went to Iraq and did a week of fawning over there.

This is better? Different?

Journalists should have the same freedom that every citizen of the US has to ask tough questions and demand answers from our elected and public officials.

But, now that they've put everyone who does that into the "traitor" bucket and locked them out of public fora, I guess we can't really complain about Katie. We've all been shut down.

I mean, she's gotten a promotion and a raise and she's still there, right? Seems like if this bothered her all THAT much, she'd have taken all this desire for journalistic integrity somewhere else.

You know, the problem with this item is that it seeks to refute the absurd "conservative" belief in the all-powerful liberal media with evidence (anecdotal, but still evidence). What does this accomplish? Liberals and independents already know that the whole liberal media thing is a lie. "Conservatives", on the other hand, simply will not belief what reality says. Your typical "conservatives" and Republicans are so indoctrinated by their party masters that any attempt to convince them that a news source is not liberal simply because it does not only give the "conservative" point of view. To them, there is no reality save for that perceived through the lens of "conservative" propaganda. There is no point in trying to convince them otherwise. It is pretty much the same problem you would have had with a true-believing Communist. There is no way you could convince such a person that Pravda (i.e. the Communist Fox News) was not the absolute, unvarnished truth, nor that all other media were contaminated by counter-revolutionary, capitalist reactionism. Good try, though.

While she was still America's Sweetheart on the Today Show, Katie Couric was one of the few journalists (okay, I use that word a little loosely when applying it to her) who had enough visibility and clout to ask the tough questions without much fear of retribution. And frankly, asking Condi Rice to confirm a Bush political smear against Kerry doesn't even qualify as a tough question; it could just as easily be interpreted as water-carrying for Bush. Didn't hear the smear before? Well, now you have!! She should have been asking tough questions about the prosecution of the war, and whether it was making America safer. Or about Rice's inaction before 9/11.

If Couric actually had asked tough questions, what was the "punishment" that NBC could have threatened her with? That they'd yank her off the air? Not likely. That they'd assign the political interviews to somebody else? At least she would have gone down fighting.

Instead she bolted for a higher-profile ego boost at CBS, and the last time she interviewed Condi Rice, she asked her about what it was like DATING when you're a high-profile political figure. She learned her lesson, all right. And taught a lot of other less powerful journalists a lesson in the process. What a shameless tool she is.

Sadly, anything other than total acquiescence to the Grand Old Party line is evidence to the Right in this country of the liberal media. Fox is of course their model of acceptable media; they'd love for the entire press to be like that. Then they'd have no complaint.

Too bad the gliberal media are so busy trying pretend not to be biased that they end up timid and far more acquiescent to power than they should be, while at the same time pretending that they're objective and liberal. But just as liberality and conservatism are fairly relative concepts in this country (e.g., what's "liberal" is judged only in relation to how far it is from "conservatism"), so it goes with journalism.

By way of contrast, if you hear BBC reporters questioning an American official, asking hard questions -- you can see the official kind of staggered by it, being used to softball, pretend-journalism questions from American reporters.

When Katie asked Condi Rice to confirm a Bush political smear against Kerry, she broke the sacred media cow, which was to never criticize the president. Ostensilbly because we are at war (which is not a valid reason), but maybe the reality is closer to the media being afraid of Bushs smear machine (look at Dan Rather), and extraordinary extraditions (ok not likely for a journalist, but might make them think twice. Fear of the whip is what controls the masses).

... someone maintains that corporate ownership of media hasn't turned that media into one big GOP lapdog, I'm gonna refer them to this story.

You wanna know why we're in this mess? Corporate ownership of media. Period. Yeah, there are other reasons, but that's the big reason, the overarching reason why we're on our way to some kind of corporatist police-state.

That a giant defense contractor would expect the giant media outlet it owns to act in its best interests. Shocked.

You tell them: Fuck Off.

Couric was angering the viewers, why was she surprised to be told to back off? Her job is to sell ad time by attracting and keeping viewers. If she's angering viewers, and causing them to watch other networks, she's not doing her job.

It always amazes me that we put journalists on this pedastal, when they're just there to attract the viewers/readers that advertisers want. Tim's job is to get me to read his column, so that I see the Pfizer and Visa ads, pure and simple. If he says interesting things, I read the column and see the ads. If he doesn't, I go elsewhere.

So, NBC is Fox (not so) Lite.

When a so-called journalist (I am having a harder and harder time using that term)asks a legitimate political question in an election year, and then for doing so receives a love note from the boss to lay off, we are supposed to believe that the media is "too liberal"? And it is Katie Couric?

Deregulating the airwaves did wonders for political discourse. How many of us have to become pimps for the Republican Party before some semblance of order is restored to sanity, not to mention civic responsibility?