We know original ideas are getting scarce in Hollywood, but has it come to poaching sitcom concepts from the notes of Rachel Maddow’s therapy sessions? That’s the likeliest inspiration for Fair and Balanced, a comedy being developed for ABC by Obama sycophant Kal Penn and his stoner comedy writers from the Harold & Kumar franchise.

Think of it – an entire sitcom designed solely to skewer FNC, reinforcing liberals’ sense of superiority while adding to media’s 2016 Hillary choir. What’s not to love? 

The establishment press is all over revelations by Fox News Friday morning that the investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails involves a "section of the Espionage Act is known as 18 US Code 793," and that "the focus includes a provision of the law pertaining to 'gathering, transmitting or losing defense information,'" according to "an intelligence source." ... Just kidding.

The only reaction I've seen thus far is at the Friday evening version of "The 2016 Blast" collection by Henry C. Jackson at the Politico. The fifth item covered — after a snippet on "John Kasich's Aerial Attack" and three snoozers on Mrs. Clinton's predictable dissembling — reads as follows (bolds and italics are theirs):

2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, as seen in this March 10 Associated Press report, has claimed for several months that "No Classified Material (was) Sent via Her Personal Emails" from a home-based server she said "would remain private."

That claim, like so many other representations Mrs. Clinton has made, fell apart earlier this week, when, as Fox News reported, it was learned that Mrs. Clinton "used her personal email account to handle high level negotiations in 2011 for a no-fly zone to help topple Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi." Only Fox considers this a story. Apparently, the fact that icky Fox has reported it means that no one else in the establishment wants to. Video and the Fox story follow the jump.

The competition is fierce, but perhaps the most consistent area of outright and arguably deliberate U.S. and worldwide press distortion is found in their coverage of the Catholic Church and its pontiff.

Last week, the major international wires and several U.S. outlets once again demonstrated that readers, listeners and viewers can never trust that they will get an accurate story relating to these matters without also consulting other publications and online outlets. Numerous stories claimed that Pope Francis called Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas (aka Abu Mazen) an "angel of peace." As Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media and Ellen Carmichael at National Review have noted, he did no such thing.

Rush Limbaugh posted an interesting pair of questions at his web site yesterday: "How can CNN still be on the air with no audience? How can MSNBC have been on the air with no audience? In the old days, they're gone, kaput. Something else is tried. But they stay. And they double down on what they're doing that's losing audience."

A large part of the answer, as I noted on March 30, is that those two networks apparently have suffered very little financially as they have lost audience. That's because, as is apparently the case with most of the major cable channels, their primary source of revenue comes from "subscriptions," also referred to as "carriage fees" or "license fee revenues." In plain English, cable channels get paid a great deal of money even if nobody watches them, and don't benefit as much as would be expected when their audience grows.