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Given some of the reactions to an item I wrote yesterday about Barney Frank's objections to Rick Warren giving the invocation at the inauguration, let me state for the record that I lean libertarian on marriage.  On the one hand, I don't like courts substituting their judgment for legislatures or the will of the people.  But in the long run, I think it might be better for government to recognize…

Oops! The New York Times admitted yesterday that it had inadvertently printed a letter critical of would-be Democratic senator Caroline Kennedy."This letter was a fake. It should not have been published," the paper admitted in a note printed after it had already printed it.The hoax message was supposedly sent by Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris.

MRC director of media analysis Tim Graham will appear on tonight's "O'Reilly Factor" on the Fox News Channel with guest host John Kasich. The show airs at 8 and 11 pm Eastern. The red-hot topic is MRC's survey of The Best Notable Quotables of 2008.

The Tuesday morning shows of NBC, ABC, and CBS all promoted Barack Obama’s celebrity status as hosts and reporters ogled the latest paparazzi photo of Obama in swim trunks while on vacation in Hawaii, as NBC’s Matt Lauer declared on Today: "And fit to serve, Barack Obama photographed shirtless in Hawaii and a lot of women are giving him the presidential seal of approval." On ABC’s Good Morning…

In 2005, I sensed that journalists in general prefer to call this time of the year in commerce that of “holiday shopping” instead of “Christmas shopping,” but that when it came to people losing their jobs, they preferred to describe layoffs as relating to “Christmas.” My instincts have been proven correct during the past three years. So did anything change in 2008? Not that much, but slightly in…

Is it possible the financial media played a role in facilitating the alleged $50 billion Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme? An interesting theory by Jon Najarian, CNBC analyst and cofounder of optionMONSTER, contends that they very well may have unwittingly done just that. Madoff, he believes, used media publicity to lure investors to his scheme. As Najarian explained on CNBC's Dec. 22 "Fast Money,"…

You would think from reading yesterday afternoon's report by the Associated Press's Tom Murphy that companies like Toyota, Nissan, and Honda are not that far from finding themselves in the situations US taxpayer bailout recipients General Motors and Chrysler are in. Murphy tries mightily to make the foreign-owned companies' situations look serious, at one point even putting out the howler that…

The roundtable on Monday night's Special Report with Brit Hume on FNC was not kind to the New York Times's hit piece on Sunday's front page that blamed President Bush and only Bush for the mortgage meltdown, ignoring the Democrats in Congress who protected the irresponsible push for more "affordable housing" by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (as Times Watch noted yesterday). Nina Easton, Washington…

 This is a timely op-ed from Dan Gainor of BMI.Christmastime is the time of giving. So we can thank Bernie Madoff for giving Americans some special gifts this holiday season.Yes, I said thank him. OK, maybe not a lot. But the one-time financial wizard's downfall is a morality tale that provides so many lessons it's almost impossible to know where to start. If you've been living under a rock, the…