Every holiday season, many news outlets put together inspirational and heartwarming stories to fit the season. They’re always a joy to watch and, as we watch so many here at Mediaite, it’s hard not to start picking favorites. Last year, the best may have been a delightful tale from The New York Times and it looks like we may have an early favorite for 2011. CBS wrapped up the evening news tonight by recounting the tale of a little girl from North Carolina who asked Santa to bring her father, a contractor in Iraq, home for the holidays.

Ben Stein, he of multi hyphenates and mono tones, appeared on The Early Show this morning to talk all of the big stories of the day. He spent a lot of time discussing Herman Cain’s many problems right now and ended up defending the candidate. Perhaps coming from experience as someone who worked with a president who may not have been a great guy personally (Stein was a speechwriter for Richard Nixon), Stein stressed the importance of looking at a candidate’s policies rather than gossip. “If you concentrate on economic policy that will give a man or a woman a job, that means something,” he argued. “To concentrate on a person’s gossipy love life, that doesn’t mean a darn thing.”

With Rep. Ron Paul consistently near the top of Republican polls since the presidential campaigns started at full speed, the Congressman’s libertarian policies are receiving increased scrutiny. On tonight’s O’Reilly Factor, host Bill O’Reilly and Brit Hume discussed Rep. Paul’s appearance on Face the Nation, where host Bob Schieffer took him to task on his position on a nuclear Iran. Rep. Paul’s answers, O’Reilly contended, were “dangerous stuff,” for someone who would want to be President.

Rep. Ron Paul was on the receiving end of some of the hardest questions he has taken since the 2012 campaign for president began, perhaps not in small part due to his recurring appearance at the top of Republican polls. On today’s Face the Nation, Bob Schieffer pressed Rep. Paul to explain how his attitude towards American foreign policy did not amount to “saying Americans caused 9/11,” and how he would deal with Iran in a way that would guarantee safety.

Last night, Herman Cain paid a visit to David Letterman‘s Late Show, where talk eventually turned to his “9-9-9 plan.”

Letterman admitted he doesn’t quite understand what the plan is all about… right before informing Cain that “you don’t even know what it means:”

As the Penn state child rape scandal continues to develop, the main characters involved have gone surprisingly public, with Jerry Sandusky admitting to “horsing around” with children on NBC last night and private emails from alleged eyewitness to Sandusky’s crimes Mike McQueary giving the media a glimpse of how he felt he was being treated by the media. On CBS tonight, McQueary in fact confirmed that he was very concerned for his personal life and safety, and the scandal was taking an emotional toll.

In case you missed last night’s Commander-in-Chief debate co-sponsored by CBS News and the National Journal, CBS has posted the full-length debate online.

Perhaps the most dominant running theme to emerge from this year’s slate of Republican presidential debates has been the reactions of conservative audiences to things like executions, letting the uninsured die, and a question from a gay US soldier. At tonight’s CBS/National Journal Republican debate, the audience sort of had it both ways, wildly cheering both sides of the issue of whether the US should waterboard terrorism suspects.

Here we go again– live from South Carolina, your favorite (only*) Republican presidential candidates in 2012, on Saturday night. Tonight’s debate, hosted by CBS and National Journal, will focus on foreign policy and national security. The show is on live at 8 PM, and with tonight come all the requisite plotline questions: What will Rick Perry say next? Will Mitt Romney finally explode in an angry rage? And will Scott Pelley or Major Garrett throw Herman Cain the hardball: what does he really think about Uzbeki-beki-beki-stan-stan?

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi resigned today after seventeen years in power. After announcing that he would step down earlier in the week, he came to the state house and handed in his resignation, exiting cheerfully while crowds alternatively jeered and made celebratory noises.

Television host and seasoned interviewer Charlie Rose joins radio and television personality Gayle King as two of the newest editions to the revamped edition of CBS’ Early Show.

Broadcasting legend and 60 Minutes fixture Andy Rooney died Friday night in a hospital in New York City. Rooney had only made his final sign-off as a weekly commentator on the CBS show just over a month ago, and was reportedly in stable condition following complications from minor surgery last week.

As the Herman Cain sexual harassment allegations continue to monopolize the news cycle, allegations, particularly from conservatives, that the allegations are race-based continue to fly. On CBS today, however, one prominent black conservative went out of her way to warn that race was not the way to fight these claims. In an interview with The Early Show, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice weighed in, expressing disgust at the entire idea of talking about race at all. “I don’t care much for incendiary language,” she sighed, warning that “it’s not good for the country” for anyone– left or right– to “play the race card.”

Walter Issacson‘s latest biography might be the most historically significant, at least for the very moment in which we now find ourselves. Over the last year or so, Apple founder Steve Jobs granted 40 interviews recorded for a biography, the publish date of which has been moved up since the Jobs died this month as a result of pancreatic cancer. 60 Minutes sat down with Issacson for a two-part feature on Jobs, both of which you can view below, courtesy of CBS News:

Rep. Michele Bachmann seems to have lost her entire campaign staff in New Hampshire, but if her workers resigned, they seemed to neglected telling her. The Bachmann campaign’s former New Hampshire campaign director, Jeff Chidester, confirmed the resignations as Rep. Bachmann herself denied them, leading to more speculation as to the future of the Bachmann campaign.

Bill O’Reilly appeared on David Letterman ostensibly to promote his new book Killing Lincoln, but the conversation turned to a variety of items in the news:Occupy Wall Street, The Tea Party Movement and $16 muffins all got some airtime in a spirited and light back-and-forth. But the most tense part of the exchange was a surprisingly dramatic high-five between the two influential television personalities who have not always seen eye-to-eye, but put aside any previous tension for a symbolic demonstration of agreement. The harmonic convergence is now upon us!

Former president Bill Clinton paid a visit to the Late Show last night, where he weighed in on several topical political issues, including ideas for how to breathe new life into the economy. When host David Letterman brought up the concept of redistributing wealth — or at least the idea that the well-off would feel some sort of impetus to help out those not as well-off — Clinton seemed skeptical. “I’m always looking to blame somebody,” Letterman joked.

Last night, Brian Williams appeared on Late Show and, considering he moderated a GOP debate, it’s unsurprising that politics found their way into a lot of the discussion. However, considering Williams is a network news anchor and all, he had to fight to stay as unbiased as possible which was tough as David Letterman did his best to egg him on. In fact, the whole conversation could be summed up as such; Letterman calls GOP candidate a “psych job” while Williams quickly assures him “That’s just the way all candidates are.”

The news that nonagenarian Andy Rooney would be leaving his post at 60 Minutes resulted in much warmth and nostalgia from a loyal audience, but if he was expecting it from Bill O’Reilly and Bernaie Goldberg, he was left wanting. Goldberg and O’Reilly, who had both worked at CBS, traded stories of Rooney being mean to them both, with Goldberg concluding he was cowardly and “not a stand-up guy.” Ouch.

Distrust in the media, according to the latest numbers, appears to be at record highs. On tonight’s O’Reilly Factor, host Bill O’Reilly aired the results of a Gallup poll showing almost half of Americans think the media is “too liberal,” and that Fox News was overwhelmingly the television news source of choice. Why are Americans sensing this bias, according to poll results? Guest Bernie Goldberg argued it was because, in the post-Obama era, the media didn’t show bias, it showed activism.

Had it not been for Twitter, The Amazing Race might have been over before it even began for Kaylani Paliotta and Lisa Tilley. The show had just kicked off its 19th season — which premiered last night on CBS — when Paliotta lost her passport before even getting out of the country. The show’s producers were [...]

California Congresswoman and former Congressional Black Caucus chair Maxine Waters has been critical of President Obama‘s approach to unemployment, particularly within black communities where the rate is nearly double the national average, and she found it “curious” that President Obama would call on CBC members this weekend to: “Shake it off. Stop complaining. Stop grumbling. Stop crying. We are going to press on. We have work to do.”

NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly has built himself quite the counter-terrorism unit. Appearing last night on CBS’s 60 Minutes, Kelly broke down some of the changes he’s made in the wake of September 11th. “I knew that we had to supplement, buttress our defenses,” he told Scott Pelley. “We couldn’t rely on the federal government alone.” And so he put his 50,000 employees to work devising an anti-terrorism unit on par with any military’s, complete with nuclear radiation detectors, an extensive network of surveillance cameras and, most awesomely, the ability to shoot down rouge aircrafts.

TV Newser reports today that, for the first time since the 2001-2002 season, nightly newscast viewership is up for all three major networks; ABC, CBS, and NBC gaining a combined 637,000 total viewers in the 2010-11 season. With news breaking fast and furious on 24hour cable news networks and the internet, viewers have recently trended [...]

Donald Trump has upped his woo-ing game. Yesterday, the real estate mogul met with Texas Gov. Rick Perry to talk jobs and grab a bite. And unlike when Sarah Palin was in town, he actually took the presidential hopeful somewhere nice. The two met at Trump’s Fifth Ave tower, and then headed out together to a nice dinner at Jean-Georges — plastic utensils, nowhere in sight.