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On this Sunday's Reliable Sources on CNN, ESPN senior writer Andy Katz was asked by host Howard Kurtz about Fox hosts Eric Bolling and Sean Hannity and their defense of the abusive Rutgers basketball coach last week and Katz was more than happy to give Kurtz an earful with what he thought of them.

KATZ: It's ridiculous. Okay, first of all, they were losing. So that tactic wasn't working, You can clearly motivate without physical contact, without slurs. I mean, it's been proven time and time again at all levels of sports. You do not have to go to that level.

You can position. You can adjust, you know, physically moving people in different sports, but you cannot, absolutely and we saw that with the assistant Jimmy Martelli. You cannot physically hit someone. You can't throw things at someone and you cannot... We're in a different era. You can't have those kind of homophobic slurs. You can't.

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This "access" whinefest by the media, which has been going on for the better part of the week, isn't legitimate and isn't about their ability to practice journalism.

I'm sorry, but I don't buy it. Howard Kurtz and his panel this Sunday, which included David Zurawik, Julie Mason and Bill Plante come across as still being pissed off that none of them had a chance to snap a picture of President Obama playing golf with Tiger Woods.

As Kevin Drum said, it would be easier to sympathize with these national reporters if they really did ask tough, unpredictable questions of the President, but they don't. And Drum's observations on the Politico article and their complaints about the White House using social media and going around the press, can be applied to the conversation here as well:

At the same time, the reporters interviewed for this piece seem to be weirdly upset over the fact that the Obama White House uses Twitter and Facebook and releases lots of its own photos. Why is this a problem? It's 2013, guys. Why shouldn't a president communicate with the public using whatever mediums the public happens to consume? Over the past century, that's evolved from whistle-stop tours to radio to TV to Facebook, but so what? Why should reporters be unhappy about this?

Given the sorry state of our corporate media these days, I don't think they're going to get much sympathy from most of the public.

Transcript below the fold.

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I hate to break it to Mr. Axis-of-Evil David Frum -- who was more than happy to be one of those conservative flame throwers when he was still in the club -- but Fox finally getting rid of Palin doesn't represent any kind of sea change for the network. They've still got a long, long list of others who are just as bad as Palin and Beck still working at that network and so unless we see some mass firings there, it's business as usual with or without Palin.

And CNN TeaNN doesn't have much room to talk about giving extremists air time after watching them work every bit as hard as Fox to promote the AstroTurf "tea party" and giving these flame throwing politicians endless interviews with little to no push back. I don't expect we'll see Howard Kurtz talking about that on his Sunday show any time soon though.

KURTZ: For three years now the former governor of Alaska has been one of the most prominent voices on Fox News.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SARAH PALIN, FORMER GOVERNOR OF ALASKA: Barack Obama is a socialist. He believes in socialism, in redistributing wealth and confiscating hard-earned dollars of our small business men and women.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: On Friday we learned that Sarah Palin's contract will not be renewed. Sarah Palin was a very hot property when Fox hired in her 2009. What happened?

PAGE: That's showbiz. You know, she has really kind of played out now I guess as far as is Fox is concerned and her appeal. But it's been said Roger Ailes was not happy with the Palin arrangement. He wants to get away from that sort of showbiz punditry on the right, unless she's going to it clear her candidacy, I suppose.

KURTZ: Is it the political climate has changed since Palin's VP run, rise in the Tea Party or is it Sarah Palin's star has simply faded?

FRUM: I think both are true. Watch this in tandem when Glenn Beck was taken off the air. There was this period from 2009 to 2011 where there was nothing to wild too put on Fox News. Beck began to frighten his programmers. This man was capable of saying anything, including things that could wreck his show, damage the network.

And as they backed away from him, as they have backed away from other characters who went, the whole exercise is, the whole network is an exercise in going too far, but as they retreated from those who went farthest, I think this is a milestone, as well.

KURTZ: My reporting shows that Fox News did offer Sarah Palin a new contract, but what I would call low ball offer, significantly less, a fraction of the million dollars a year she had been paid.

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On CNN's Reliable Sources this Sunday, Howard Kurtz did a segment focusing on whether the pundits out there in the media who were telling everyone it would be a Romney blowout, should pay a price for being continually wrong with their predictions. I think Kurtz misses the forest for the trees with his criticism, primarily because any real analysis about just how bad most of the corporate media's election coverage was, would require him taking a look at his own network and not just Fox News.

First and foremost, if we're ever going to do anything about getting the money out of politics, we're not going to get much help, if any, out of the industries primarily profiting from it, which is all of the television stations and radio stations across the country. You're not going to see the pundits out there saying much about all of those advertising dollars when their companies and everyone they work with is thriving because of it.

And then there's the issue of Rove and his ilk on Fox, who was not just that he was misleading viewers with overly optimistic predictions about the election results, but also running a PAC. Fox continually failed to disclose Rove's involvement in the election. They also made a regular habit of bringing on Romney campaign advisers as pundits and failing to disclose their roles as well..

If Kurtz wants to give an honest assessment of the coverage of this presidential election, there's a lot more wrong with it than just pundits getting predictions wrong. And what I noted here is just the tip of the iceberg. Endless focus on polls and the horse race, rather than substance, the issue of media consolidation, fake balance where there is none and a host of other issues are a lot bigger problem than talking heads being rewarded for failure.

Full transcript of Kurtz and his panel's remarks below the fold.

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John Amato:

Heather sums up this segment quite well, but I want to focus on Jennifer Rubin's performance here. She is totally out of control as she freaks out on Matthews and Aravosis. Talk about being "unhinged". Rubin becomes the embodiment of unhinged-ness. My God, she's as unhinged as it gets. But let's not forget that Republicans create their own reality, so I guess in her brave new world she's just being normal. As Digby states:

Perhaps this still explains the Republican strategy better than anything else:

"When we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

That's not all that different from this:

Romney pollster Neil Newhouse: "We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers."

On a more prosaic level, some of this is a function of the massive amounts of information out there and the nature of the two party system. All it takes is for one side to tell a lie and the other side to call them out, for many people to retreat to their partisan corners. They don't feel capable of sorting out the truth so they rely on their tribal identificati.

Howard Kurtz apparently thinks there wasn't anyone more qualified than Mitt Romney fan-girl and neocon, right-wing blogger Jennifer Rubin to weigh in on Chris Matthews' dust up on Morning Joe last week with RNC chairman, Reince Priebus, because that's one of the guests he brought on Reliable Sources to discuss it this Sunday.

Rubin took the opportunity to call Matthews "unhinged" and attack MSNBC for their liberal convention coverage lineup and to make some snide remarks about liberalism not being in the "mainstream." As Kurtz's other guest, John Aravosis rightfully pointed out, that aggressive interview style we saw from Matthews with Priebus is "what Matthews does," and like some of his counterparts on Fox, such as Hannity and O'Reilly, he very often gets aggressive with guests, interrupts them and talks over them, although I'd never put Matthews in the same category as either of those two. Matthews can be a bully at times, but he's no Hannity or O'Reilly.

If Rubin didn't realize that before last week, I guess she never watches his show, because John is right, Matthews can be and is often very aggressive with his guests. I for one was glad he was with Priebus, but that's because I'm fully aware of how Priebus normally handles interviews, which is he filibusters and makes sure he gets all of his talking points in and then runs out the clock. He's also an unabashed liar and gets away with lying without being called for it on a regular basis.

The only reason she cares one iota about how Matthews acted this time around is it's an excuse to attack all of them for their convention coverage for supposedly being too "liberal." Note to Rubin and Kurtz on that matter: Andrea Mitchell, Chuck Todd, Tom Brokaw, Brian Williams, and Chris Matthews for that matter, are not liberals. And if Rubin thinks Matthews is "unhinged" it makes me wonder if the woman reads her own column or has watched herself on the television. She didn't mind getting into it with and interrupting Aravosis during this very interview.

Kurtz followed that by allowing Rubin to pretend that Paul Ryan wasn't really lying during his convention speech. Aravosis called her out for it and Kurtz wrapped things up with the typical Villager, we just have two different points of view and I can't dare let the audience know who's lying game. Pitiful.

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I've got to wonder if CNN's Howard Kurtz has ever once asked if the media was spending too much time focusing on a story that's bad for Democrats. From this Sunday's Reliable Sources, Kurtz asks his panel if the media has been intentionally trying to keep the Todd Akin story alive and to their credit, he can't get a single one of them to agree with him that the story didn't deserve the amount of air time it got.

He couldn't get any of them to agree that it's biased to talk about the fact that the Republicans policies are very hostile to women, or that it wasn't perfectly fair to bring their vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan's views into the debate either. Sorry to disappoint you Howie, but sometimes the facts just happen to have a liberal bias and all the concern trolling by you for Republicans isn't going to change that.

And it's not the "liberal media" that threw Akin under the bus when this happened and demanded he get out of the race. That would be the Republican establishment and their allies in the media and right wing blogs that were responsible for that and for keeping the story alive as well. I don't believe there's a chance in hell if the tables were turned and this was a Democrat getting thrown under the bus for something they said that Kurtz would be saying one word about the amount of media coverage the story received.

When you can't even get any of your fellow Villagers to agree with you, it's time to hang it up Howie.

Transcript below the fold.

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From this Sunday's Reliable Sources, Current TV's Stephanie Miller shows us the correct way to respond to the beltway Villager nonsense about Paul Ryan's budget proposals where they constantly try to paint him as a Very Serious Person and the adult in the room who wants to solve the problems that everyone else is afraid to talk about.

After discussing Mitt Romney's selection of Ryan as his running mate and how the media is going to respond to it, Kurtz asked Miller if she and her “left-wing pals” were now going to “pound Paul Ryan even more than Mitt Romney?” I love the fact that she managed to get a Charlie Pierce reference into this interview.

MILLER: I'm not sure if this is better for comedy or better for Democrats. It's about even. I love the fact that Eddie Munster is trending on social media now and also the term “zombie-eyed granny-starver” which I believe my friend Charlie Pierce coined on my show.

A little later in the program, she did a good job of shooting down Kurtz when he tried playing the “you might not like Paul Ryan but at least he's a Very Serious Person” game.

KURTZ: Now what the Washington pundit class is saying, it seems to me Stephanie Miller, is that you may not like Paul Ryan's ideas, and I bet you don't.

MILLER: Yeah.

KURTZ: But at least he has a plan and he's put himself out there with a detailed, or fairly detailed budget, some omissions in it clearly, and the Democrats are largely ducking the debate about entitlements. So how do you take that one on?

MILLER: Oh, you mean ducking, as in not wanting to destroy the social safety nets? This is what drives me crazy about the “mainstream media,” present company excepted of course is that somebody puts forward a plan like that and people go “oh well that's bold and courageous” and ooh he's “serious.” It's seriously a horrible plan. I don't think there's anything, you know, bold or refreshing about destroying Medicare and replacing it with vouchers.

Amen sister. She also hit back at the notion that Social Security is broke or in a “crisis” because it isn't and there are policy discussions to be had on making sure our social safety nets stay in place, but gutting them while giving tax cuts to the rich isn't most people's idea of preserving them. I will disagree with her about one thing she said during this segment. I know she was being polite to her host, but Howard Kurtz doesn't deserve an ounce of deference on this matter. He's as bad as the rest of them out there with their adoration of Ryan as he just demonstrated here.

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The last time I payed any attention to the San Francisco Chronicle's Debra Saunders was back in January of last year, when she was helping Howard Kurtz carry water for Sarah Palin and her crosshairs map just after the shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords. This week on Reliable Sources, she decided to play the false equivalency game with Sen. Harry Reid and Rep. Michele Bachmann.

Sorry Debra, but Harry Reid tweaking Mitt Romney about his tax returns and playing some hardball politics is not the same as Michele Bachmann's insanity and her comments about the HPV virus supposedly causing a woman's daughter to suffer mental retardation.

And Bill Press is right, there is one person who can clear this up and it's not Harry Reid. It's Mitt Romney and the media should be asking why he's only released one year of his tax returns so far.

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Former McCain strategist Steve Schmidt made the statement over the weekend that were Newt Gingrich to win the Florida primary after winning South Carolina, we might see a bit of a civil war within the Republican Party ensue. Well, I think we got a taste of some of the opening salvos of that during this interview from Sunday's Reliable Sources on CNN.

The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin was not at all happy with CNN debate moderator John King for the question he asked Newt Gingrich to open up their South Carolina debate earlier in the week, but not for the same reason the audience was displeased. It's not often I agree with Rubin on much of anything, but she's right here that King lobbed Gingrich a complete softball in the way he framed the question and should have known better that Gingrich was going to go after him and attack him for it.

Rachel Maddow actually made a very similar point in her coverage shortly after the debate, noting that there were about a dozen different ways that question could have been framed for Gingrich so he would have had to answer for the hypocrisy of one, being from the party that claims to run on family values when you've got a history of cheating on your spouses. And two, the utter hypocrisy of Gingrich cheating on his wife at the same time he was trying to have President Clinton impeached for similar behavior.

Howard Kurtz did point out that Rubin is a supporter of Mitt Romney during the segment. What he failed to note is that she wrote an op-ed the previous day, basically begging a number of people in the Republican Party leadership to come together and "collectively get behind a not-Gingrich candidate." Schmidt talked about the panic that was coming if it looked like Newt Gingrich might actually have a chance to win the Republican nomination. Well, as BooMan put it in his post on Rubin's op-ed -- I Got Your Panic, Right Here.

The other thing missing from this discussion is one of the reasons for the audience at the debate being so completely hostile to John King, or to Juan Williams earlier in the week as well, and that's how many of them are potentially Fox News viewers or listen to right wing radio and have been completely propagandized to believe that you can't trust the "liberal media" and that conservatives are somehow under assault from those evil lefties that are just out to get them? We've got large swaths of this country who have been trained to believe that Fox is the only place they can trust to get their information from and as much as CNN tries to go after those viewers by catering to the AstroTurf "tea party" or with their fake balance and host of "conservative" pundits who come on the air and lie to their viewers as well, they're still going to be part of that "liberal cabal" that they've been taught to hate.

As has already been noted here, Fox viewers are less informed than those who watch no news at all. I imagine a good deal of them were in those audiences cheering for Gingrich's attack on John King and booing Juan Williams for daring to point out that Gingrich has been playing the race card. I don't expect Kurtz and his guests to be pointing that out since CNN is about one notch above Fox in the misinformation game, if not on a par with them.

Transcript via CNN below the fold.

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CNN's Howard Kurtz chastised the big media companies who have failed to disclose their conflict of interest and their support of the controversial Internet privacy bills, SOPA and PIPA which they finally covered when there was a blackout by a large number of Internet companies in protest of the legislation.

I'm glad Kurtz at least decided to mention that they should have been more open about their conflict of interest, but less than one minute with no mention of the names of the bills at the end of his show hardly qualifies as anything that really informed his viewers of what those conflicts are. It's a step in the right direction, but a pretty lame one at best.

Now if we could get them to disclose their conflict of interest with the Citizens United ruling that allows corporations to pour unlimited amounts of money into campaigns anonymously and the fact that the big media companies don't want to fix the mess since they're the ones benefiting from all that money flowing into the advertising on their networks.

I expect that to happen about the time hell freezes over. They only covered this blackout because they were forced to because too many people who use the Internet were wondering what was going on or were about to and they would have looked like incompetent buffoons to have completely ignored the story. And Kurtz's complaints here ring pretty hollow when there was a virtual blackout on the story for months while Congress hoped to get it passed with no one noticing.

KURTZ: A strange thing happened this week that transformed the complicated Congressional debate into something that, if you own a computer, was impossible to miss.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRIAN WILLIAMS, NBC ANCHOR: Gone blank. Tonight, the big fight behind what happened to some big names on the Web today and why they went away.

DIANE SAWYER, ABC ANCHOR: You may have noticed today if you happened to go to Google or Wikipedia, the popular Web sites were blacked out in protest over proposed new crackdown on the Internet.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: These and other opponents say the heavy hand of government regulation could ruin the Internet. They are taking the fight to the big media companies and the Motion Picture Association, which say new restrictions are needed to crack down on online piracy.

And it worked. Public pressure forced congressional leaders to put the bill on hold. But here's the thing - when "Good Morning America," "CBS This Morning" and the "Today" show first covered the blackout, they didn't mention that ABC, CBS and NBC have lobbied hard for the restrictive legislation, although the "Today" show did take note of it during a subsequent interview.

No initial disclosure as well on CNBC. The "New York Times" says that CNN has been, quote, "relatively diligent" in disclosing that parent company, Time Warner, supports the legislation.

This is an important story about online freedom and thievery. And it's just plain embarrassing that the networks didn't fess about the very clear financial interests of the companies that own them.