Shortly after Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus called on MSNBC's president to personally apologize and "take corrective action" for an offensive statement posted to the liberal network's Twitter feed which claimed that conservative people hate interracial families, the TV executive appears to have done just that.

"The tweet last night was outrageous and unacceptable. We immediately acknowledged it was offensive and wrong, apologized and deleted it," MSNBC president Phil Griffin said in a press release that was read aloud on "The Cycle."

It’s hard to imagine, but for many years, conservatives and Republicans were rather common in Hollywood. Exploring that history is worth doing not just because it is informative but also because it illustrates that there is no good reason that people on the Right could not have a bigger presence in that industry today.

Arizona State University professor Donald Critchlow has done an important service in this regard with his new book When Hollywood Was Right: How Movie Stars, Studio Moguls, and Big Business Remade American Politics. I had the pleasure recently of speaking with him about his work, the transcript of which follows this introduction.

The Newsroom, HBO’s low-rated series about a fictional television news channel will end after its third season, the premium cable channel announced Monday.

Besides struggling to get viewers, the Aaron Sorkin drama was widely criticized as being unrealistic and pompous. The show also was notable for its very liberal political slant and incredible lack of self-awareness about that slant. Throughout its brief time on the air, the show repeatedly denounced a lack of civility on cable television while also frequently slamming conservatives.

After a string of high-profile embarrassments, MSNBC appears to have decided that perhaps letting the inmates run the asylum is not the best of ideas.

According to a piece out today by National Review, the low-rated cable news channel has assigned an executive to review the scripts of its shows before they are aired as a way of trying to prevent such premeditated disasters like Martin Bashir wishing for Sarah Palin to be defecated upon.

For decades, there has been a lot of discussion about a “cultural war,” primarily between people of traditional faith and those who see religion as something of little value. Whether war is quite the right metaphor to describe the phenomenon, there certainly is a lot of pressure on people who adhere to traditionalist opinions, as Phil Robertson of A&E’s Duck Dynasty can certainly attest.

Yet while opponents of traditional beliefs and a politically unbalanced media have certainly proved harmful to faith in the public square, those two groups cannot be entirely blamed for the less prominent place that Christians now have in American culture. According to poet and art critic Dana Gioia, Christians also have themselves to blame as well for basically withdrawing from the cultural scene.

Following the suspension of Phil Robertson from A&E’s hit show Duck Dynasty, his family appears to be reevaluating their relationship with the cable channel.

In a statement released on their Duck Commander company website, the family said it “cannot imagine the show going forward without our patriarch at the helm” and is currently in discussions with A&E about what that means for the future of Duck Dynasty.”

It took less than a day for A&E to indefinitely suspend Phil Robertson, star of its reality television show “Duck Dynasty,” for making anti-gay remarks in an interview with the men’s magazine GQ.

The suspension appears to be the culmination of long-running tensions between Robertson and A&E over his self-described “Bible-thumper” religious views.

Continuing a decades-long trend, members of the media placed near the bottom in a poll which asked respondents their opinions of various professions.

In the Gallup survey, TV reporters were barely more popular than advertising salespeople, state-level politicians, car salesmen, members of Congress, and lobbyists with just 20 percent of respondents saying they had a favorable opinion. They were tied with lawyers.

As the absurd spectacle surrounding Fox News Channel Megyn Kelly’s recent joke about the race of Santa Claus is dying down, there’s one remainder of the story that is worth noting: It would appear that Aisha Harris, the Slate writer who started the whole brouhaha, appears not to know that a penguin, the animal which she semi-seriously argued should replace Santa, is a bird and not a mammal.

As noted by media blogger Jim Romenesko, the original Harris piece bears this amusing postscript: “Correction, Dec. 10, 2013: This article originally misidentified penguins as mammals. They are birds.”