How much do you need to know about a subject before expressing a strong opinion during a panel on MSNBC? Apparently very little, as Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart took part in a Monday afternoon discussion on the future of the Washington Redskins National Football League team since coach Mike Shanahan had just been fired.

Kristen Welker -- fill-in host for that weekday's edition of Andrea Mitchell Reports -- asked: “Are the Redskins stronger moving forward without Shanahan?” Capehart replied: “You’re asking the wrong guy here. I don’t know anything about football.” Instead, he turned to a liberal talking point: “But this much I do know: The name of the football team, personally speaking, is an abomination and that they should change it.”

As 2013 draws to a close, Fox News Channel continues to dominate cable television news programming, according to Nielsen data through Dec. 8.

In an article for Variety, Rick Kissell stated that Fox has averaged 1.774 million viewers in prime time -- down 13 percent from last year's presidential election-driven numbers -- while the Cable News Channel fell 15 percent, and MSNBC lost 29 percent.

"The journalistic bond between The Post and MSNBC just grew a bit stronger, as the paper’s opinion section announced that MSNBC host Rachel Maddow will be writing a monthly column."

So began Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple's announcement Wednesday concerning the addition of the perilously liberal Maddow to the Post opinion page.

It’s good to see the left finally upset about treasonous threats to the United States. Never really able to get worked up about communist spies, domestic terrorists or radical mosques, lefties – at least the ones at MSNBC – are sounding the alarm over … The Confederacy.

Everywhere the hosts and guests of MSNBC look they see gray and butternut – secessionists and white supremacists, wild-eyed states’ rights absolutists and grim Confederate holdouts plotting to dissolve the Union. Driven by racism and distrust of Washington, they form a “confederacy of hate.”

Washington Post media blogger Erik Wemple read through a stack of books by cable-news hosts for a Sunday Outlook piece, and declared “MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is the clear winner of the cable-news-host literary prize” for her book “Drift.”

On Sunday’s front page, The Post called it a “blab lit review” and called it “A survey of the many cable big mouths who have stuffed it between hard covers." Wemple accurately captured the contempt the liberal media has for Fox hosts: