On Tuesday morning’s Starting Point, host Soledad O’Brien led yet another discussion of the Obama administration’s decision to give non-church religious employers one year to comply with the Preventive Services Mandate, which some claim is an “attack on religious liberty.”

O’Brien did a good job of challenging that false premise, but allowed guest Rep. Marcia Blackburn (R-TN) to slip in the lie that the mandate covers the “abortion pill.”

In the past week, Mitt Romney has rebounded and claimed the lead once again in the Republican presidential race. And with no debates for weeks, Newt Gingrich may not be able to shift voters’ opinions for a third time. So once again, the media is back to pushing the “inevitable Romney” narrative it’s had to temporarily shelve on a few occasions. On This Week today, George Will not only agreed that Romney is inevitable, but added that the GOP race is already over.

The lie that emergency contraception is the same as the “abortion pill” RU-486 has just completed the jump from the minds of Republicans like Michele Bachmann, to Fox News opinion programming, to the broader mainstream media. On Sunday morning’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos sat mute as columnist George Will repeated the lie that the Obama administration’s Preventive Services Mandate would force religious employers to “provide…abortion-inducing drugs.”

In an interview with Good Morning America host George Stephanopoulos Wednesday morning, Vice President Joe Biden passed on an opportunity to call former House Speaker Newt Gingrich out over his overtly racial politicking. Asked if Gingrich is playing racial politics with references to President Obama as the “Food Stamp President,” Biden responded, “It’s hard to tell. I’m not being facetious. It’s hard to tell what Newt means. He says a lot.”

Now that Newt Gingrich has become the newest “Not Romney” to surge in the polls, Rick Santorum has a choice to make: whether to plow on ahead or drop out and have conservatives get behind Gingrich. George Stephanopoulos asked Santorum today about this decision, but Santorum insisted he would be a better conservative standard-bearer than Gingrich. He branded the Mitt Romney-Gingrich fight as a choice between a moderate and an “erratic conservative.”

One week ago, Mitt Romney was the inevitable GOP nominee, the impossible-to-defeat frontrunner who was going to take three states in a row and end the primary season earlier. As George Stephanopoulos put it, what a difference a week makes. Now Newt Gingrich is back in the spotlight, and many analysts are wondering where Romney could have gone wrong. George Will‘s take? Romney just has too much… Romney in him.

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.

Stephen Colbert isn’t even a candidate for the presidency yet, and he’s already attracting more attention than actual candidates. The comedian has been riding high ever since announcing his intentions last Thursday to form an exploratory committee to run for the presidency in South Carolina, and on the heels of a new ad released by the Jon Stewart-helmed Definitely Not Coordinating With Stephen Colbert Super PAC released late last night, Colbert sat down with George Stephanopoulos to talk about his chances of actually getting on the ballot and the influence of Super PACs on the political process.

On last night’s Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert got George Stephanopoulos to open up about how he got Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney to say that states have the constitutional right to outlaw contraceptives during Saturday night’s debate.

Appearing on Good Morning America to promote his critically-acclaimed film, The Descendants, movie star George Clooney told host George Stephanopoulos that he was rooting for President Obama in 2012.

At Saturday night’s ABC News/WMUR Republican presidential debate at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, moderator George Stephanopoulos began to press former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney on his claim to have created 100,000 jobs at Bain Capital, but after extracting a major admission from Romney about a glaring flaw in that calculation, Stephanopoulos mysteriously ignored it completely.

At tonight’s ABC News/WMUR Republican presidential debate at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney stumbled badly on a Constitutional question from moderator George Stephanopoulos, first trying to punt it to “our Constitutionalist” Ron Paul, then demonstrating painful ignorance about the issues of privacy and banning contraception. To his credit, George pursued him like Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive.

At tonight’s ABC News/WMUR Republican presidential debate at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) zinged Rep. Ron Paul when the Texas Congressman’s microphone fed back on him. Paul was in the midst of launching an attack on Santorum, and when the mic squealed, Santorum cracked, “It caught you not telling the truth, Ron.”

A week and a candidate removed from Iowa, and less than a week away from the make-or-break state of New Hampshire, six of the remaining Republican candidates (alas, Buddy Roemer was excluded yet again!) are reconvening at St. Anselm College for another debate. This debate, hosted by ABC News, Yahoo! News and WMUR-TV airs tonight on ABC at 9PM ET, but you can watch along with us here by clicking below.

With all the talk of the ongoing battle between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, at least one person thinks the two will be able to patch it up. That person is Rob Lowe who predicted that the two front runners would become “the new Republican ticket” when stopping by Good Morning America.

George Stephanopoulos is returning to ABC’s This Week this weekend, right in the middle of election madness. RELATED: George Stephanopoulos To Return As Host Of This Week Stephanopoulos, who is coming back to host the Sunday morning show as former host Christiane Amanpour balances the role of global affairs anchor with a new show on [...]

Former Massachusetts governor (oh, and the winner last night in Iowa) Mitt Romney told Good Morning America‘s George Stephanopoulos just how his experience differs from that of “runner up” candidate Rick Santorum, noting that there is “nothing wrong” with the fact that Santorum has spent “most of life in the governmental sector,” but that “it’s very different, I think, if you want to get the economy going again.”

In the world of the microscopic news cycle, a year is a mighty long time. Think “dog years” on steroids. Over the course of the past year, in thousands (around 7,500 ) of articles and millions (between 3 and 4 million) of words, Mediaite has covered the ups and downs of that whizzing, ricocheting media world. In case you lost track in that sea of information, we’ve compiled a list of 2011 Media Winners and Losers that we hope will be the start  of a conversation, not the end of one. Here, in no particular order, are Mediaite’s 2011 Media Winners and Losers.

Longtime host George Stephanopoulos is set to return to ABC’s This Week early next year with the news that current host Christiane Amanpour is set to return to CNN for a weekday show, and remaining with ABC for specials.

Since details of Penn State’s horrific child rape scandal emerged in a grand jury report released earlier this week, few of the known participants have submitted themselves to an interview with the press. That changed this morning when Good Morning America anchor George Stephanopoulos sat down with the mother of an alleged victim, identified in the report as “victim #1.” With her voice and image altered to protect her identity, the mother explained how her son came to reveal the reprehensible allegations at the center of this story.

On Tuesday, influential conservative pundit Erick Erickson launched a thermonuclear attack on Mitt Romney, the steady near-leader in the GOP presidential field. In an online-only interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, Romney responded to Erickson’s criticism by saying, “I’ll let the slings and arrows come, as they may,” and by changing the subject to Barack Obama, to whom Erickson compared Romney…unfavorably.

There are probably fewer things scarier in life than an ultra-serious bald man with glasses popping up on a futuristic video conference screen and telling you that you’ve been exposed to a fatal poison and you’re all going to die. But that’s what happened in October 2001, when Dick Cheney showed up on the secure line, sharing the bad news. Condoleezza Rice recounted the incident Tuesday on Nightline to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

Democratic strategist James Carville appeared on Good Morning America this morning to assess the current crop of front runners in the GOP presidential field and was not shy in his both predictable and entertainingly harsh criticism of his ideological foes. Herman Cain and Mitt Romney were both targeted, but it was Texas Governor Rick Perry, who has seen a rather enormous dip in recent polls, that received the most merciless review.

ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos spoke with Texas governor and GOP presidential hopeful Rick Perry about comments Perry’s wife made in South Carolina regarding the “brutalization” her husband has suffered at the hands of the press and his opponents due to his Christian faith and conservative viewpoints.

Stephanopoulos asked Perry whether he agreed with his wife’s assessment of their situation.

You guys already know about a few things I really dislike, namely sharks and the ocean and the comedic stylings of one George Lopez. But, know what I love? Dogs. I love dogs so much. And I’ve always just really liked George Stephanopoulos. He seems like a nice guy who also happens to look a [...]