In Friday’s USA Today, media columnist Michael Wolff came out defending Hillary Clinton’s shifty e-mail tactics as ... “responsibly paranoid.”

Wolff barely nods to the argument of "do-gooders" and “schadenfreudeists” that perhaps when four Americans die in a terrorist attack at a badly secured consulate in Benghazi, e-mail might help figure out the mess. That’s “vastly disingenuous,” because e-mail is wildly unreliable as evidence.

Stocks took a beating yesterday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 279 points. The S&P 500 and the NASDAQ each declined by over one percent.

The subject line of a USA Today email I received shortly after the closing bell crystallized the establishment press "wisdom": "Dow plunges nearly 280 points as strong jobs data raises Fed rate hike fears." The problem is that even though the government's reported seasonally adjusted payroll job additions of 295,000 were indeed strong and beat expectations, the underlying raw data doesn't support the excitement.

At USA Today Friday afternoon, two of its reporters came down on the side of Brian Williams in the controversy over what even the often media-enabling Associated Press has called his "fake Iraq story."

Roger Yu tried to portray Williams as a victim of a "synergistic stretch" who is now having to defend himself against the "firestorm on the Internet and social media," while Marisol Bello, who covers "breaking news, poverty and urban affairs," wrote that "there are reasons that it's plausible" that "Williams would remember riding in a helicopter that was shot down if he was nowhere near it."

On Thursday, USA Today reported Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was "defiant" on the right of the Koch brothers to spend money on political ads. Reporter Susan Page suggested the amount of Koch spending was inappropriate, just too large.

McConnell shot back at USA Today ownership: "How many people have to sit down and shut up in order to make the process work? My view is that in a free country with free speech, everybody ought to be as free to express themselves as Gannett."

Following the deadly Islamic terrorist attack in Paris on Wednesday, major broadcast networks ABC and NBC joined other news outlets in not showing any of the controversial cartoons of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad from the Charlie Hebdo magazine during their evening newscasts.

Despite initially telling Buzzfeed that they would not be showing any of the cartoons, CBS News did go forward and displayed three of them on the air during the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley. The three were shown as part of a report by CBS News foreign correspondent Elizabeth Palmer from Paris that led off the broadcast.