MS NOW (formerly MSNBC)

Chris Matthews on Wednesday laid into Barack Obama's teleprompter calling it "his menace."Near the end of a "Hardball" segment about the President's prime time address to the nation Tuesday, the host said, "If he doesn't get rid of that damn teleprompter...He's just reading words now."Matthews continued, "It's separating him from us." And continued, "You go to a meeting with him I'm told,…

On Tuesday, NewsBusters identified the media's emerging strategy of discrediting Glenn Beck by pitting his religious beliefs against other Christians. Mere hours later, as if on cue, MSNBC was all over it. "Hardball" host Chris Matthews invited on liberal Salon editor Joan Walsh and Democratic strategist Bob Shrum, two people who are something less than experts on the religious right, to help…

Glenn Beck on Wednesday blasted MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell for dismissing the size of the crowd at Saturday's "Restoring Honor" rally as "just the flow through traffic of tourists."On Monday while he was filling in for the seemingly always vacationing Keith Olbermann, O'Donnell told "Countdown" guest Bill Press, "On a typical summer Saturday on the [National] mall, 80,000 is not a big deal."…

KEY UPDATES below the fold, including Beck's response to Schultz. There's not really much you can say about this claim, beyond "suuuuure."Ed Schultz, who attracts just over a quarter of Glenn Beck's viewership (700,000 vs. 2.6 million viewers), claimed he could out-rally the Fox News host, whose "Restoring Honor" event attracted an estimated 300,000 people to the National Mall on Saturday."I…

NBC's Richard Engel has done some good reporting from Iraq.  But scratch the reporter's surface, and you find a political partisan eager to echo the anti-Bush party line.   Witness his exchange with Ari Fleischer on Morning Joe today.  Engel twisted the former Bush press secretary's words, accusing him of alleging an Osama Bin Laden connection with Iraq.  Fleischer had palpably said no such…

Ve haf certain powers, Miz Maddow . . . In the midst of bashing Pres. Bush over Iraq this evening, Rachel Maddow's mic went suddenly dead, forcing her MSNBC show to go to commercial.When she returned [and after paraphrasing a line from Macbeth], Maddow let it be known she was "such a conspiracy theorist" but didn't dare tell the audience what she was thinking because "it would discredit me…

Chris Matthews almost got another tingle up his leg on national television Tuesday talking about how wonderful Barack Obama is.So did Salon's Joan Walsh,In the opening segment of "Hardball," the host and his perilously liberal guests concluded by trying to figure out why conservatives don't like the current White House resident.In the end, and sadly predictable, the conclusion was the color of…

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs made the rounds of the six broadcast and cable morning news shows on Tuesday morning to help set the table for the President’s speech marking the end of major combat operations in Iraq. Of the six network anchors Gibbs spoke with, only CBS’s Harry Smith failed to ask whether President Obama would extend credit to President Bush for the successful surge…

While MSNBC host Keith Olbermann was recently dismissive of conservatives for highlighting radical Islam’s persecution of homosexuals in some countries, the Countdown host also has a history of showing more interest in mocking conservatives who complain about the persecution of women by radical Muslims than of actually reporting on such mistreatment.Last July, Olbermann ignored a story about an…

Appearing as a guest on Friday’s Countdown show on MSNBC, during a discussion of conservative talker Glenn Beck’s "Restoring Honor" rally, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson dismissed Dr. Alveda King – niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and former Georgia state representative – as a "figurehead or puppet" of Beck because of her scheduled participation in the rally.And, even though she and…

A truly astonishing thing happened on MSNBC Monday: three devout, liberal Obama supporters said the President is responsible for people thinking he's a Muslim.During the opening segment of "Hardball," in a discussion about Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally and how the host and attendees view Obama's faith, Newsweek's Howard Fineman said, "Barack Obama probably should have joined a church here…

The news that it could be a good year for women electorally did not cheer up the likes of MSNBC's Chris Matthews, Bloomberg's Margaret Carlson and the Politico's Jeanne Cummings, because it turns out it's only going to be a good year for women on the Republican side like Nikki Haley, Meg Whitman, and Carly Fiorina or as Carlson put it: "It's not a compassionate women year." [audio available here…

Howard Dean pulled off the rare twin-trashing this morning, dumping on both Glenn Beck and the people who respond to his message.  He began by calling Beck crazy, saying he has "a few things the matter with him up here, up in the head there." Later, he compounded the calumny, calling Beck a "racist" and a "hate-monger."  So who were the hundreds of thousands of people who attended the rally…

On Thursday's The Ed Show on MSNBC, substitute host Cenk Uygur -- also of the Young Turks -- blamed conservative opposition to the Ground Zero mosque for acts of violence against Muslims, and charged that the Republican party is the "party of hate." He soon added: "Then there's the vitriolic fight against immigrants, undocumented ones and in Arizona just people who happen to look undocumented.…