Today is a glorious day, for I have discovered something so rare it is almost non-existent in today’s media world: giving context to things. On his CNN show today, Fareed Zakaria discussed Mitt Romney‘s unfortunate comments about the poor, which have done nothing to help his public image, but Zakaria actually defended Romney. He blamed the media for taking Romney’s comments out of context to get the juicy soundbite of the former businessman seemingly ignoring the plight of poor people.

Have we not reached a place free of this yet? For some reason, George Stephanopoulos decided to talk about the notoriously Christian NFL player Tim Tebow on This Week today. He asked George Will how Tebow has become such a polarizing figure in not just sports, but somehow in politics as well. Will called Tebow “an exemplary gentleman” and said he was undeserving of the attacks against him.

Herman Cain appeared on The Late Show last night, and perhaps one of the highlights of the interview was when David Letterman asked the candidate about the accusations of sexual harassment threatening to damage his candidacy. Letterman sympathized with Cain, having gone through a similar situation himself, but asked the Republican candidate if he plans to drop out of the race if any new evidence emerges against him.

On Fox News Sunday today, Bill Kristol threw cold water on Herman Cain‘s presidential candidacy, arguing that regardless of his popularity among conservative voters and whether or not his sexual harassment scandal will end up helping or hurting him, there was very little chance in the first place he was ever going to be the Republican nominee.

On Monday’s Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert stuck up for Rick Perry over his West Texas hunting camp’s racially charged name. He called the scandal “much ado about nothing” as “many presidents have vacationed at questionably named resorts.”

As the fallout from the Rick Perry “Camp N*ggerhead” controversy continues to build, an interesting peripheral question has emerged: How will this controversy affect the rising candidacy of Herman Cain, whose denunciation of Perry elevated this from a mere “hit piece” from the “liberal media” to an intramural fight among Republicans? The perfect storm of the “race card” and Cain’s use of a word that’s arguably as inflammatory to the conservative base as the n-word – “sensitivity” – could spell trouble for Cain’s meteoric campaign.

Earlier today, The Washington Post reported on a hunting camp connected to presidential candidate Rick Perry bearing in its title a racial slur. On This Week earlier, fellow candidate Herman Cain reacted negatively to the news, criticizing Perry for going there so frequently.

A new Washington Post report about a hunting camp that once (and colloquially, still does) bore the offensive name “N*ggerhead” is raising new questions, fairly or unfairly, about embattled GOP presidential candidate Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX). The article exhaustively details the questions surrounding the camp, and while it contains a denunciation by Perry, it also carries with it the strong suggestion that Perry at least tolerated the name, once painted on a large rock at the camp’s entrance, for a time.

Given the sort of Game Change-esque drama in the Gingrich and Huntsman camps, the fact that this passes for controversy for Tim Pawlenty is likely a good sign. The Pawlenty campaign sent out a press release yesterday linking to what they considered favorable press from the Des Moines Register, attributing to Pawlenty a “winsome personality” and impressive resume. Missing from the press release? The anecdote that opens the piece, of the Republican presidential candidate ripping the pants off the Minnesota House Speaker.

Always trying to appear objective, the mainstream media has its own brand of bias: an institutional one towards controversy. The moment it became clear that Elena Kagan would be nominated by President Barack Obama, editors simultaneously posed the same rhetorical question: What do we really know about her? What is the dirt? Well the vacuum of controversy is now leading to overt frustration expressed on both sides of the media political aisle.

Not that there was any doubt that men’s figure skating silver medalist Evgeni Plushenko was in the running for worst sportsman of the 2012 Olympic Games before, but Plushenko, always the fierce competitor, has taken his unique ability to alter reality to new heights with his latest online antics. After spending a good amount of last week trashing gold medalist Evan Lysacek for not being able to perform a quadruple jump (“It’s not men’s figure skating… it’s dancing”), he has convinced himself that he didn’t lose a gold medal – he won a platinum one.

Bad news, bloggers: according to a Harvard Business Review columnist, controversy is going to be a less and less valuable news product in the years to come. Umair Haque writes that “One of the new competencies the news media is going to have manage is opinion arbitrage. In an era of media production devolved to the masses, everyone can finally express their opinion. So publishers will have to learn to, to put it crudely, buy opinion low and sell it high.” What does that mean, exactly?