CNN’s Jake Tapper would have done well to read “Lone Survivor,” rather than just seeing the new movie, before interviewing former Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell last week. If he had, Tapper might have been more careful than to describe the deaths of Luttrell’s SEAL comrades in Afghanistan as “senseless.” And he would have been wary of Luttrell’s contempt for the liberal media.

The film “Lone Survivor, which ” took in $38.5 million at the box office its opening weekend is based on a 2010 book by Luttrell that tells the tragic story of a 2005 operation in which the three other members of Luttrell’s SEAL team, along with 17 other special ops warriors, were killed. The story turned on the team’s agonized decision to turn lose some Afghan goat herders who had stumbled onto its concealed position. As the SEALs had feared, the freed civilians went straight to the Taliban, precipitating the battle.

MSNBC anchor Ed Schultz, who has previously frothed over "bastard," "slut," "dirt hole" conservatives, on Thursday attacked Jake Tapper for offering a mild critique of liberal New York Mayor Bill de Blasio's inauguration. During the ceremony, speaker after speaker slammed the outgoing Michael Bloomberg, comparing the city under his tenure to a "plantation."

On his CNN program, Tapper pointed out that political leaders often use inaugurations to "reach out to critics, to reach out to those who maybe didn't vote for him. This was not that." This innocuous statement caused Schultz to mock, "If Jake Tapper thinks a man who was elected with 70 percent of the vote for making income inequality the centerpiece of his campaign was wrong for talking about it, he can keep on pretending." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

"Top journalists from The New York Times, NBC News and CNN acknowledged Wednesday that, generally speaking, the national media has a liberal bias," Politico's media reporter Dylan Byers noted in a December 18 post recapping a Politico Playbook breakfast discussion held earlier on Wednesday morning.

More than one panelist opined that it's not just that journalists tend to be liberal on policy questions but that they live and work in environments which are socially liberal. "I live in northwest Washington, none of my neighbors are evangelical Christians [and] I don't know a lot of people in my kid's preschool who are pro-life," New York Times writer Mark Leibovich noted. Fellow Washington, D.C.-based journalist Jake Tapper picked up on that thread:

Jake Tapper's Thursday interview with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi started off chummy and didn't really get tough until near the end.  Tapper teed her up to criticize Tea Party Republicans and critique John Boehner's Speakership on CNN's The Lead.

"Speaker Boehner has an unruly group of Tea Party Republicans," Tapper noted before serving his biggest softball. "How have you been able to control, cajole, convince, work with, the feistier progressives in your caucus both as Speaker and as Minority Leader in a way that he has not been able to do with Tea Party Republicans?"

As NewsBusters reported, former Florida governor Jeb Bush pounded public school activist Matt Damon in August for putting his kids in private school.

Damon gave CNN's Jake Tapper a rather lame excuse for this in an online segment of their interview Friday while claiming, "I'd eat my shoe if he could name a Bush that ever even walked into a public school" (video follows with transcript and commentary):