As NewsBusters previously reported, CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson announced last Friday that her computers had been hacked into “by an unauthorized, external, unknown party on multiple occasions in late 2012.”

On Monday, Attkisson told Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly that she thinks she knows who did it (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In a report on Monday's NBC Today about new leaks from National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell took a jab at former Vice President Dick Cheney: "Cheney, who helped institute warrantless evesdropping, no court orders required, a policy Congress later rejected in favor of the current surveillance programs." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

The implication from Mitchell seemed to be that the NSA surveillance program under the Bush administration was wrong but that the program under President Obama is fine. She failed to mention Obama's dramatic shift on the issue, having been a harsh critic of such methods under President Bush.

As NewsBusters has been reporting, it’s been truly fascinating watching liberal media members attack National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.

On CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday, host Bob Schieffer used his mid-program commentary section to lambaste Snowden saying “he is no hero” and instead is “just a narcissistic young man who has decided he is smarter than the rest of us” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In an early Wednesday morning story which seems to have been a strategic trial balloon, Charles Babington at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, ran a story trying to portray the NSA surveillance revelations by Edward Snowden and subsequent developments as matters which have only riled up people on the "far left and far right." Otherwise, the American people are okey-dokey with NSA's data dragnet. Too bad for Babington and the administration, as I demonstrated in Part 1 (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), that what appears to have been a belated attempt to intimidate prominent elected politicians has to a large extent not worked.

This post will further show that polling data Babington cited near the end of his report contradicts his claim that "Solid majorities of Americans and their elected representatives appear to support the chief elements of the government's secret data-gathering."

While government spying on citizens has been a hot topic of conversation lately, it’s worth noting that such snooping can also happen in the private sector. The Bloomberg wire service, founded by anti-gun nut New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, has admitted that its reporters have been spying on customers of its business data service for years and using that information to generate news stories.

Through an established company policy, reporters for the news service were given exclusive access to private customer records for anyone they wanted to look up. Once they pulled up a user’s records, they had the ability to see that person’s last login date, his contact information, view her requests for technical support, and even see what types of data that the customer was calling up within the vast Bloomberg financial database.