Brian Stelter at The New York Times reports MSNBC's 4 pm host, Dylan Ratigan, is quitting as of June 22, and his hour will be taken over by Martin Bashir. Staff on the Bashir show will try to create a new 3 pm template. "The channel may try out an ensemble of hosts and contributors at that hour." An ensemble...together...like a ripoff of The Five? After all, that started as a place-holder.

“Once you’ve said your piece, you can either keep saying it — and then it’s a job, good job, pays well, everybody knows your name, it’s great — or you can decide what you’re going to do about it,” Ratigan said. “And the answer is, I don’t know. But I do know, in order to figure it out, I have to dismount.”

New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter was the latest to downplay Obama-supporter Hilary Rosen's insult of Ann Romney of having "never worked a day in her life," in his Sunday Review "news analysis," "From Flash to Fizzle." Stelter argued that Hilary Rosen's insult would be the latest controversy to burn hot and then be totally forgotten:

New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter on Monday defended Hollywood and the new HBO movie "Game Change," a hit job on the 2008 vice presidential campaign of Sarah Palin based on the book by liberal reporters John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. In "Rogue, Rube or G.O.P. Star: Portraying Palin," Stelter defended Hollywood from "conspiracy theories" that the movie is meant "to undermine a future run for president by Ms. Palin" (as if Hollywood liberals wouldn't love to have it accomplish just that).

Stelter also vigorously defended the movie-makers choice to focus solely on Palin at the expense of the portions of the book devoted to the bloody Democratic primary tussle between Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. But it doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to realize that overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic movie-makers would prefer the "Palin is an ignoramus" parts, rather than the parts that might have made Hillary and Obama look petty.

The front page of Monday’s Business Day featured New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter’s oh-so-respectful profile of MSNBC’s newest left-wing host, Melissa Harris-Perry (she also teaches at Tulane University, which impresses Stelter and the Times enormously): “At MSNBC, A Professor As TV Host.”

Harris-Perry is not just another MSNBC host but will soon become, in Stelter’s phrase, “the only tenured professor in the United States -- and one of a very small number of African-American women -- who serves as a cable news host.” Stelter even found time to suck up to another liberal host, Rachel Maddow, “a Rhodes scholar...lauded for her long, carefully argued essays.” Stelter also insisted cable TV now contains "pockets of intellectual stimulation that did not exist a decade ago." Which all just happen to reside on the liberal network MSNBC.

Stelter has a history of hiding the radicalism of leftists while bashing conservatives, as in his sympathetic treatment of leftist academic Frances Fox Piven and excoriation of Piven critic Glenn Beck.

New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter may have let his personal views color his enthusiastic reception of the popularity of Occupy Wall Street’s “99 percent” motif, but he was right that it is cropping up in a lot of places these days, especially among liberal activists. It has certainly sunken into the collective consciousness of New York Times journalists.

One prominent example: The front page of Monday’s Times featured a story by William Broad on affluent tourists taking trips on a mini submarine for a view of the Titanic, “Plunging Deep (in Pockets) to See Titanic at 100.”