During a segment on Tuesday evening's edition of The O'Reilly Factor, the Fox News Channel host stated he “does not, does not believe in white privilege. However, there is no question that African-Americans have a much harder time succeeding in our society than whites do.” [video below the jump]

Those assertions led Charles Blow, a columnist for the New York Times, to ask in his Thursday column “Is white privilege real? Not according to Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly.” The black writer also criticized the cable news host by declaring: “It is statements like this ... that make you the race hustler.”

On Wednesday night, Megyn Kelly, perhaps the best host on the air today at adapting and responding to new information, did a double-take when Fox News White House correspondent Ed Henry told her that President Obama would be traveling to Rhode Island on Friday for a Democratic Party fundraiser.

Having been so informed, she then made those plans the first topic of discussion with each of her next two guests: Marc Thiessen of the American Enterprise Institute and Democratic Pary strategist Penny Lee. Along the way, it because obvious that White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest's claim that the administration has "a comprehensive strategy" for dealing with ISIS is a load of rubbish. Video and transcribed highlights follow the jump (HT Fox News Insider via The Blaze and Mediaite):

While competing newscasts on ABC and CBS led tonight with the president's stunning admission at a press briefing that he hasn't formulated a strategy to deal with ISIS yet, NBC placed the story in the third slot in the lineup, after a lead-off report regarding the NFL's "tough new policy" on domestic violence and a story by New York-based correspondent Katy Tur about comedian Joan Rivers's hospitalization.

On top of that, Nightly News substitute anchor Lester Holt completely left out both ISIS and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia from his opening-credit tease. By contrast, both ABC's Amy Robach and CBS's Maurice DuBois led off their opening-credit teases by citing the most quotable nugget from today's presidential presser [LISTEN to MP3 audio here; WATCH video montage below page break]:

Left-wing comedian Bill Maher is not one to hide his disdain for conservative politicians he disdains, but he really pushed the envelope today with the help of comedian Will Ferrell's Funny or Die website. 

Noted David Edwards of RawStory.com:

The nation’s top television news broadcasts - in both English and Spanish - have been entirely mum on the latest revelations related to alleged obstruction of justice and politically-directed abuse of power at the Obama administration’s Internal Revenue Service.

Whether at ABC, CBS and NBC, or Univision, Telemundo and Mundo Fox, these networks to date have essentially censored the admission by a U.S. Justice Department official –revealed by government watchdog group Judicial Watch – that allegedly lost e-mails of Obama IRS official Lois Lerner are in fact accessible, through the federal government’s computer back-up system.

The Trotskyist-turned-conservative writer James Burnham said that where there’s no solution, there’s no problem. In a Thursday post, American Prospect blogger Paul Waldman analyzed what he considers one such situation: the Republican party’s ongoing shortfall with female voters.

Waldman doesn’t see how the GOP can overcome both its ideas and its tone on women’s issues. He asserted that when Republicans discuss their opposition to abortion and the contraceptive mandate, many of them “can't keep themselves from doing so in the most hostile, contemptuous ways imaginable.”

Despite a Thursday New York Post report that President Obama's upcoming Labor Day weekend fundraising junket would shut down airspace across the northeast and hurt business for local pilots, neither NBC's Today nor ABC's Good Morning America covered the controversy. CBS This Morning offered a mere 18-second news brief on the topic.

This Morning fill-in co-host Vinita Nair informed viewers: "...the FAA is forcing no-fly zones beginning Friday. That includes grounding sea planes from the Hamptons to Nantucket. One company says it is a major hit on their busiest weekend of the year." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

As reported on Tuesday night, two of the three major broadcast networks covered a new report from the Office of the Inspector General at the Department of Veterans Affairs on the scandal-ridden agency and its Phoenix VA hospital that led to a nationwide investigation of delayed wait times and secret waiting lists. 

While the coverage was mixed with ABC’s World News with Diane Sawyer completely omitting the story, the coverage in print and online sources such as Politico, the Associated Press, and The Washington Post completely missed the boat.

So, Senator, will you agree to debate your opponent during the campaign?

Hey, let me tell you about this sweet corn. It is so delicious that you can't eat just one ear. So sweet and tasty that I eat them by the dozen. And since I still have to run out the clock until election day, let's switch gears to ponder on the issue of chocolate chip cookies. You can buy them by the bucket and float them in bottomless glasses of ice cold milk...

The New York Post, which broke the story of David Gregory’s decline and “psychological evaluation” and fall at NBC News, reports former anchorman Tom Brokaw and others were “apoplectic” when NBC News president Deborah Turness “dropped the tactless clanger” in a New York Times interview on Sunday that “NBC News hadn’t kept up with the times in all sorts of ways, for maybe 15 years...I think the organization had gone to sleep.”

The headline over TV writer Bill Carter's story was “NBC News President Rouses the Network,” which played on those comments.