Brent Baker

For Tuesday’s show this past week, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel took his camera out to Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles to ask people to identify North Korea on a map. Not surprisingly, total failure. Take an amusing, if depressing, look at how clueless many are as more than one person pointed to Europe, the Middle East, Australia, South America and even....Canada.

Unintentionally inane sentence of the weekend, from Jon Klein, the former President of CNN/US, on the legacy of the late Roger Ailes, founder of the Fox News Channel: “By unreservedly infusing news with a right-of-center agenda, Ailes popularized the notion that all journalists are biased.” You read that correctly: The media were not widely seen as biased until Ailes created a biased network.

On last week’s episode of FX’s The Americans, mom “Elizabeth,” a KGB operative in the U.S. in the mid ‘80s, catches teen daughter “Paige” reading Karl Marx’s Capital: Critique of Political Economy. “Elizabeth” espouses how Marx wrote about “the capitalist class structure being a kind of slavery, how revolution is necessary to create and achieve a worker state so that no one is exploited.” To which, “Paige” asks of the Soviet Union: “Is everybody equal?” Mom responds: “We have our problems.”

The season opening home game for the Washington Nationals will take place Monday afternoon and last week media outlets were full of outrage over how President Donald Trump, by declining the team’s invitation to throw out the first pitch, was breaking a century-old “baseball tradition.” But as Washington Post “D.C. Sports Bog” reporter Dan Steinberg pointed out in calling out his journalistic brethren: “It isn’t true. It’s news that is fake. Trump is not breaking a 100-year-old baseball tradition.”

The penultimate fifth season of The Americans debuts at 10 PM EST/PST tonight (Tuesday) on FX. As I’ve written before, while the FX series humanizes undercover KGB operatives working in the U.S. on behalf of the Soviet Union, the show also illustrates the ruthlessness of Soviet communism and how the American Left in the 1980s helped advance Soviet interests.

Picking up on allegations Russian hacking was intended to help Donald Trump win the election, on CBS’s Face the Nation Jamelle Bouie, chief political correspondent for Slate, contended that “if it is true, if we have further verification of this, then what it suggests potentially is that the election was in some sense illegitimate.”

Fidel Castro was a tyrant who oppressed Cubans and brought misery to many for several decades and while much of the breaking news coverage emphasized that reality, some journalists couldn’t resist crediting him for supposed great advancements in education, literacy and health care. ABC’s Jim Avila went so far as to tout how Castro “was considered, even to this day, the George Washington of his country” and, reminiscing about his high school years, Chris Matthews asserted Castro was “a romantic figure when he came into power” who “was almost like a folk hero to most of us.”

British comedian John Oliver remained in full denial on his Sunday night HBO show, bitterly lashing out with expletives at Americans for supporting Donald Trump, demanding: “How the f- -k did we get here and what the f- -k do we do now?” He proceeded to blame Trump’s win on “deep racism and/or indifference to it,” the media for going too easy on him as they failed to destroy “a serial liar” and argued that to “mitigate Trump’s damage” his viewers should support mainstream media outlets.

Two national polls released late in the week confirmed the public widely recognizes the news media’s agenda in favor of Hillary Clinton and decidedly against Donald Trump, a reality documented in a NewsBusters study earlier in the week. “By nearly 10-1, all those surveyed say the news media, including major newspapers and TV stations, would like to see Clinton rather than Trump elected,” Susan Page and Karina Shedrofsky reported deep into a Thursday USA Today story.