directive, telling Powell that the FCC had to do a much better job of explaining its rationale for wanting to do away with a decade's worth of ownership regulations. The court found fault with both the logic and the evidence presented by the FCC.

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Here's how the paper, scooped by yesterday's Washington Post and Sunday Times of London, plays the release of the July 21 briefing document: "A memorandum written by Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet office in late July 2002 explicitly states that the Bush administration had made 'no political decisions' to invade Iraq, but that American military planning for the possibility was advanced." The Times adds, "The publication of the memorandum is significant because a previously leaked document, now known as the Downing Street Memo, appeared to suggest that a decision to go to war may have been made that summer."

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The briefing paper was prepared for participants in advance of the now-famous July 23, 2002 meeting, held at Prime Minister Tony Blair's residence, 10 Downing Street in London. According to the Times report, the briefing paper confirms that Blair had actually signed off on Bush's plan to invade Iraq back in April, 2002, at a summit in Crawford Texas. The two men then spent the next 11 months working to formulate a justification for the invasion -- because, as the briefing paper stressed, it was necessary to create the conditions which would make the invasion legal.

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According to the Washington Post's page 1 story today, "A House subcommittee voted yesterday to sharply reduce the federal government's financial support for public broadcasting, including eliminating taxpayer funds that help underwrite such popular children's educational programs as 'Sesame Street,' 'Reading Rainbow,' 'Arthur' and 'Postcards From Buster.'"

Even more dramatic was this move:

"In addition, the subcommittee acted to eliminate within two years all federal money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting -- which passes federal funds to public broadcasters -- starting with a 25 percent reduction in CPB's budget for next year, from $400 million to $300 million."

The CPB is an umbrella group created by Congress not only to promote public broadcasting in Washington, but also to function as a fundraiser to help produce programming. The CPB is especially important to smaller market radio and television outlets which cannot raise as much money from local donors.

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"We're rollicking, aggressive pursuers of facts," Klein tells MarketWatch.com. "No one else does that. Plenty of people talk about that. We're the only ones who go out and report the news. Our editorial chops are alive and well. We're kicking butt every day. The American people want serious news -- and they're not getting enough of it from cable."

Not to be rude, but does Klein actually watch CNN? Just off the top of our heads, we're thinking about the release of a certain memo from Downing Street that handed reporters, on a silver platter, an intriguing story about how Bush administration officials had decided to invade Iraq long before the bombs started dropping and were more concerned about justifying a war than preventing one.

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The memo was leaked this year to the Times of London, which printed it on May 1. The story, coming on the eve of Blair's reelection, generated extensive press coverage in Britain. In setting up his question to Mehlman on Sunday, Russert said, "Let me turn to the now famous Downing Street memo" (emphasis added).

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Instead, this week Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, despite having been scooped when "Deep Throat" was revealed in the pages of Vanity Fair, enjoyed a victory lap of sorts as they basked in their three-decade-old Watergate triumph and their ability to keep their source's identity a secret.

That potent combination of nostalgia, media navel gazing, and real-live history being revealed fueled the flood-the-zone coverage among the D.C. media elite. Although, as a New York Times editorial noted, finding out that the often-suspected Mark Felt was "Deep Throat" was akin to learning that Superman's secret identity is Clark Kent, the story captivated newsrooms.

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A main figure in the roiling controversy is Kenneth Tomlinson, the head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, who insists that public radio and television suffer from a liberal bias and that actions -- such as adding conservative-leaning programs to the lineup -- must be taken to counterbalance it. Tomlinson recently singled out the weekly news program "Now," once hosted by liberal Bill Moyers, as the cause for his concern about bias.

Tomlinson's conviction is so strong he once suggested to the CPB board that Fox News anchor Brit Hume be invited to "talk to public broadcasting officials about how to create balanced news programming," according to a report broadcast May 20 on National Public Radio.

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As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports, "Republicans suffered a setback yesterday to their late-developing strategy to claim fraud in the governor's race when a judge said the fraud claim can't stand as a key to the party's legal challenge of Democrat Christine Gregoire's 129-vote victory.

Chelan County Superior Court Judge John Bridges' decision is critical because under Washington law, a challenger most likely would need to establish fraud by one side in the case to get an election overturned simply on the basis that the number of improper votes exceeded the margin of victory. Without fraud, Republican candidate Dino Rossi faces the much more difficult task of showing that Gregoire owes her win to illegal votes or actions."

In an election where 2.8 million ballots were cast, Gregoire won the final recount by 129 votes.

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That despite the fact that Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, wrote to his colleagues in the Senate yesterday urging them to vote against Bolton's nomination.

"I strongly feel that the importance of this nomination to our foreign policy requires us to set aside our partisan agenda and let our consciences and our shared commitment to our nation's best interests guide us," Voinovich wrote. "In these dangerous times, we cannot afford to put at risk our nation's ability to successfully wage and win the war on terror with a controversial and ineffective ambassador to the United Nations."

According to Reuters, Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, agreed to let the nomination come up for a Senate vote. The haggling now is over how many hours of debate the Senate will allow for the confirmation vote.

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Newsweek has also taken flak for originally writing that its item was based on multiple "sources," when in fact it all hinged on the recollection of a single (anonymous) source. Inflating a source into sources is another cardinal sin of journalism.

But what's received less attention is the fact that prior to publication, Newsweek, in an effort to verify sensitive information, sent the entire article (albeit a short one) to a senior Pentagon official, asking whether the piece, not just the Quran mention, was accurate.

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