Rich suggested that Mitt Romney and Rick Perry have a great advantage over many other candidates in 2012, including Obama, since they didn’t have any part of the nightmare that just took place in Washington. And about Obama, Rich complains:

“There was not much leadership from him – that someone has given him the idea that if you’re the adult in the room and you’re willing to compromise and you’re an agreeable guy, that somehow will appeal to independents and get him re-elected. I’m not so sure.”

Turning their focus to Palin, after she defended the Tea Party against accusations of being “domestic terrorists” by bringing up Obama’s connection to Bill Ayers, Bashir commented “remarkable that she remembered Bill Ayers.” And Rich was confident she didn’t really even know anything about Ayers:

“If you put a reloaded gun in front of her, to use her language, would she be able to actually remember anything Bill Ayers actually did? Or what his relationship to Obama was? . . . Who knows what she’s up to?”

Despite some over-the-top gun imagery from Rich, he actually thinks it would be “hilarious” if she ran for President. Especially since Frank wonders whether “just being on the Fox payroll” is enough to satisfy her, he ultimately wouldn’t be shocked if Palin does jump into the race.

Watch the clip from MSNBC below:

Rich paid a visit to Joy Behar‘s HLN show to discuss his experiences further and to issue a warning that the “whole Murdoch culture” evidenced by the News of the World hacking scandal has spread to the United States:

Well, I think that we’re deluding ourselves if we think the whole sort of Murdoch culture has not spread to America. We’re reading all this sort of exotic stuff about having British police on the payroll. Bernie Kerik was on the Murdoch payroll. He had a huge advance from Harper Collins. And you know, the piece I’ve written in New York that’s out today, I talk about the bullying things that they do. It’s not just about politics; it’s not just about Fox being right-wing. It’s about them going after people who are personal enemies, Bill O’Reilly having producers stalk people on the street.

Rich believes the Murdoch empire allegedly lashes out in this because it is motivated by “power and money, punishing enemies that they don’t like, for reasons that could be personal or business, not just political.”

“It’s thuggery,” he concluded, agreeing with Behar’s assessment of Murdoch. “And I think this scandal is going to play out like Watergate for a couple of years. We’ll see where all of it lands in this country.”

Have a look at the segment, via HLN:

In 1976, at the dawn of his career, Rich found himself working for the Post when the paper was sold to an Australian business mogul who was, at the time, little-known in the States. The crux of Rich’s piece lies not in bolstering the “us versus them” narrative espoused by many in the “mainstream media,” but on zeroing in on how the Murdoch empire systematically abuses power in order to further an agenda, even if this abuse should happen to break the law:

This defense is a smoke screen. The real transgressions of the Murdoch empire are not its outré partisanship, its tabloid sleaze, its Washington lobbying, or even what liberals most love to hate, the bogus “fair and balanced” propaganda masquerading as journalism at Fox News. In fact, these misdemeanors are red herrings—distractions from the real News Corp. corruption that now threatens to bring down its management and radically reconfigure and reduce its international corporate footprint. The bigger story is this: An otherwise archetypal media colossus, with apolitical TV shows (American Idol), movies (Avatar), and cable channels (FX) like any other, is controlled by a family (and its tight coterie of made men and women, exemplified by the recently departed Rebekah Brooks) that countenances the intimidation and silencing of politicians, regulators, competitors, journalists, and even ordinary citizens to maximize its profits and power and to punish perceived corporate, political, and personal enemies. And, as we now know conclusively, some of this behavior has broken the law.

Frank highlights two specific instances of his personal brushes with those working under Murdoch, ranging from merely annoying to threatening:

The Post would not be my last brush with Murdoch’s minions. An emissary tried to rehire me for his other new purchase in New York—this magazine, which he wrested unscrupulously from its founder, Clay Felker, in 1977 and owned until 1991. (I declined.) Years later, when I became a Times columnist who frequently criticized various Murdoch organs, I was harassed by a “blind” fictional “Page Six” item that had me leaving my wife for a Broadway director. That was a mere warm-up for a full-frontal assault from Bill O’Reilly. After I came to the less-than-novel judgment that Mel Gibson and his 2004 movie The Passion of the Christ were anti-Semitic, O’Reilly, whose one novel had been optioned by Gibson for a film, attacked me on six different installments of his prime-time Fox News show, The O’Reilly Factor, sometimes displaying my photograph. I would have laughed off his blowhard provocations—“Hollywood and a lot of the secular press are controlled by the Jewish people” was a ­typical hypothesis—had they not incited the most explicitly violent and virulently anti-Semitic threats of my career. It was only one of two times in seventeen years as a Times columnist that I sought security advice. (The other was when I wrote critically about Scientology some years earlier.)

Throughout his article, Rich provides a veritable trove of examples demonstrating retaliation on the part of those employed by Murdoch’s various outlets and ventures, from the petty and juvenile to the heinous and, in some cases, potentially dangerous — and quite possibly illegal. As for News Corp’s hand in politics, Rich describes a relationship between the company and the Republican party that’s akin to a “business partnership,” Rich feels as incomparable to other political figures appearing on Fox news’ competitor, MSNBC.

Rich’s “exposé,” so to speak is worth being bookmarked today to read in full, but here’s his basic takeaway: That further and widespread investigative reporting is needed to make the public — and law enforcement — aware of the unethical journalistic practices and illegal activities allegedly promoted and carried out by Murdoch’s companies, both overseas and in the U.S.:

If Murdoch is to be undone in America, as in England, it won’t be politicians who take the lead. It will take aggressive journalism, law enforcement, and civil actions to force jettisoned News Corp. executives to sing.

h/t NY Mag

Beginning in June, Rich will not only contribute essays for the magazine, he’ll also act as its editor at large, overseeing a “special monthly section anchored by his essay,” and posting regularly to nymag.com.

As expected, Twitter is, well. All atwitter with the news. New York Times cultural news editor and restaurant critic Sam Sifton, for one, noted that NY Mag editor in chief Adam Moss sounded “pleased as punch” to announce the hire. And T.J. Ortenzi, the Washington Post‘s senior social media producer, declared Rich’s move a bold, if humble, one:

Frank Rich is leaving NYT. Which means new headshot. Which, as a vain person, I imagine is reason enough for aging columnists to stay put.

One Tweeter (Twitter user? Twitterer? Twit? Your guess is as good as ours.) made a rather interesting choice for Rich’s possible replacement, telling Keith Olbermann, now of Current TV, that there should be a regular New York Times byline in his future.

Rich, for his part, leaves the New York Times with fond memories and high hopes:

I leave the paper with deep affection for both the institution and my many brilliant colleagues, and with much gratitude for the opportunity the paper gave me to serve in two dream jobs in journalism. I’ve spent much of the past year talking to friends inside and outside the Times about what might be most exciting for me next. It was impossible to top the idea of reuniting with my friend Adam Moss, who has played a crucial role in my writing life since the late eighties and who, as editor of the Times Magazine, was instrumental in my transition from arts criticism to broader essay writing.

h/t New York Magazine

Rich writes about the initial controversy:

When a four-minute excerpt from “A Fire in My Belly” was included in an exhibit that opened six weeks ago at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, it received no attention. That’s hardly a surprise, given the entirety of this very large show — a survey of same-sex themes in American portraiture titled “Hide/Seek.” The works of Wojnarowicz, Hujar and other lesser known figures are surrounded by such lofty (and often unlikely) bedfellows (many gay, some not) as Robert Mapplethorpe, John Singer Sargent, Grant Wood, Thomas Eakins, Georgia O’Keeffe, Andy Warhol, Andrew Wyeth and Haring. It’s an exhibit that would have been unimaginable in a mainstream institution in Wojnarowicz’s lifetime.

The story might end there — like Haring’s altarpiece, a bittersweet yet uplifting postscript to a time of plague. But it doesn’t because “Fire in My Belly” was removed from the exhibit by the National Portrait Gallery some 10 days ago with the full approval, if not instigation, of its parent institution, the Smithsonian. (The censored version of “Hide/Seek” is still scheduled to run through Feb. 13.) The incident is chilling because it suggests that even in a time of huge progress in gay civil rights, homophobia remains among the last permissible bigotries in America. “Think anti-gay bullying is just for kids? Ask the Smithsonian,” wrote The Los Angeles Times’s art critic, Christopher Knight, last week. One might add: Think anti-gay bullying is just for small-town America? Look at the nation’s capital.

The Smithsonian’s behavior and the ensuing silence in official Washington are jarring echoes of those days when American political leaders stood by idly as the [AIDS] epidemic raged on.

And then delves into the lesser-known backstory of how the Smithsonian succumbed to pressure from conservative groups to remove the video:

Like many of its antecedents, the war over Wojnarowicz is a completely manufactured piece of theater. What triggered the abrupt uproar was an incendiary Nov. 29 post on a conservative Web site. The post was immediately and opportunistically seized upon by William Donohue, of the so-called Catholic League, a right-wing publicity mill with no official or financial connection to the Catholic Church.

Donohue is best known for defending Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitism by declaring that “Hollywood is controlled by Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular.” A perennial critic of all news media except Fox, he has also accused The Times of anti-Catholicism because it investigated the church pedophilia scandal. Donohue maintains the church doesn’t have a “pedophilia crisis” but a “homosexual crisis.” Such is the bully that the Smithsonian surrendered to without a fight.

Read the full column here.

THOSE desperate to decipher the baffling Obama presidency could do worse than consult an article titled “Understanding Stockholm Syndrome” in the online archive of The F.B.I. Law Enforcement Bulletin. It explains that hostage takers are most successful at winning a victim’s loyalty if they temper their brutality with a bogus show of kindness. Soon enough, the hostage will start concentrating on his captors’ “good side” and develop psychological characteristics to please them — “dependency; lack of initiative; and an inability to act, decide or think.”

This dynamic was acted out — yet again — in President Obama’s latest and perhaps most humiliating attempt to placate his Republican captors in Washington. No sooner did he invite the G.O.P.’s Congressional leaders to a post-election White House summit meeting than they countered his hospitality with a slap — postponing the date for two weeks because of “scheduling conflicts.” But they were kind enough to reschedule, and that was enough to get Obama to concentrate once more on his captors’ “good side.”

And so, as the big bipartisan event finally arrived last week, he handed them an unexpected gift, a freeze on federal salaries. Then he made a hostage video hailing the White House meeting as “a sincere effort on the part of everybody involved to actually commit to work together.” Hardly had this staged effusion of happy talk been disseminated than we learned of Mitch McConnell’s letter vowing to hold not just the president but the entire government hostage by blocking all legislation until the Bush-era tax cuts were extended for the top 2 percent of American households.

The captors will win this battle, if they haven’t already by the time you read this, because Obama has seemingly surrendered his once-considerable abilities to act, decide or think.

Read Rich’s full column here.

Rich writes:

Palin is on the top of her worlds — both the Republican Party and the media universe. “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” set a ratings record for a premiere on TLC, attracting nearly five million viewers — twice the audience of last month’s season finale of the blue-state cable favorite, “Mad Men.” The next night Palin and her husband Todd were enshrined as proud parents in touchy-feely interviews on “Dancing With the Stars,” the network sensation (21 million viewers) where their daughter Bristol has miraculously escaped elimination all season despite being neither a star nor a dancer. This week Sarah Palin will most likely vanquish George W. Bush and Keith Richards on the best-seller list with her new book.

…Revealingly, Sarah Palin’s potential rivals for the 2012 nomination have not joined the party establishment in publicly criticizing her. They are afraid of crossing Palin and the 80 percent of the party that admires her…Sooner or later Palin’s opponents will instead have to man up — as Palin might say — and actually summon the courage to take her on mano-a-maverick in broad daylight. Short of that, there’s little reason to believe now that she cannot dance to the top of the Republican ticket when and if she wants to.

Read Rich’s full column here.

Optics matter. If Washington is tumbling into a political crisis as the recovery continues to lag, maybe the president shouldn’t get out of Dodge. If the White House couldn’t fill a 13,000-seat arena in blue Cleveland the weekend before the midterms, maybe it shouldn’t have sent the president there. If an administration charged with confronting a Great Recession knew that its nominee for secretary of the Treasury serially cut corners on his taxes, maybe it should have considered other options. Shoulda, woulda, coulda. Well, here we are.

What does Rich think is the solution to all this “shoulda, woulda, coulda”? He says Obama needs to call the (irresponsible) GOP’s bluff.

Obama has a huge opening here — should he take it. He could call the Republicans’ bluff by forcing them to fill in their own blanks. He could start by offering them what they want, the full Bush tax cuts, in exchange for a single caveat: G.O.P. leaders would be required to stand before a big Glenn Beck-style chalkboard — on C-Span, or, for that matter, Fox News — and list, with dollar amounts, exactly which budget cuts would pay for them. Once they hit the first trillion — or even $100 billion — step back and let the “adult conversation” begin!

And if he’s not willing to do this Rich thinks he “might as well just take his time and enjoy the sights of Mumbai.” Ouch.

Related: Barack Obama, Phone Home [NYT]

But whatever Tuesday’s results, this much is certain: The Tea Party’s hopes for actually affecting change in Washington will start being dashed the morning after. The ordinary Americans in this movement lack the numbers and financial clout to muscle their way into the back rooms of Republican power no matter how well their candidates perform.

Here’s who will be in those backrooms.

The main dining room remains reserved for Koch’s fellow oil barons, Lott’s clients, the corporate contributors (known and anonymous) to groups like Rove’s American Crossroads, and, of course, the large coterie of special interests underwriting John Boehner, the presumptive next speaker of the House. Boehner is the largest House recipient of Wall Street money this year — much of it from financial institutions bailed out by TARP.

The result? Beware the Mama Grizzly!

The tempest, however, will not be contained within the tiny Tea Party but will instead overrun the Republican Party itself, where Palin, with Murdoch and Beck at her back, waits in the wings to “take back America” not just from Obama but from the G.O.P. country club elites now mocking her. By then — after another two years of political gridlock and economic sclerosis — the equally disillusioned right and left may have a showdown that makes this election year look as benign as Woodstock.

Kumbaya?

Related: The Grand Old Plot Against the Tea Party [NYT]

President Obama, the Rodney Dangerfield of 2010, gets no respect for averting another Great Depression, for saving 3.3 million jobs with stimulus spending, or for salvaging GM and Chrysler from the junkyard. And none of these good deeds, no matter how substantial, will go unpunished if the projected Democratic bloodbath materializes on Election Day.
[...]
The reasons for his failure to reap credit for any economic accomplishments are a catechism by now: the dark cloud cast by undiminished unemployment, the relentless disinformation campaign of his political opponents, and the White House’s surprising ineptitude at selling its own achievements.

However, it’s not merely ineptitude at PR on Obama’s part, says Rich, it’s also that he went soft on Wall St.

The Obama administration seems not to have a prosecutorial gene. It’s shy about calling a fraud a fraud when it occurs in high finance.
[...]
Since Obama has neither aggressively pursued the crash’s con men nor compellingly explained how they gamed the system, he sometimes looks as if he’s fronting for the industry even if he’s not. Voters are not only failing to give the White House credit for its economic successes but finding it guilty of transgressions it didn’t commit.

This is probably as close as Rich will ever come to calling Obama a humanoid.

Gerard was on the program to defend unions against claims that foreign money had been circulating in their funding. “I can’t tell you how distressful it is to think our democracy is up for sale,” he told Schultz, challenging “secret clubs” in Congress to be as transparent about their budgets as he claims his organization is. Schultz asked if it was possible for auditors to look through his unions accounting and, upon receiving an affirmative answer, Schultz took it as a cue to attack the Times, Rich, and far-right media:

“I challenge Frank Rich and the New York Times to do the damn story. You know, he’s insinuating that there’s foreign money in unions in this country. Mr. Rich, I hope you’re watching tonight and I hope you follow up on an interview that I just did here. You know, it is amazing to me how many lies there are and distortions in the media when it comes to the working folk of America. you know, they just throw it out there.”

The ball is in Rich’s court now, though as his most recent work seems to challenge the funding of the Tea Party movement and its motives more than unions, it’s difficult to imagine what the response to this attack will be, if any.

Schultz’s challenge to Rich via MSNBC below:

For all the Obama team’s digital bells and whistles, among them a lightning-fast site to debunk rumors during the campaign, Internet-fed myths still rage. In a Pew poll in August, 18 percent of Americans labeled the president a Muslim — up 7 points since March 2009. The explosion of accessible media and information on the Web, with its potential to give civic discourse a factual baseline and hold politicians accountable, has also given partisans license to find only the “facts” that fit their prejudices. Meanwhile, wealthy candidates like Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive running for Senate in California, have become adept at buying up prime Google-YouTube advertising real estate to compete with digital stink bombs tossed by the rabble.

One might argue it’s less that the anticipated transparency hasn’t been achieved than that the country, when confronted with the reality of it, finds that it’s easier to complain in a sympathetic comments section than do anything concrete about it. Nevertheless, Rich is feeling so disheartened that even Alvin Greene is looking good these days.

When Christine O’Donnell ran an ad last week with the improbable opening line “I’m not a witch,” we once again had to marvel at the Delaware primary triumph of a mystery candidate with a falsified résumé, no job, and apparently no campaign operation beyond out-of-state donors and out-of-state fans like Palin “writing” Twitter endorsements…Sometimes I wonder if the most “real” candidate this year is the one most derided by Democrats, Republicans, the news media and late-night comics alike: Alvin Greene…As it turned out, Greene’s résumé actually is more authentic than those of O’Donnell, Blumenthal, Quayle and Kirk. He really is who he said he is — a genuine nobody with no apparent political views. That he drew 100,000 votes — more than three times O’Donnell’s tally in her Delaware victory — leaves you wondering if he’d have a shot at the presidency had he only been on Facebook.

Related: Facebook Politicians Are Not Your Friends [NYT]

ALL it took was some 30,000 Republican primary voters in a tiny state to turn Christine O’Donnell into the brightest all-American media meteor since Balloon Boy. For embattled liberals, not to mention the axis of Comedy Central, “Saturday Night Live” and Bill Maher, she’s been pure comic gold for weeks: a bottomless trove of baldfaced lies, radical views and sheer wackiness. True, other American politicians have dismissed evolution as a myth. Some may even have denied joining a coven. But history will always remember her for taking a fearless stand against masturbation, the one national pastime with more fans than baseball.

I’m going to hazard a guess it was less those 30,000 Delaware voters that turned O’Donnell into a “media meteor” than the potent combination of Sarah Palin and Bill Maher simultaneously shining (very different) spotlights on her. But nevertheless, she is a star and Rich thinks she might actually help the GOP. Though perhaps for reasons other than the ones you can expect to see in a campaign ad.

Whatever her other talents, she’s more than willing to play the role of useful idiot for her party. She gives populist cover to the billionaires and corporate interests that have been steadily annexing the Tea Party movement and busily plotting to cash in their chips if the G.O.P. prevails.

While O’Donnell’s résumé has proved largely fictional, one crucial biographical plotline is true: She has had trouble finding a job, holding on to a home and paying her taxes. In this, at least, she is like many Americans in the Great Recession, including the angry claque that found its voice in the Tea Party. For a G.O.P. that is even more in thrall to big money than the Democrats, she couldn’t be a more perfect decoy.

Basically, Rich thinks O’Donnell is a convenient beard for the GOP’s corporate interests. Which may be true to some extent but completely ignores the argument that the GOP is running scared to some extent from the surge in Tea Party candidates who’ve made it onto the November ballot (alas Rich does not mention Carl Paladino in today’s column). Perhaps that’s because Rich thinks big money is behind the Tea Party movement.

“Big money rains down on the “bottom up” Tea Party insurgency through phantom front organizations (Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Job Security) that exploit legal loopholes to keep their sugar daddies’ names secret.”

Either way, Rich believes the future is rosy for O’Donnell: “By the time her fans discover that any post-election cuts in government spending will be billed to them, and not the Tea Party’s shadowy backers, she’ll surely be settling her own debts with fat paychecks from “Fox & Friends.”

Related: The Very Useful Idiocy of Christine O’Donnell [NYT]

And then there was Chris Matthews on Sunday questioning whether the President had been fiddling while Rome burned.

Says Matthews: “He should have been focusing on the economy, instead he was focused on making history with health care.”

Howard Fineman concurs: “You get the sense he was reaching for history and taking the extra credit courses. This in an overacheiving guy, this is a guy whose chief of staff said ‘never let a crisis go to waste.’”

“Was he fiddling while Rome burned?” questioned Matthews. Whether or not he was, it certainly makes for a great attack ad tagline. Watch below.

Apparently he may not be all that far off. NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston reported this morning that in recent days the mosque debate has been the number one topic on the “jihadi chat rooms and frequent radical Islamic sites on the Web” that attract young Muslims and experts worry the debate is “playing right into the hands of radical extremists” including American-born Internet cleric named Anwar al-Awlaki, the man who has been linked to both the Fort Hood shootings and the Christmas Day bomber. Experts are concerned that the recent “anti-Islamic tone” is something “people like Anwar al-Awlaki can take advantage of.”

Said Evan F. Kohlmann, who tracks these kinds of websites and chat rooms for Flashpoint Global partners, a New York-based security firm. “Extremists are encouraging all this, with glee. It is their sense that by doing this that Americans are going to alienate American Muslims to the point where even relatively moderate Muslims are going to be pushed into joining extremist movements like al-Qaida. They couldn’t be happier.”

So much for encouraging relations with the Muslim world. There’s more, and it gets more worrisome:

All this controversy and vitriol are not only encouraged; they’re welcomed. Extremists and radical clerics posted a stream of “I told you so” messages: After years of telling followers that Islam was under attack by the West, the harsh reaction to a simple community center seemed to prove it.

That message, transmitted in a multitude of chat rooms and websites, has law enforcement worried. There have been a record number of homegrown terrorist plots in this country since late last year, and the conventional wisdom has been that the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have moved some young Muslims — many of whom came of age watching U.S. forces fighting in two wars on television — to join the fight.

It is rather astounding to realize that nearly nine years after 9/11 we are having this debate and that in many ways the rhetoric that surrounds it is far worse than what followed the actual attacks. In fact, much of what this article reports on is exactly what the Bush administration appeared to be hoping to avoid with their immediate calls for tolerance. You can listen to the report below.

Here’s what’s been lost in all the screaming. The prime movers in the campaign against the “ground zero mosque” just happen to be among the last cheerleaders for America’s nine-year war in Afghanistan. The wrecking ball they’re wielding is not merely pounding Park51, as the project is known, but is demolishing America’s already frail support for that war, which is dedicated to nation-building in a nation whose most conspicuous asset besides opium is actual mosques…it has also rendered Gen. David Petraeus’s last-ditch counterinsurgency strategy for fighting the war inoperative. How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar when you are calling Muslims every filthy name in the book in New York?

Here’s how he sees it playing out at home:

An America at war with Islam plays right into Al Qaeda’s recruitment spiel. This month’s incessant and indiscriminate orgy of Muslim-bashing is a national security disaster for that reason — Osama bin Laden’s “next video script has just written itself.”

And then Rich dives right into the whole Nazi mudfight:

If the cleric behind Park51 — a man who has participated in events with Condoleezza Rice and Karen Hughes, for heaven’s sake — is labeled a closet terrorist sympathizer and a Nazi by some of the loudest and most powerful conservative voices in America, which Muslims are not?…Now, when the very same politicians and pundits who urge infinite patience for Afghanistan slime Muslims as Nazis, they will have to explain that they are not talking about Hamid Karzai or his corrupt narco-thug government or the questionably loyal Afghan armed forces our own forces are asked to entrust with their lives.

If this controversy continues on, and it looks like it might barring another big end-of-summer news story, one imagines supporters of the mosque and/or opponents of the opponents taking this line of attack; it’s one that would likely be unwelcome by a slew of conservatives running for reelection this fall.

Related: How Fox Betrayed Petraeus [NYT]

Frank Rich

It is often taken as fact that the New York Times has a bias in favor of gay rights and the gay and lesbian community in general. In a 2004 public editor column, Daniel Okrent said “it’s disappointing to see The Times present the social and cultural aspects of same-sex marriage in a tone that approaches cheerleading.”

But it hasn’t always been that way. It was not until 2002 that the New York Time first began to run wedding announcements from same-sex couples. And tucked away in Rich’s piece are two sentences that describe how the New York Times was very late in covering AIDS and the gay community generally.

The Times did not put the mysterious disease on Page 1 until after the casualty rate exceeded 500 and didn’t start covering it in earnest until Rock Hudson died of AIDS three years after that. In 1985, the term “gay” itself was an untouchable for writers in this newspaper.

Journalism historian Larry Gross recounts that during the 1970s and 1980s, gay stories were a contentious issues in the paper because of publisher Arthur Sulzberger and managing Abe Rosenthal’s attitude towards gay people and stories. On the question of AIDS coverage, he quotes Michelangelo Signorile as saying “Rosenthal, who attacks anti-Semitism in the media, never realized that the way he was treating the AIDS epidemic wasn’t much different from the way that news organizations treated the Holocaust early on.” It wasn’t until 1987, after Rosenthal left the paper to be replaced by Max Frankel, that the word “gay” replaced “homosexual.”

He also quotes former NYT reporter Charles Kaiser:

Everyone below Rosenthal spent all of their time trying to figure out what to do to cater to his prejudices. One of these widely perceived prejudices was Abe’s homophobia. So editors throughout the paper would keep stories concerning gays out of the paper.

While AIDS coverage improved under Frankel, another major turning point in how AIDS and the gay community was covered by the NYT was the 1990 collapse in the newsroom of deputy national editor Jeffrey Schmalz who was later diagnosed with AIDS. The closeted Schmalz said that he feared that his sexual orientation would harm his ascent in the newsroom and therefore his brain seizure at his desk also represented his coming-out as gay. In 1992 Schmalz wrote “Covering AIDS And Living It: A Reporter’s Testimony,” a groundbreaking moment for the paper because a gay man with AIDS wrote about being a journalist and covering both gay issues and AIDS.

Twenty years after Schmalz feared telling anyone he was gay because it would harm his career, a gay man–Richard Berke–is now the national editor and a so-called gay mafia–which includes Ben Brantley, Frank Bruni, Stuart Elliot, Adam Nagourney, and Eric Wilson–hold key positions at the paper. Alas, the paper has no openly gay or lesbian voices on it editorial pages.

Now, of course, gays are everywhere in the paper’s coverage and in the newsroom.  In a recent blog post, Kaiser commented on the changes at the paper after attending a New York Times-sponsored seminar with the lawyers working to overturn Proposition 8 in California.

[I]n the third row sat New York Times publisher and chairman Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. , and six rows behind him was Andy Rosenthal, the editor of the Times editorial page.

Thirty years ago, their fathers, Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger and Abe Rosenthal, were running this newspaper, and they shared such antipathy for homosexuals that gay employees of the newspaper believed that their careers depended on keeping their sexual orientations a secret.

But as the younger Sulzberger began his ascension through the paper’s corporate ranks, he did a  remarkable thing: he made it clear to every single person who worked for him that he would not tolerate an iota of prejudice based on sexual orientation.

Practically overnight, he transformed what had been a relentlessly homophobic place into one of the most gay-friendly institutions in the world.

Concluding “[w]hat a difference a new generation can make,” Kaiser said “Andy Rosenthal’s editorial page has published more brilliant editorials in defense of equal rights for gay people than any other editorial page in the world.”

So does the NYT have a bias now in how it covers same-sex marriage and gays generally?  That’s probably something for the next public editor to explore. There’s no doubt that few papers cover the LGBT community  as extensively as the New York Times, but it is far from perfect. Some critics argue that gay people are much more likely to show up on the culture and arts pages than the news pages, and locals complain that the paper does a poor job of handling news that involves the local LGBT community. In addition,  lesbians still remain largely invisible in coverage (and in the newsroom). And, of course, conservative critics of the paper will always contend there is a strong pro-gay bias, not matter the facts on the ground.

But as Rich points out, there’s been a remarkable change at the paper and how it approaches covering the gay community and gay issues. His column provides for a nice moment to reflect on those changes.

Here’s a new one: Frank Rich. This comparison comes by way of the Weekly Standard‘s Joseph Epstein who pens a long-ish piece in the current issue about canceling his longtime subscription to the New York Times.

In explaining his cancellation Epstein notes the paper’s recent propensity for running features over news stories on the front page and its lack of oped thinkers (he’s especially, and justifiably, tough on MoDo). However, here’s the part that caught my eye:

I could go on about the artificial rage of Frank Rich—the liberals’ Glenn Beck—or the forced gaiety of “Sunday Styles,” but the main feeling I have as I rise from having wasted an hour or so with the Sunday New York Times is of what wretched shape the country is in if it is engaged in such boringly trivial pursuits, elevating to eminence such dim cultural and political figures, writing so muddledly about ostensibly significant subjects.

Emphasis mine. Clearly, this comparison is not meant as a compliment to either party, nonetheless it’s sort of interesting. Frank Rich was at one time the most powerful columnist in the country (and may still be, though I’m not sure how powerful columnists still wield…Rich should probably consider getting on Twitter). His lengthy, entertaining, must-read Sunday columns often served to distill the thinking on the left and clarify it (frequently with some sort of historical context). I’m not sure any of these things can be said about Glenn Beck. Beck generally marches to his own drummer and has inspired enough of a passionate following to instill something between fear, loathing and a fair amount of ass-kissing in the thinkers on the right. That said, if you are comparing say Frank Rich of 2004 to Glenn Beck of 2010 I think you could probably argue that they wield of similar level of influence over their various parties, and more to the point, are saying what people in those various parties very much want to hear but are unable to articulate in succinct and appealing way.

As for Epstein deciding to cancel his NYT subscription now — let’s just say it’s (sadly) a bit like leaping for the lifeboat after the captain has called ‘abandon ship’: get in line.

In today’s New York Times, he writes: “As the president conducts his scheduled reappraisal of his war policy this December, a re-examination of 1971 might lead him to question his own certitude of what he is fond of calling “the long view.” But of course, what Rich really means is that it’s maddening to him that this disclosure of information is -not- having that sweeping effect. “Last week the left and right reached a rare consensus. The war logs are no Pentagon Papers,” Rich wrote ruefully. So there began Rich’s effort to equate two very different leaks of information about two wholly different wars.

It is a nice narrative and an interesting read, but when Rich leaps on the rhetorical springboard here, the dive becomes somewhat disastrous. About Daniel Ellsberg (who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971), Rich writes: “What Ellsberg’s leak did do was ratify the downward trend-line of the war’s narrative. The WikiLeaks legacy may echo that. We may look back at the war logs as a herald of the end of America’s engagement in Afghanistan just as the Pentagon Papers are now a milestone in our slo-mo exit from Vietnam.” This hardly veiled effort by Rich to piggyback on Ellsberg’s widely lauded efforts fall flat after even a cursory examination of the two situations.

The Pentagon Papers were drafted in response to a request from the Secretary of Defense seeking definitive conclusions about the war he was overseeing. The Vietnamese conflict was dragging on and secretary Robert S. McNamara wanted answers to the most fundamental of questions: how did we get here and why are we there at all? The answers, provided in the form of the Pentagon Papers, demonstrated that five administrations had at best shaded the truth, and at worst completely obscured it. The Wikileaks documents, on the other hand, were military documents written by those in the field describing primarily military assessments and sometimes embarrassing setbacks that both the Bush and Obama administrations had not made public. They provide specifics as to certain failures, what can be best characterized as anecdotes. The Pentagon Papers, on the contrary, offered a historically rooted response to the ultimate question: Should we be there at all?

Sure, both were about wars, and both revealed information that administrations did not want made public. But its obvious why both sides of the political spectrum have, in Rich’s words, reached a “rare consensus.” Because, unless one is seeking to use this leak as a sword to end all American military involvement in Afghanistan, as Rich clearly is, the comparison fails. Think about comparing a dossier of private emails to a researched essay. While they are ostensibly both written documents, they hold very different reasons for being and play very different roles in the communication of ideas.

This, of course, does not change the reality that serious questions must be asked about our ongoing effort in Afghanistan. The disclosures expose military setbacks and additional problems with Pakistan, in particular. As troubling as that is, it does not change the fact that, unlike the Vietnam War, there is no question about -why- we are in Afghanistan in the first place. Every major political figure of both parties has long agreed that military action had to be taken in Afghanistan after 9/11 as the Taliban continued to protect those directly responsible for the attacks on the United States. Nothing similar can be said of the war in Vietnam.

Does that mean that nine years later we must continue this level of military involvement there? Of course not. The extent of our military commitment is a separate and distinct question but it is disingenuous to appear almost baffled about why we are there at all. And even more so to then compare it to a war that was, at best, an effort to thwart a highly theoretical threat as opposed to one that was a direct retaliation for acts of aggression against the U.S.

In fact, seen purely through the prism of the leaks themselves, this one is far more perilous. While these Wikileaks documents were deemed “secret” as opposed to “top secret,” the Pentagon Papers were an already three year-old historical review when leaked. The Wikileaks documents are from just last year and it now publically names names. Taliban leaders have already threatened to retaliate against those Afghans mentioned in the documents who helped the U.S. effort. Furthermore, in 1971, The New York Times and Washington Post took great care when publishing the Pentagon Papers to work with the administration to retract particularly sensitive information that could threaten national security. While the Times appears to have done so this time around as well, the full documents are now readily available on the web.

Rich wrote that it was time to “inject a little reality into the garbling of Vietnam-era history,” but in the process he conflates two dissimilar leaks about two even more dissimilar wars and himself ends up garbling the very reality he sought to illuminate.

IT was on a Sunday morning, June 13, 1971, that The Times published its first installment of the Pentagon Papers…But if we were titillated that Sunday, it wasn’t immediately clear that this internal government history of the war had mass appeal. Tricia Nixon’s wedding in the White House Rose Garden on Saturday received equal play with the Pentagon Papers on The Times’s front page. On “Face the Nation” the guest was the secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, yet the subject of the papers didn’t even come up.

The same can definitely not be said about WikiLeaks…it has dominated today’s shows. Rich also notes that like the Pentagon Papers the WikiLeaks boasted no big reveal, but that the long-term effect may be similar.

No, the logs won’t change the course of our very long war in Afghanistan, but neither did the Pentagon Papers alter the course of Vietnam. What Ellsberg’s leak did do was ratify the downward trend-line of the war’s narrative. The WikiLeaks legacy may echo that. We may look back at the war logs as a herald of the end of America’s engagement in Afghanistan just as the Pentagon Papers are now a milestone in our slo-mo exit from Vietnam.

First here is Friedman, who not only worries what CNN’s decision portends for future journalists, but backs up the thinking behind Nasr’s controversial (singular) tweet. It’s rare that I say this anymore about a Friedman piece, but this one is definitely worth reading all the way through.

I find Nasr’s firing troubling…To begin with, what has gotten into us? One misplaced verb now and within hours you can have a digital lynch mob chasing after you — and your bosses scrambling for cover. A journalist should lose his or her job for misreporting, for misquoting, for fabricating, for plagiarizing, for systemic bias — but not for a message like this one.

What signal are we sending young people? Trim your sails, be politically correct, don’t say anything that will get you flamed by one constituency or another. And if you ever want a job in government, national journalism or as president of Harvard, play it safe and don’t take any intellectual chances that might offend someone. In the age of Google, when everything you say is forever searchable, the future belongs to those who leave no footprints.

And here is Rich on Gibson…he is not nice.

Six years ago [Mel Gibson] was not merely an A-list movie star with a penchant for drinking and boorish behavior but also a powerful and canonized figure in the political and cultural pantheon of American conservatism. That he has reached rock bottom tells us nothing new about Gibson. He was the same talented, nasty, bigoted blowhard then that he is today. But his fall says a lot about the changes in our country over the past six years. We shouldn’t take those changes for granted. We should take stock — and celebrate. They are good news…It was into that tinderbox of America 2004 that Gibson tossed his self-financed and self-directed movie about the crucifixion, “The Passion of the Christ.”
[...]
It seems preposterous in retrospect that a film as bigoted and noxious as “The Passion” had so many reverent defenders in high places in 2004. Once Gibson, or at least the subconscious Gibson, baldly advertised his anti-Semitism with his obscene tirade during a 2006 D.U.I. incident in Malibu, his old defenders had no choice but to peel off. Today you never hear conservatives mention their embrace of “The Passion” back then — if they mention Gibson at all. (Fox News has barely covered the new tapes. Ed note: Shepard Smith has talked about this frequently.) But it isn’t just Gibson who has been discredited. Even as he self-immolated, so did many of the moral paragons who had rallied around him as a culture-war martyr.

The Pakistan connection, if true, is good news in the sense that it indicates the decline of the tradecraft of terrorism over time. The underwear bomber at Christmas and this man, also, are staggeringly incompetent and minor league figures compared to the amazing precision and scale of the 9/11 attacks.

Probably credit goes to both the Bush and the Obama administration for the extraordinary pressure with the drone attacks and all the rest that are being put on the Taliban and other supporters who are now footloose and having trouble coordinating.

The bad news — if there is bad news in this — is the targeting of Times Square. Let me tell you a story. Right after 9/11, I asked Jack Valenti, the late Jack Valenti, then chairman of the motion picture association, if he worried that someone might target Universal Studios as a symbol of Western decadence. He said, no, what worries me is six backpack bombs in six cineplexes around the country on a Saturday night. That would put huge economic damage on the movie industry. The question is, have they begun to figure that out?

All things considered, I think that’s what you might call a level-headed reaction. On a related note: I did not hear one mention this morning of Frank Rich’s op-ed piece accusing the media of ignoring the Times Sq. bomb news story whilst flooding the airwaves with WHCD party coverage. Video of Will below.

Meanwhile, Maher’s guests, which included New Yorker editor David Remnick and journalist Laura Flanders, appeared to concur with Frank Rich’s take on what’s motivating the movement, concluding from the poll results that the Partiers are actually not that upset about government involvement or taxing (they like their medicare; social security), but are worried and angry that we have a black president.

Says Flanders: “All this time we’ve been told to believe that they were beleaguered poor white people worried about taxes, now we come to find out they’re actually quite well-to-do white people, worried about a black president.”

Says Remnick: What concerns me is the phrase ‘Take Back Our Country.’ When I hear the phrase ‘we want our country back’ I’m afraid that’s coded language.

Counters Maher: Let’s not say they’re racist, let’s say they’re nostalgic for an era where blacks were invisible.

Remick does point out that it’s not fair to paint the Tea Party as a whole as racist, or ignorant of the issues, but that the worst aspects of the party are represented by its leaders, namely Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Michelle Bachmann. As pointed out by Norah O’Donnell during a Chris Matthews appearance yesterday, Palin starts all of her appearances by asking the crowd to help her ‘take back our country.’ And regular watchers of Glenn Beck will know that he spends a not little amount of time glorifying the old days when things were right in America (frequently with the help of a 1950′s TV set). Video of the exchange below. The Tea Party language conversation begins about the 1:30 mark.

What is known is that the nearly all-white G.O.P. is so traumatized by race it has now morphed into a bizarre paragon of both liberal and conservative racial political correctness. For irrefutable proof, look no further than the peculiar case of its chairman, Steele, whose reckless spending and incompetence would cost him his job at any other professional organization, let alone a political operation during an election year. Steele has job security only because he is the sole black man in a white party hierarchy. That hierarchy is as fearful of crossing him as it is of calling out the extreme Obama haters in its ranks.”

– Frank Rich continues to not pull any punches when it comes to the Tea Party movement, the GOP and race.

This week’s column is a long tirade against Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell’s botched attempt to make April ‘Confederate History Month’ — botched because he ‘neglected’ to include any mention of slavery in his declaration, and only did so under great pressure. Rich traces McDonnell’s faulty memory back to the South’s post-Civil War habit of reframing the war as having nothing to do with slavery and then connects that to recent claims that because the death threats and epithets (and spit) hurled at members of Congress were not captured on tape they were merely a “mirage.”

Rich’s tone may be a tad heavy-handed, but the point he is making about selective memory and the language of race has not been lost on others. Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic has been doing his own (must-read) celebration of Confederate History Month, which he launched with this excellent (and far more nuanced) post.

If the war actually weren’t about slavery, I think all our lives would be a lot easier. But as I thought on it, my sadness was stupid. What undergirds all of this alleged honoring of the Confederacy, is a kind of ancestor-worship that isn’t. The Lost Cause is necromancy–it summons the dead and enslaves them to the need of their vainglorious, self-styled descendants. Its greatest crime is how it denies, even in death, the humanity of the very people it claims to venerate. This isn’t about “honoring” the past–it’s about an inability to cope with the present.

25. Pat Buchanan – 53 On-Air Mentions

And we start off our list with none other than Mr. Pat Buchanan. Buchanan made a number of appearances last week on MSNBC where he’s a commentator. One fun appearance was on Hardball where the he and Ron Reagan Jr. discussed Michele Bachmann. The talk was derailed briefly when Buchanan and Chris Matthews spent a while trying to figure out what on earth a “cyberattack” was. It made us think that MSNBC should add a technology show starring Chris and Pat. Each week would end with one of their grandchildren calling in to make sure they checked that the computer was plugged in first.

24. Jean Chatzky – 53 On-Air Mentions

Next up is Chatzky, who was part of a panel on the Today Show that offered financial advice to regular people over Skype. Isn’t it great, now that everyone has wonderful HD TVs, that we can use them to look at blurry computer images? We can’t wait till those new 3D TVs come out and Today can air YouTube videos. That cat with the piano is gonna blow your mind in 3D.

23. Charles Osgood – 65 On-Air Mentions

Osgood offered up a special Easter edition of CBS Sunday Morning by wearing a glorious pastel bow-tie and ending his show with a few minutes of soothing footage of bunnies frolicking in the field. It was so hypnotizing that we were unable to continue writing this list for like ten minutes. We’re talking about the bow-tie, not the bunnies.

22. Andy Rooney – 71 On-Air Mentions

60 Minutes is a powerful show. How powerful? Well, Rooney only appears on TV once a week, doing his famous rant on that week’s episode but, since there are so many affiliates carrying the show, he ends up at #22 on our list. In the April 4th rant, Rooney read some mail. It turns out he makes two piles with the letters he gets: the “good” mail and the “bad” mail. He read from the “bad” mail. Why not? It makes for better television. And makes him the 22 most oft-referenced TV pundit.

21. Harvey Levin – 76 On-Air Mentions

We now move to the well-respected area of hard-journalism that is celebrity news. Levin, who is also the executive producer and host of TMZ, appeared on a Fox affiliate to discuss the trial of Michael Jackson’s doctor for all the eight people who still care about the trial of the Michael Jackson’s doctor. He also appeared on The People’s Court where he acts as legal analyst where he asked people on the street if animals can die of being heartsick. Why that required a law degree, we are not sure.

>>> NEXT PAGE: #20-16

Depending on where you stand — or the given day — he is either an overintellectual, professorial wuss or a ruthless Chicago machine pol rivaling the original Boss Daley. He is either a socialist redistributing wealth to the undeserving poor or a tool of Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs elite. He is a terrorist-coddling, A.C.L.U.-tilting lawyer or a closet Cheneyite upholding the worst excesses of the Bush administration’s end run on the Constitution. He is a lightweight celebrity who’s clueless without a teleprompter or a Machiavellian mastermind who has ingeniously forged his Hawaiian birth certificate, covered up his ties to Islamic radicals and bamboozled the entire mainstream press. He is the reincarnation of J.F.K., L.B.J., F.D.R., Reagan, Hitler, Stalin, Adlai Stevenson or Nelson Mandela. (Funny how few people compared George W. Bush to anyone but Hitler and his parents.)

Frank Rich remarks upon the country’s amazing about-face perception of President Obama in the aftermath of the health care bill (something that’s not necessarily reflected in recent polls). From Clark Kent to Superman in one leap over a tall bill!

Rich then goes on to reflect of the amazing “shape shifting” that Obama is capable of — one that leaves observers unable to accurately pinpoint the President, as evidenced by the variety of descriptions above. “We keep hoping that the Obama puzzle might be cracked once and for all, like the Da Vinci Code,” says Rich. Really? I don’t think so, actually. In fact, after having been a fairly close witness to the cable and blogosphere coverage of Obama for the last year I suspect the media has become rather dependent on the blank slate Obama provides and the public’s blanket tendency to hear what it wants to hear. Rich’s list reads like a run through of media memes over the course of any week of the last 52, each phrase generated by a competing channel (or a morning Politico newsletter) in an effort to own the headline of the day.

Rich further remarks on the Obama-as-Rorschach test phenomenon, which works both ways mind you, and notes that both sides of the aisle have also chosen to hear the most advantageous angle to any and every remark. What’s left out of this analysis, however, is whether the media is also hearing what it wants to hear, namely clicks, and adjusts the ever changing, ‘Obama as fill-in-the-blank’ storyline accordingly.

“Media Diet”—or “What I Read”– began close to home in early February with Atlantic political editor Marc Ambinder. It’s part diary of the profiled, part anthropology study for the magazine: take a trip through the average day in the life of someone who has turned their media obsession into a career. The feature’s introduction explains that it began in response to the fear that “other people can read faster, or have some secret formula that allows them to converse knowledgeably at 8 a.m. about an item this morning on paidcontent.org.” You know, that person. “Media Diet” attempts to figure out just how to lead a happy life while simultaneously following your favorite pundit’s every move.

After the Ambinder profile, they soon expanded to some of the biggest names in the business: Tucker Carlson, Andrew Breitbart, Frank Rich, and coming full circle this week with Atlantic senior editor Joshua Green. And with an endless supply of media personalities, Atlantic Wire executive editor Ben Carlson tells Mediaite that “What I Read” is here to stay– “we’ll keep running them as long as they’re interesting.” The key to keeping them interesting, of course, is the people profiled. Luckily, there is no shortage of obsessive Blackberry checkers in this industry, and even if there were, Carlson says it’s not the only place the magazine is fishing for contributors: “we’re looking to expand into entertainment, politics, technology, sports—anything that would be interesting to our readers.” So while an edition of “Sarah Palin: What I Read” seems farfetched for obvious reasons, don’t count out some more creative editions of the series from any and all walks of life—as long as they consume media.

How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht. The weapon of choice for vigilante violence at Congressional offices has been a brick hurled through a window. So far.

In case you missed it, Frank Rich penned one of his epic, touchstone columns yesterday; the sort that will subsequently be brandished on both sides of the aisle as evidence the opposition had gone off the rails, as was evidenced on yesterday’s Sunday shows. It is, of course, exactly the sort of thing Rich is paid to do. For what it’s worth, the piece is currently riding a top the NYT most emailed list, where I imagine it will stay for at least a few days, not to mention, it was all over Twitter for the better part of yesterday.

The short version: these violent health care protests — the ones we’ve been hearing so much about this week — are nothing new. The country suffered a strikingly similar reaction after the Civil Right bill was passed, leading Rich to conclude that much of the hysteria currently gripping Congress and parts of the country has nothing to do with health care and everything to do with prejudice.

The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

Furthermore, the GOP needs to man-up.

Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.

HLN host and The View panelist Joy Behar and actress Cynthia Nixon received the top honors at the Gay an Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation Awards handed out March 13 in New York.  Behar won the excellence in media honors and Nixon received the Vito Russo Award for advocacy by an openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender media person.

The New York Times won the award for best overall newspaper coverage, with the NYT’s Frank Rich winning for best columnist, Tara Parker-Pope winning for best newspaper article for “Kept from a Dying Partner’s Bedside” and Benoit Denizet-Lewis winning for best magazine article for his NYT magazine piece “Coming Out in Middle School.” Best television news segment went to CNN’s “Why Will Won’t Say the Pledge of Allegiiance” while Rachel Maddow won for best TV news journalism for “Uganda Be Kiddng Me.”

Outstanding digital journalism article was won by ESPN.com’s “We Love You, This Won’t Change a Thing’” by John Buccigross who told the story of Brendan Burke’s coming out to his father U.S. Olympic hockey coach Brian Burke. Brendan died in a February car crash. The award was shared with AfterElton.com’s  “Why Can’t You Just Butch Up? Gay Men, Effeminacy, and Our War with Ourselves” by Brent Hartinger.

Best Spanish language newspaper article went Pilar Marrero of La Opinion to “Mas familias de dos papás o dos mamas” for a story on adoption by same-sex couples while Univision and Telemundo divided up the outstanding Spanish-language television journalism awards.