Congressman Joe Walsh told the Media Research Center‘s Brent Bozell that the media will do whatever it takes to protect President Obama because he’s black. “This guy pushed every one of the media’s buttons. He was liberal, he was different, he was new, he was black. Oh my God! It was the potpourri of everything! [...]

The only thing more predictable than the swallows return to Capistrano is the very use of the Capistrano swallows as banal trend metaphor in a media criticism piece. But a close second in the growing list of media criticism cliché is the post-event hand-wringing alleging overwrought news coverage. Case in point, the Monday morning quarterbacking done by many media critics’ breathlessly taking news outlets to task for ostensibly over-hyping the potential effects of Hurricane Irene.

After a week-long break for Thanksgiving, The Daily Show returned to mid-season form with the following segment in which host Jon Stewart rips the media for the innocuous but annoying habit of making excessive puns while delivering the news. Like virtually every other segment that critiques the media, this follows the same form: a brief set-up, followed by montage of newscasts then a comedic admonishment from Stewart. Predictable? Sure, but still funny.

During an interview on Glenn Beck‘s radio program on the day before Thanksgiving, Sarah Palin misspoke and said “we gotta stand with our North Korean allies.” Mr. Beck quickly corrected the former Alaska Governor and current reality-show star, but the damage was done. A viral video was born. Last night Palin took to her favorite scores-settling platform, her Facebook page, to fire back at the “lamestream media.”

Politico is taking heat from all over the blogosphere for a story they posted Wednesday that conflated support for convicted rapist Roman Polanski with political donations to President Obama. The splashy headline read “Roman Polanski Backers Gave $34k to Barack Obama, DNC.”

There was a report in US News, yesterday, that has different corners of the blogosphere going at the White House Press Corps like ‘roid-raged 5th graders at a pinata. The criticism centers, not around the corps’ threat of a “more adversarial tone” with the Obama White House, but around the reasons for it: Print reporters [...]