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The website Box Office Mojo reports the Afghanistan war movie “Lone Survivor” opened to an estimated $38.5 million this weekend, which is second all-time in January behind 2008's sci-fi monster film “Cloverfield.”

On Friday afternoon, CNN anchor Jake Tapper interviewed the “lone survivor” of the title, Marcus Luttrell, and actor Mark Wahlberg, who plays him in the movie. Luttrell reacted strongly to Tapper’s suggestion that after watching the movie, he felt the mission that cost him his friends seemed hopeless: [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

Following up on Friday's awful jobs report from the government (only 74,000 seasonally adjusted jobs added, with the unemployment rate dropping to 6.7 percent only because adults continued to leave the workforce), the Asssociated Press's Christopher Rugaber tried to search for excuses.

To its credit, the headline at Rugaber's report didn't blatantly dissemble like the one at Bloomberg, which, in revising the title of an underrated Stevie Wonder song from the 1970s ("Blame It on the Sun"), blamed it on the cold and snow: "Old Man Winter Put a Chill on U.S. Labor Market at End of 2013." But the AP reporter predictably failed to entertain the possibility that Obamacare's virtual chaos, plan cancellations, and impending 2014 premium hikes might have thrown a great deal of sand into the job market's gears, even though a virtual halt in healthcare hiring stuck out like a sore thumb. Excerpts follow the jump (bolds and numbered tags are mine):

Emmy Rossum, the 27-year-old star of Showtime’s Shameless, which has its fourth season debut tonight (Jan 12), on Wednesday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live marveled at the “amazing” and “free health care” in Britain.

Recounting her travails during a recent visit to the nation with nationalized healthcare, she told Kimmel that food poisoning sent her to a hospital. “The hospitals are amazing there,” she exclaimed, citing “free health care” and how “they don’t even ask you for your I.D. You give your name, you give your symptoms, they hook you up to a bunch of fluids. They say just leave when you feel like it. You pay nothing!”

As NewsBusters has been reporting, the Hillary Clinton-loving media have been having a field day this week hyping the so-called scandal involving Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) and the George Washington Bridge.

Although CBS's Face the Nation did cover the matter Sunday, host Bob Schieffer seemed rather amused by the whole thing and even offered a commentary wherein he read a Letter to the Editor of the Washington Post mocking the affair for even being "newsworthy" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The people at NBC News and Meet the Press should be ashamed of themselves.

With all that happened last week - a bombshell new book released by a former Defense Secretary as well as the worst jobs report in years - David Gregory and Company decided to devote more than half of their show Sunday to the truly earth-shattering Bridgegate scandal that directly impacted a small percentage of the nation.

The indefatigable David Rose of Britain's Daily Mail, working with British climate blogger Tony Newberry, has today exposed bias in news reporting of climate change of a scale heretofore unknown, even for that never-accurately-covered subject.

He reveals that, in a move orchestrated by the BBC itself and a left-wing lobby group, the British government under the Labor Party paid for BBC personnel to be taught the left-wing, pro-alarmist spin on climate issues for the specific purpose of using the "news" as propaganda.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the Comcast-owned Weather Channel is starting to play hardball over demanding higher fees to air on the DirecTV satellite TV system.

Everyone needs their weather news to stay safe, they argue, so DirecTV is threatening public safety by not knuckling under. They're even pressing DirecTV viewers to write Congress and insure Comcast gets more profits for this "critical public safety resource," like your local TV station doesn't cover the weather:

Billionaires who back conservative Republicans are trashed on NPR when they die as “scathing TV ad” backers. But what about a black radical who wrote a poem blaming 9-11 on Israel and implying America was evil and terrorist? On Thursday night's "All Things Considered," NPR began by calling him “one of America's most important — and controversial — literary figures,” under the headline “Amiri Baraka's Legacy Both Controversial And Achingly Beautiful.”

The man’s invented Muslim name was Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones). He was the poet laureate of New Jersey in 2002, but they abolished that honorary office after his poem. NPR cultural correspondent Neda Ulaby found his most controversial work wasn’t too negative, it was “complicated.”

Bullying by staffers of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who has denied knowledge of their actions when they were taken, is a national news obsession. Bullying by staffers of Colorado Senator Mark Udall — which the Senator has acknowledged and is defending — is barely a blip.

The story, first reported in the Colorado blogosphere at Complete Colorado, is that Udall staffers "worked assiduously to revise press accounts that 249,000 Coloradans received health care cancellation notices" by pressuring the state's Department of Insurance to change the definition of "cancellation." There is no dispute that the cancellations as normal people understand the word occurred (links are in original; bolds are mine):

One reason commercial liberal talk radio’s never quite succeeded is that NPR is a network with liberal hosts, liberal guests, and liberal callers. This perfect storm of unanimity displayed itself on Thursday’s Diane Rehm Show, when they discussed the push for more gun control. There were no guests from the NRA, just moderate Richard Feldman, who wrote a book about his “confessions of a gun lobbyist.”

On the other hand, Rehm brought on Mark Kelly, the astronaut husband of disabled ex-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords to talk up his new gun-control group, as well as an anti-gun New York Times reporter and Ladd Everitt, communications director for the liberal Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. A caller named Bill joined the show to trash NRA president Wayne LaPierre as a draft dodger, and Everitt joined in to make the same accusation of NRA board member Ted Nugent:

During Wednesday night's edition of Piers Morgan Live on the Cable News Network, a panel of four media analysts joined their liberal host in agreement that The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News -- and Divided a Country, a new book written by New York Magazine reporter Gabriel Sherman, will not have much impact on readers' views of that cable network.

“People who are skeptical of Fox News are going to read this book and are going to be sure, once and for all, that Fox News is an arm of the Republican Party,” said media critic Brian Stetler of the New York Times. However, Amy Holmes -- a host on TheBlaze TV -- asserted that the book is filled with “pretty thin gruel.”

Time assisant managing editor Rana Foroohar is clearly a mouth-breathing fangirl of Janet Yellen, the new chair of the Fed. Liberal women have obviously bonded.

In the January 13 edition of Time, Foroohar began her Yellen profile with goo: "When the right person is holding the right job at the right moment, that person’s influence is greatly expanded. That is the position in which Janet Yellen, who is expected to be confirmed as the next chair of the Federal Reserve bank in January, now finds herself."

Surely nothing grates on a Republican watching TV news than Chuck Todd's "Bridgegate" chiding of Gov. Chris Christie: "This is, you know, welcome to the NFL...welcome to the vetting process. Now that he's essentially shown interest in being a presidential candidate, this is what life is like. This is what happens when the bright lights start burning."

In this NFL analogy, does that mean Christie is a player and the media are referees? Or does it mean Christie is a player and the journalists are the opposing team, working to tackle him and take him out of the game? On Monday night, during the BCS college football championship, Todd chided the referees for "inserting themselves into the game." I couldn't resist comparing that to "referees" in our election process:

Jonathan Haidt and Chris Wilson at Time.com claim that "your preferences in dogs, Internet browsers, and 10 other items predict your partisan leanings." So a left-leaning mag which is philosophically united with the crowd that insists that we must be equal opportunity friskers of 4 year-old children and 80 year-old grandmothers at airports because "we shouldn't profile" has no trouble profiling people as conservative or liberal based on the answers to 12 inane questions.

Conservative Rush Limbaugh — cat lover, rebellious teen, and Mac user — will certainly be amused at the questions in the survey, the authors' breezy contentions about what their answers supposedly mean, and the other assertions they make.

On Friday's CBS This Morning, Charlie Rose and Norah O'Donnell refreshingly departed from their usual softball treatment of liberal guests, and pursued New York magazine's Gabriel Sherman about his new biography of Fox News's Roger Ailes. O'Donnell spotlighted how "critics...[are] saying...you're a younger, liberal-leaning journalist."

Both anchors also hounded Sherman for a political accusation in the very title of the bio – The Loudest Voice in the Room: How The Brilliant Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News – and Divided A Country: [MP3 audio available here; video below the jump]