As the News of the World phone hacking scandal continues to claim scalps, the coverage– or lack thereof– of the story on its sister organization Fox News continues to claim headlines. On today’s Reliable Sources, host Howard Kurtz, admitting he felt “very strongly” about the issue, chided Fox News for keeping quiet, noting that “when CNN has controversy, we always do it” and that, by not covering the scandal, the network “undermines its credibility.”

James Fallows of the Atlantic and Ben Smith of Politico are both covering the “Chinese Professor” attack ad from Citizens Against Government Waste (video below).

The initial, general consensus seems to be that President Obama exceeded expectations and that his “sober” Nobel acceptance speech — – which required him to walk a very tricky tightrope — will please the conservatives as well as the liberals as much as any speech by the president can. That said, for a Peace Prize speech the president spoke an awful lot about war. In fact, he mentioned ‘war’ 44 times during the speech. He mentioned ‘peace’ 29 times.

James Fallows isn’t being subtle about pointing the finger at Betsy McCaughey for spreading the “Death Panel” rumour. Neither is the New York Times, or Joe Conason at Salon, or Greg Sargent at the Plumline, singling out McCaughey on the front page for derailing the health care debate with pernicious rumours. Again.

In October, 1991, James Fallows wrote a hilarious takedown of the Economist that ran in the Washington Post’s Outlook Section. The essay attempted to explain why perfectly intelligent people, like Harvard’s Robert Reich (who at the time was in the middle of a squabble with Newsweek’s Robert Samuelson), would say things like: “I, for one, [...]