The roots of the battle between the Obama Administration and Fox News:

As the campaign accelerated after the first voting contests, Michelle Obama went from headlining intimate campaign events to enormous ones. Television cameras appeared, and some of her more forceful comments were endlessly replayed. When cable shows, bloggers and opponents fixated on her — on her supposed lack of patriotism, her supposedly angry streak — Barack was irate. As unflattering reports played on television, he would tell aides stories about her parents, about her as a mother, according to Gibbs, as if defending his wife in private could somehow help. Barack even met with the Fox executives Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes in part to insist that they treat her more respectfully.

via The Obamas’ Marriage – NYTimes.com.

Jane Hall doesn’t think MSNBC has any conservatives on. Of course Howard Kurtz doesn’t disagree.

HALL: No, I didn’t. The reason I left was in part because they’ve had less debates than they used to. It is a fair point to say how much debate is there on MSNBC? How many Republican strategists? We have a bifurcation of the media.

The proof doesn’t support Hall’s beliefs.
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Yes, CNN’s Lou Dobbs is so bad that a sensationalist hack like Geraldo Rivera is calling him out for being over the top, and some of Rivera’s points are dead on. Only some. Rivera insists on injecting stupidity and hypocrisy into his critique of Dobbs.

He says Dobbs is responsible for anti-immigration sentiment (he’s complicit, not responsible). This is rich after Rivera works for Fox News whose pundits mostly disagree with him regarding immigration law and reform. Riveras colleagues and Dobbs all support the jail first law enforcement tactics employed by Sheriff Joe Arpaio, vigilante Minutemen, useless border walls and unnecessarily restrictive INS policies regarding work visas that discourage law abiding foreign students and skilled professionals from attempting to come to the US. Rivera believes CNN has to answer for Dobb’s views when he works for the network where these dangerous views find a welcome home at any hour of the day.
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