JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH CHYRONS, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: Richard Grenell points to media double standard after Dem Sen. Tom Carper’s profane mini-meltdown, CBS News journo tells him to ‘chill, man.’

Earlier: CBS’s Scott Pelley Loses a Fight Rigged In His Favor.

PROJECT VERITAS EXPOSES CBS THIS MORNING CREW FAKING A SCENE AT A MICHIGAN COVID TESTING SITE.

To be fair, that’s awfully on-brand from the network that brought you Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Katie Couric, and Scott Pelley.

IS THE NEW YORK TIMES A LIBERAL NEWSPAPER? OF COURSE IT IS: Times editor Dean Baquet admits that his paper is staffed by Democratic Party operatives with bylines — and airbrushes:  In a column headlined, “The Times Took 19 Days to Report an Accusation Against Biden. Here’s Why,” former BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith asks Baquet:

I want to ask about some edits that were made after publication, the deletion of the second half of the sentence: “The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable.” Why did you do that? 

Baquet replied:

Even though a lot of us, including me, had looked at it before the story went into the paper, I think that the campaign thought that the phrasing was awkward and made it look like there were other instances in which he had been accused of sexual misconduct. And that’s not what the sentence was intended to say.

I’m pretty sure the 2020 Trump campaign won’t have the same veto power on Times articles.

It’s always nice to see major legacy media figures drop the mask of objectivity, usually inadvertently. Baquet’s admission today is reminiscent of CBS’s Scott Pelley’s 2017 interview with blogger and prolific tweeter Mike Cernovich, where to paraphrase Breitbart.com’s Ezra Dulis, Pelley lost a fight rigged in his favor:

Scott Pelley: How would you describe what you do?

Mike Cernovich: I’m a lawyer, author, documenter, filmmaker, and journalist.

Scott Pelley: And how would you describe your website?

Mike Cernovich: Edgy, controversial content that goes against the dominant narrative.

Scott Pelley: What’s the dominant narrative?

Mike Cernovich: The dominant narrative is that there are good guys and there are bad guys. The good guys are liberals. Everybody on the right is a bad guy. Let’s find a way to make everybody look bad. Let’s tie marginal figures who have no actual influence to anybody we cannot overwrite. That’s the narrative.

Scott Pelley: That’s not a narrative I’m familiar with. Who’s narrative is that?

In 2008, Pelley compared global warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers. Ben Rhodes, who until January was Obama’s deputy national security advisor, is the brother of CBS News president David Rhodes. John Dickerson, the host of Face the Nation and the “political director” for CBS, wrote an article for Slate in 2013 charmingly titled “Go for the Throat! Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party.” Katie Couric, whom Pelley succeeded as Evening News host, read a poem on her broadcast to shill for the passing of Obamacare, and after leaving CBS had a Rathergate-like moment of her own, attempting to marginalize gun owners.

But back to the transcript of Pelley and Cernovich, where eventually, the hunter is captured by his prey:

Scott Pelley: You wrote in August a story about Hillary Clinton’s medical condition the headlines said, “Hillary Clinton has Parkinson’s disease. Position confirms.” That’s quite a headline.

Mike Cernovich: Yeah, Dr. Ted Noel had se-sent a story to me anonymously, that I checked out, analyzing her medical condition. And –

Scott Pelley: It isn’t true.

Mike Cernovich: How do you know?

Scott Pelley: Well, she doesn’t seem to have any signs of Parkinson’s disease.

Mike Cernovich: She had a seizure and froze up walking into her motorcade that day caught by a citizen journalist.

Scott Pelley: Did you, well, she had pneumonia. I mean –

Mike Cernovich: How do you know?

Scott Pelley: Well, because that’s what was reported.

Mike Cernovich: By whom? Who told you that?

Scott Pelley: Well, the campaign told us that.

Mike Cernovich: Why would you trust a campaign?

To ask the question is to answer it. In a post headlined “‘Shamefully Stupid’: CBS’s Scott Pelley Loses a Fight Rigged in His Favor,” Breitbart.com’s Ezra Dulis adds in response, “Pelley has no answer for those six words — ‘Why would you trust the campaign’ — as his entire profession goes berserk with literal-minded fact checks for every tweet from President Trump. Pelley also seems to forget the fakery that Clinton World attempted hours before its pneumonia statement — with the candidate smiling and waving outside her daughter’s apartment, greeting a little girl, and assuring reporters everything was a-okay.”

UPDATE: NY Times Editor Admits Editing Article on Biden Sexual Assault Allegation After Campaign Complained:

Baquet failed to muster a coherent response beyond noting that the standard for reporting on such allegations is “very subjective.” He explained that the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings in 2018, which included testimony from a woman, Christine Blasey Ford, who accused him of sexually assaulting her in high school, constituted a “hot story” that required a “different news judgement.”

Kavanaugh vehemently denied Ford’s allegation, and the Times did not interview anyone who recalled Ford telling them about the alleged incident at the time. Baquet, in the interview with Smith, cited the importance of “contemporaneous” conversations in determining the credibility and newsworthiness of sexual assault allegations. Like he said, the standard is “very subjective.”

Baquet also defended the Times‘s decision to immediately publish Julie Swetnick’s allegations against Kavanaugh. Swetnick, a client of former attorney and convicted felon Michael Avenatti, accused Kavanaugh of gang rape at frat parties. She turned out to be about as credible as her attorney. But the Times chose not to spend two weeks investigating her claims, Baquet said, because Kavanaugh “was already in a public forum in a large way” and had become “the biggest political story in the country.” Apparently the same can not be said of Joe Biden or the 2020 presidential election.

As Matt Whitlock of the National Republican Senatorial Committee tweets, Baquet’s admission today “should be a major media scandal, but many of the major media watch dogs have ignored it entirely because it didn’t happen on Fox News.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Harsh, but fair.

Will you still have a song to sing, when the Razor Boy comes and takes your fancy narrative away?

GREAT MOMENTS IN GASLIGHTING:

● Shot: “‘There are very few people who are able to deliver a trustworthy broadcast without point of view,’ says CBS News president Susan Zirinsky. ‘That’s who we want to be.’”*

—“Norah O’Donnell Takes Over as Anchor on ‘CBS Evening News,’” the Hollywood Reporter, today.

● Chaser: Norah at Night: The Most Liberal Moments From Incoming CBS Evening News Anchor.

—NewsBusters, today.

* Curiously, lots of talk about Walter Cronkite, but none of Dan Rather in the Hollywood Reporter article. Katie Couric and Scott Pelley are each only mentioned once, despite (or likely because of) their own inability to “deliver a trustworthy broadcast without point of view.”

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Derp State Coup, Race Hoax? and Much, Much More. “So ‘Andy’s office’ told Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes” that he and some of his derp staters want to nullify the duly elected President Trump via the 25th amendment and claim Trump was unable to fulfill his duties as president because RUSSIA. Of course, this amendment is for a president who is IN A COMA or literally incapacitated, but this is the logic coming from the agenda-driven dummies now populating the FBI and DOJ.”

Once you’ve convinced yourself that your job is to protect the proles from themselves, any foul action you take becomes excusable, or even noble. That’s progressivism in a nutshell.

WHO? CBS bosses are ‘considering axing evening news anchor Jeff Glor’ after six months of ratings disasters:

CBS Evening News anchor Jeff Glor is reportedly on the hot seat with his bosses over sagging ratings just six months into his tenure.

David Rhodes, CBS News president, called a meeting with Glor and his producers on Tuesday and ‘unleashed on the team’ over the broadcast losing nearly 1.5million viewers since Glor took over in December, an insider told Page Six.

The network denied the account in a statement, saying ‘the meeting as described never happened. What did happen was a discussion centered on editorial and production, not ratings, which is not unusual.’

That last statement is by CBS News, the former home of Dan Rather, Katie Couric, and Scott Pelley, led by the brother of former failed novelist, Obama middle east guru and nascent MSNBC contributor Ben Rhodes, which certainly helps to strengthen its believability, and to explain Glor’s ratings predicament.

THE NEXT TARGET IN DONNA BRAZILE’S PRIVATE WAR? JAKE TAPPER:

Brazile, a former CNN contributor, recalled in her new book when emails stolen from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta showed that she relayed information about possible topics that would be brought up during the Democratic primary debate hosted by her network.

“The next day, even Jake Tapper took a swing at me, calling me unethical and ‘journalistically horrifying’ during a radio interview with WMAL even though I worked for CNN as a commentator not a journalist,” Brazile wrote in her book Hacks: The Insider Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House. “When I called him on this, he did not apologize. His attack on me was really about him. He wrote in an email, ‘I don’t know what happened here except it undermines the integrity of my work and CNN … you have to know how betrayed we all feel.’”

Brazile continued, “The feeling is mutual, my friend.”

This is the mirror image version of the question that Mike Cernovich asked CBS’s Scott Pelley, when Pelley attempted to give the pro-Trump blogger/Twitter star the third degree 60 Minutes treatment. In March, Pelley asked Cernovich about a piece he ran during the campaign headlined “Hillary Clinton Has Parkinson’s Disease, Physician Confirms,” telling Cernovich “It isn’t true.” When Cernovich mentioned Hillary’s apparent seizure on September 11th last year, Pelley dismissed it as “pneumonia.” Cernovich asked Pelley how he knew that, and Pelley replied “Well, the campaign told us that.”

Cernovich then asked the veteran CBS anchor the obvious question, one that he telling refused to answer: “Why would you trust a campaign?”

Why would Donna Brazile, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, trust an “objective” CNN reporter in the heat of a presidential campaign? As with Pelley, to ask the question is to answer it:

RACHEL MADDOW: Trump Obsessing Over NFL Protests While Ignoring Puerto Rico.

Besides its being not true, you know what would have made recovery efforts easier for Puerto Rico? A nice big US Navy base there. Too bad Maddow’s future colleague at NBC Al Sharpton led the protests that ultimately removed it in 2003 – which also significantly damaged Puerto Rico’s economy. As John Stossel, then with ABC reported at the time, “The base contributes $300 million a year to the local economy…It’s as if some of the protesters want bombs to stop falling from the sky, but they want money to keep falling.”

Related: A CBS 60 Minutes segment on Vieques hosted by Scott Pelley from that period.

MSNBC HOST JOY REID SUGGESTS REP. STEVE SCALISE DESERVED TO BE SHOT DUE TO CONSERVATIVE RECORD.

And in case you missed it Friday night, Scott Pelley of CBS: It’s time to ask whether [Wednesday’s] attack was foreseeable, predictable, self-inflicted.

As Glenn would say, that in mind when any of the DNC-MSM starts in on the “have you no shame, sir” sanctimony.

FAKE NEWS? Old-school journalists ‘pissed’ about Gayle King’s vacation with Obamas:

Gayle King’s serious CBS colleagues had a lot to say about her recent yacht jaunt with former first couple Barack and Michelle Obama in Tahiti, and it wasn’t positive.

“The ‘Capital J’ journalists are pissed and raving mad that she was on a yacht with the Obamas over the weekend. The old-school people were talking about it. She shouldn’t be doing that. She’s an anchor of a news program that covers the White House. You’re held to a different standard. It’s one thing to be friendly. It’s another thing to go vacationing on a yacht,” a source told us of the backlash at CBS.

CBS is denying that there’s any rancor internally directed at King, which makes sense, considering that her colleague Charlie Rose pretended to have no clue about candidate Obama’s foreign policy stance on the eve of the 2008 presidential election, and last year sat with two of Obama’s speechwriters while all three laughed on air about the Big Lie of Obamacare — the over 36 times Obama told Americans, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”

CBS Nightly News anchor and 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley once compared global warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers, and admitted recently to accepting at face value the Hillary campaign’s story and not investigating further the cause of her infamous collapse on September 11th last year.

John Dickerson, the host of Face the Nation and the “political director” for CBS, wrote an article for Slate in 2013 charmingly titled “Go for the Throat! Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party.” This was followed last year by his asking Obama, ‘Is honesty overrated as a presidential quality?’

And the boss of CBS’s news division is David Rhodes, the brother of Obama’s infamous former deputy national security advisor, Ben Rhodes.

Just think of them all as Democrat operatives with bylines and lavaliere microphones, and it all makes sense.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

● Sean Spicer just forgot the 1st rule of politics: Never compare anything to Hitler.

—Headline, CNN.com, today.

● [Ted] Turner Compares Fox’s Popularity to Hitler.

—Headline, Broadcasting and Cable, January 25, 2005.

● [Scott Pelley of] CBS Goes Low, Hurls Personal Insults at Spicer Over Hitler Blunder.

—Headline, NewsBusters, yesterday.

● CBS ‘Global Warming Special’ Host [Scott Pelley] Likened Warming Skeptics to Holocaust Deniers.

—Headline, NewsBusters, January 21, 2008.

JOHN HINDERAKER: Media “Truth” Meltdown: It’s 2004 All Over Again.

“Who owns the truth?” was about the Rathergate episode: how we and others exposed 60 Minutes’ attempt to swing the 2004 presidential election to Democrat John Kerry by publishing lies–fake news, one could say–about President George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard.

I remember the Time cover collage very well, because I am in it. The photo in the lower left was taken in the loft of my house. That is Scott Johnson sitting with his back to the camera, and my left foot is barely visible next to the chair to his right.

The liberal media’s current hysteria about “truth” is eerily reminiscent of what we went through in 2004. We even have Scott Pelley, a thoroughly dishonest journalist, extolling the virtues of liberal editors who supposedly keep watch on liberal journalists:

Scott Pelley: Well, the benefit of intermediaries is having experienced editors check things out and research people. Check the facts before it goes out to the public. You don’t do any of that.

Was Pelley not around in 2004? Has he forgotten how stupid that refrain sounded then (“Layers and layers of fact-checkers”)? Does he not realize how false it rings today?

We have been here before: the liberal media are in a panic because their authority is being challenged. It must be worse now, though, than it was in 2004. Then, Time’s refrain was a relatively benign “Who owns the truth?” Now, they ask, “Is truth dead?” We can translate: “Is the liberal news media monopoly dead?”

Actually, none of the current controversies has anything to do with the nature of truth, or whether truth is (figuratively speaking) on its deathbed. Liberal journalists are just getting the vapors because, once again, they have been found out.

Yeah, pretty much. Plus:

The crisis that we face is not epistemological, it is political. There is no shortage of evidence, and the truth is rather clear: liberal governance has failed. The country is awash in debt, its influence around the world is in decline, its social programs have mostly failed, its borders are porous, its governing class is corrupt and incompetent, and in recent years its leaders have not even tried to advance the interests of the American people.

That is the truth. That is why Donald Trump was elected president, and why Republicans now dominate at every level of government. And that is why liberal journalists are in a panic.

Again: Yeah, pretty much.

YEAH, THAT’S HEROIC AND GROUNDBREAKING: News Anchor Quits Pretending Not To Be Lefty Tool, Embraces Full-On Tooldom. “Scott sees himself in the Murrow and Cronkite tradition.”

Well, given that Cronkite was a lefty tool who pretended an avuncular neutrality before eventually pulling off the mask, I’d say he’s half-right, anyway.

PEOPLE WANT TO KNOW: WHY DID CBS SIT ON CLIP OF TRUMP TELLING SUPPORTERS TO ‘STOP’ HARASSING MINORITIES? CBS sequestered the video for two days – two days that Trump’s clip could be used to simultaneously quell violence and promote the Trump interview on Sunday night as a bombshell worth watching.

Of course, to ask the question is to partially answer it: Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security advisor is the brother of CBS News president David Rhodes. Scott Pelley, the network’s nightly news anchor, once likened global warming skeptics to holocaust deniers. John Dickerson, the host of Face the Nation and the “political director” for CBS, wrote an article for Slate in 2013 charmingly titled “Go for the Throat! Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party.” To paraphrase his remarks on Trump, apparently, CBS CEO Les Moonves believes that riots might or might not be good for the country – but they’re damn good for CBS. Which might explain why CBS news executives are fine with wide swatches of their viewers taking that “go for the throat” rhetoric far too literally.

As Glenn noted earlier, “Kellyanne Conway: Clinton, Obama Need To Calm Down Anti-Trump Protesters,” and so should their surrogates and family members in the DNC-MSM.

WEEPY BUREAUCRATS DEAL WITH TRUMP VICTORY BY ABUSING SICK LEAVE: “One career EPA employee tells E&E News, ‘If you look at the seven stages of grief, I’m still in denial. I will not look at the news.’ It sounds like there are a lot of deniers at the EPA this week. Apparently the irony of this is lost on them.”

Heh, indeed.™

And speaking of the EPA, “Donald Trump has been appointing members of his transition team, appointments that presumably foreshadow the ultimate composition of his administration. So far, I have been impressed by his choices. A case in point is Myron Ebell, who will lead Trump’s EPA transition team. The headline says it all: ‘Trump Picks Top Climate Skeptic to Lead EPA Transition.’”

Huh, apparently the MSM believes that there are people who are skeptical that the planet has a climate — who knew?

I look forward to the sound of much gnashing of teeth if and when CBS’s Scott Pelley interviews Ebell. I wonder if he’ll go full Godwin?

JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRAT OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: “Regardless of who is your chosen – or least favorite – presidential candidate, independent minds should be concerned about the latest revelations in the news media’s unseemly relationships with government and political actors. While there are many responsible journalists working today, inside documents and leaks have exposed serious lapses constituting the most far-reaching scandal our industry has known. It’s our very own Newsgate,” Sharyl Attkisson writes.

As a reminder, CEO Les Moonves said earlier this year of Trump’s campaign, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” Its nightly news anchor Scott Pelley once likened global warming skeptics to holocaust deniers. John Dickerson, the host of Face the Nation and the “political director” for CBS, wrote an article for Slate in 2013 charmingly titled “Go for the Throat! Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party.” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security advisor is the brother of CBS News president David Rhodes, and CBS pushed out Attkisson after her investigative coverage of Obama and Hillary’s Benghazi debacle.

THE FIX IS IN: ’60 Minutes’ Doesn’t Air Hillary Dodge About DNC Interference.

The Wikileaks news was breaking Saturday when CBS’s Scott Pelley sat down with Clinton and her new running mate, Virginia senator Tim Kaine, for an interview that aired Sunday evening on 60 Minutes. There’s plenty covered in the interview that ran on TV, but perhaps the newsiest topic of the day, the DNC turmoil, didn’t make it into the broadcast. In a video posted under the banner of 60 Minutes Overtime and touted as an “unaired” clip from the interview, Pelley asked Clinton and Kaine about the leak. Clinton’s answers—or, more accurately, her non-answers—on what she knew about DNC interference in the primary were…curious. Among them was Clinton’s unwillingness to say any such intervention by the party committee to favor one candidate would be “improper.”
…
This isn’t the first time CBS and 60 Minutes have done something like this. During the 2012 presidential election, CBS released a previously unaired clip from an interview between Steve Kroft and Barack Obama that seemed to back up the president’s claim during a debate with Mitt Romney that he had, indeed, deemed the September 11 assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi as a terrorist attack. But, as Bret Baier pointed out at the time, just days before the election, CBS unceremoniously published the fuller portion of the interview that showed Obama contradicting himself on this point.

For all the fuss about the GOP “establishment,” the Democrats actually have one — and it works.

THE HOUSE OF STEPHANOPOULOS HAS A SAD. Watch: Trump calls ABC reporter Tom Llamas ‘sleaze.’

Flashback: George Stephanopoulos discloses $75,000 contribution to Clinton Foundation.

Related: This is rich:

“When Democrats are raising questions, the press is also reflecting what your opposition is saying about you,” said another reporter. “We’re not just us throwing questions at you.” *

Trump responded that he didn’t mind the criticism coming from the opposition, but said it’s different when it comes from the press.

“I think the political press is among the most dishonest I’ve ever seen,’ he said. “I have to tell you that. But I think the political press – I see the stories and the way they’re couched.”

As the press conference ended, a reporter told Trump he had “set a new bar in being contentious with the press” and asked whether this is what it would be like if Trump wins the White House.

“Yeah it is,” Trump responded.

“I”m going to continue to attack the press,” he added. “I find the press to be dishonest. I find the political press to be extremely dishonest.”

Well they are. Just ask Katie Couric, Dan Rather, Brian Williams, Scott “Holocaust Denier” Pelley, Face the Nation host John Dickerson who advised Obama in 2013 to ‘Destroy the GOP,’ etc., etc.

All of which is why, “If this news conference turns into a press-driven referendum on how the press is doing,” Ari Fleischer tweets, “Trump will have won the day.”

Or as Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2000 when George Bush was caught on a hot mic calling insulting Adam Clymer, “Here is a secret about presidential politics that nobody is willing to admit but everyone knows: It never hurts to call a reporter from the New York Times an a**hole.”

Last year at the National Press Club, Ben Carson warned the press, “I got to tell you guys, that’s why people don’t trust you anymore. I mean you’re down there with used car salesmen.” I agree – although apologies to used car salesmen for the unfair comparison.

*Right – you’re acting as Democrat party operatives with bylines, amplifying your bosses’ message.

UPDATE: 800 pound gorilla in presidential race grilled for thoughts on 800 pound gorilla in zoo:

QUESTION ASKED: Are There Conservative TV Shows?

Feel free to hash it out in the comments, but I would say that CBS is arguably the most-conservative primetime TV channel, at least in terms of its military-friendly NCIS franchises, Blue Bloods and the usually politics-free Big Bang Theory.

Which is remarkable considering that its CEO Les Moonves recently said of Trump’s campaign, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” Its nightly news anchor Scott Pelley once likened global warming skeptics to holocaust deniers. John Dickerson, the host of Face the Nation and the “political director” for CBS, wrote an article for Slate in 2013 charmingly titled “Go for the Throat! Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party.” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security advisor is the brother of CBS News president David Rhodes, and CBS pushed out Sharyl Attkisson after her investigative coverage of Obama and Hillary’s Benghazi debacle.

Perhaps Moonves learned his lesson from former NBC head Jeff Zucker (now president of CNN), who learned the hard way that going full SJW in primetime is a recipe for ratings disaster.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Elizabeth Lauten quit Monday as communications director for Rep. Stephen Fincher, R-Tenn., after her Facebook criticism of Sasha and Malia Obama sparked a huge media backlash.

“It is one of the few rules that the news media and the mob usually both adhere to: Leave families out of the fight. However, tonight a Republican staffer is out of a job after something she wrote on social media about the first daughters,” NBC News’ Brian Williams said during Monday’s evening newscast.

“CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley” followed suit: “[E]lizabeth Lauten: A congressional aide whose Facebook post about President Obama’s daughters, Malia and Sasha, sparked a firestorm.”

—“Nets instantly jumped on GOP Hill aide story; ignored Gruber flap for days,” the Washington Examiner, December 2nd, 2014.

The morning after Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes published (then unpublished) a disgusting piece depicting Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz’s daughters as toy monkeys and “fair game” since they appeared in a campaign ad, ABC’s Good Morning America ignored the story completely while CBS This Morning and NBC’s Today excused it as merely a “feud” and part of “increased scrutiny” for Cruz as he ascends in the polls.

On CBS This Morning, co-host Norah O’Donnell complained in one of the show’s opening teases that it was Cruz who was “lash[ing] out at a top newspaper over his kids” while chief White House correspondent Major Garrett ruled minutes later that the racist cartoon is part of the territory: “With Cruz’s climb in the polls has come increased scrutiny. This Washington Post editorial cartoon depicting his children as holiday props drew Cruz’s wrath.”

Garrett also made sure to hit Cruz for issuing fundraising e-mails last night concerning the smear: “[B]y late last night, the Cruz campaign were sending out fundraising e-mails asking for emergency contributions. The subject line read: ‘They attacked my children.’”

In the 8:00 p.m. Eastern hour, fill-in co-host Vinita Nair explained that “[Donald] Trump isn’t the only candidate who is bashing the press this morning” as “Ted Cruz is angry with The Washington Post editorial cartoon” that “showed him in a cartoon as an organ grinder, using his daughters as holiday props.”

As many on Twitter have pointed out, it seems as though the liberal media have trotted out their tired strategy of already wondering if a conservative will ‘overreach’ concerning their response to a scandal.

—“ABC Skips WashPost Smear on Cruz Girls; CBS, NBC Excuse It as a ‘Feud,’ Part of ‘Increased Scrutiny,’” NewsBusters, today.