Newspaper Print Ad Sales Should Bottom Out in 2009, Study Predicts

A new study shows that newspaper advertising sales are likely to bottom out after four straight years of decline in 2009, but they aren’t headed back to where they used to be, reports Alan Mutter on his blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur.

In what passes nowadays for an upbeat take on the newspaper industry from an independent observer, the Virginia-based market research firm [Borrell Associates] boldly predicts that print advertising sales for the nation’s 15,000 daily and weekly papers will bottom out at $35.9 billion in 2009 after peaking at $57.3 million as recently as 2005.

Borrell forecasts a 2.4% sales rebound in 2010 to $36.8 billion and modest annual gains to take sales to $39.0 billion by 2014. With the over-all size of the national advertising pie likely to shrink in the next five years, Borrell believes newspapers could regain a 15.9% share of the advertising market in 2014 vs. 14.4% in 2009.

Cash for Clunkers Bill Hits a Pothole in the Senate

ABC News' Jonathan Karl reports the cash for clunkers bill in the Senate may have problems getting onto the highway, as Democrats scramble for votes to keep the bill alive before their recess.

Republiicans are throwing their support behind an amendment offered by Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, that would limit clunker rebates to individuals with annual incomes of 50 K or less. With Republican support the amendment stands a good chance of passing unless the majority of Democrats, who mostly favor the amendment, vote against it.

Why is that a problem?

If any amendment passes it means the House has to take up the bill again and the House, of course, has already adjourned for its August recess.

The Democratic leadership is now scrambling to get rank- and -fille Democratic senators to vote against an amendment almost all of them favor. It would be a very tough vote.

"It does seem to be out of character for Democrats to support allowing millionaires access to borrowed money to buy cars," said Don Stewart, spokesnan for Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky

DDoS Attack Strikes at Twitter

I've had all kinds of probelms with Twitter this morning, and I guess I'm not the only one.

On the site's corporate blog, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said: "On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack. Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users.

"We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate."

Jerry A. DiColo of Dow Jones Newswire describes this type of attack for non-geeks such as me:

Denial-of-service attacks are a common weapon employed by cyber criminals to disrupt the working of Web sites. Perpetrators enlist millions of computers to attempt to access a particular site. The site cannot handle the massive increase in traffic, and is rendered inaccessible.

While disruptive and hard to trace, this type of cyber attack is considered by experts to be a relatively unsophisticated technique. The attack itself doesn't attempt to infiltrate the internal operations of a company's computer infrastructure. It simply renders its Web site inactive.

Barret Lyons writes on bylon.com how it could be a DDoS attack:

At a presentation I gave at an International Terrorism and Intelligence conference, I discussed how Twitter is an obvious DDoS target. Well about 30 days later they’re in the thick of it.

Twitter is down and their network has clear signs of massive failure. In the several hundred (if not more) cases of DDoS I have had experience with, this looks like a very clear case of an attack.

Congestion is a very clear sign of a DDoS attack. In this case you will see on a traceroute clean hops up to the last few, where the network starts to get congested. Basically that means each step of the network is clean until things concentrate at the end.

The assumption is the congestion is caused by DDoS and not a system administrator creating a routing loop or something whacky like that.

They also only appear to have ONE network provider (NTT), which is rather insane these days. It also makes targeting Twitter a much less complicated task.

Using very basic tools it is possible to see that the congestion on their network is rather extreme. It’s possible to deduce that the congestion is probably due to a DDoS attack.

There have been reports that Facebook and Live Journal are having trouble as well. But my Facebook page is alive a well for the moment.

Was CNN Poll a Success or a Failure?

I always hated poll stories. To me, they were a poor substitute used by news organizations for genuine investigative reporting, which is much harder to do than to hire a pollster to ask silly questions. But they populate our media every week, giving some political junkie on either side of the aisle to parade around for a few days to say "Look, most people think like me!"

Today brings another example of a poll that for this news cycle will bring joy to the right, but is so meaningless its embarrassing.

CNN Opinion Research Poll interviewed 1,136 adult Americans, including an oversample of African-Americans, by telephone by Opinion Research Corporation on July 31-Aug. 3, 2009. The margin of sampling error for results based on the total sample is plus or
minus 3 percentage points.

On Question 3, pollsters asked, "Do you consider the first six months of the Obama administration to be a success or a failure?" Fifty-one percent said "success," 37 percent said "failure," 11 percent said "too soon to tell," and 1 percent had no opinion.

Then it compares a similar poll conducted in August 2001 about then-President George Bush. Fifty-six percent said "success," 32 percent said "failure," 7 percent said "too early to tell," and 5 percent said they had no opinion, and now the poll is being touted as proof of Obama's failure as a president.

Quickly, this was touted on Drudge as "CNN POLL: After 6 Months, More View Obama Presidency a 'Failure' Than Bush..." and on RealClearPolitics as "After 6 Months, More View Obama's Presidency as a 'Failure' Than Bush's."

The problem is, only 11 percent got it right this year, as compared to 7 percent in 2001.

You can't judge any president as a success or failure after six months. It's ludicrous. We like stories that nurture this instant gratification world. It's easy to put a number on a president's success or failure and say "Here it is!" But in reality, Obama's policies will only be judged for their effectiveness decades down the road.

Six months into Abraham Lincoln's first term, all 11 states in the South had seceded; the battle of Bull Run had been a disastrous loss, and the country was in the first days of its ugliest war. If we had polls back then, I would imagine his numbers would be worse. But I would also doubt anyone now thinks of Lincoln as a failure -- at any point in his life.

You simply cannot judge a president's success on only six months of work. Sometimes a president's impact can only be seen through the light of history. Heck, even Nixon is getting kudos for some of his accomplishments 40 years after the fact.

Instead of spending the money on a poll, CNN should do some of the hard work no one else seems to want to do. A start could be actually getting a few reporters to read through the thousands of pages in the various health-care bills, and get insurance and health experts together to analyze them. Then report on what each bill would really do to Americans. Heck, that's more than our congressmen are doing. It's harder work, but it's better journalism.

Newspapers Laid Off at Least 2,505 People in July; 2009 Total Reaches 13,000

News Cycle counts 2,505 employees being laid off from newspapers in the United States in the month of July. This figure pushes the annual total to about 13,000 newspapers employees having lost their jobs.

It was the second most difficult month this year (only March had a larger number), and was fueled by a large cut by the Gannett chain and an outsourcing of distribution operations by the Orange County Register in California.

Email me to report any job cuts in the newspaper industry.

July 31: The New Mexican of Santa Fe, N.M., 12 people.
July 31: The Register Citizen of Torrington, Conn., 27 people.
July 29: Orange County Register, 919 people as the Santa Ana, Calif.,-based newspaper contracts its delivery operations out to the Los Angeles Times.
July 28: Milwaukee Journal, 37 people.
July 27: The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., 10 people.
July 22: The Loudoun Easterner, of Sterling, Va., ceases publication. The number of employees who lost their jobs was not released by its owners, Landmark Communications Inc.
July 21: The Portland (Ore.) Tribune, two people.
July 15: The Contra Costa Times of Walnut Creek, Calif., Oakland Tribune and Tri-Valley Herald of Pleasanton, Calif., 17 people.
July 10: Claremont (N.H.) Eagle Times, 120 people.
July 8: Albany (N.Y.) Times Union, 18 people.
July 8: Bay State Banner in Boston suspends publication, 12 people.
July 2: Gannett Co. Inc., 1,331 people, according to Gannettoid.com.

Here are News Cycle's month-by-month lists of newspaper job cuts this year:

December -- 752 people.
November -- 293 people.
October -- 375 people.
September -- 347 people.
August -- 425 people.
July -- 2,505 people.
June -- 318 people.
May -- 1,084 people.
April -- 1,350 people.
March -- 3,943 people.
February -- 1,492 people.
January -- 2,256 people.

Email me to report any job cuts in the newspaper industry.

Ann Arbor.Com a Pile of Crap?

So, Jack Lessenberry, tell us what you really think!

Ann Arbor.com is an appalling pile of crap. And an insult to the intelligence of any functioning adult.

Essentially, it is written for children who are at about the fourth-grade level, possibly, slightly below-average ones. Here's what the top story on Ann Arbor.com was Sunday afternoon: DEXTER PHARMACY DAMAGED IN MINOR FIRE. ("A damage estimate is not yet available. No information was available on when the pharmacy will re-open.")

Not that there isn't a place for that kind of news. However, the real work of journalism is, say, examining how the city council works, spends money, gives out contracts. I would be astonished to see anything like that, ever, on Ann Arbor.com. What makes the website a swindle is that they promise occasional "special reports." (Eat your heart out, Sam Donaldson.) For example, there was one last week.

We learned that — get ready for this — those who fancy child pornography tend "to keep it very hidden" and that most child molesters have child pornography on their computers. They are, a professor at Eastern Michigan University tells us, "looking for things that excite them." Who knew?

What, however, about the printed version that comes out twice a week? The one I examined (July 30) could have been written by a properly programmed computer. We learned, in a hard-hitting lead story, that old people want to hang on to their senior center.

Elsewhere, we are told that there is to be a city council election, find out that a poll shows that stress affects children, and are told how to host a block party ("Get a list of all the neighbors you have on the block …").

If this is the future face of journalism, we're in a lot of trouble. This is what we will get as publishers lay off professionals who have worked at their craft for years, and replace them with minimum-wage college grads who know html but don't know how to report or edit.

Murdoch Will Start Charging for All His News Websites Next Year

News Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch said today that News Corp. plans to charge reader fees for all its news websites in 2010, writes Shira Ovide of the Wall Street Journal.

News Corp. executives offered few details of how they will implement the new business plans, the report said.

News Corp. reported a loss for its latest quarter, dragged down by charges related to MySpace and other assets and by a steep decline in its television and newspaper businesses.

The company took $680 million in charges, in part to write down the value of the unit that includes MySpace. It bought MySpace's parent company four years ago for $650 million, but the social-networking site has struggled to generate consistent profits, and its advertising revenue declined again.

Newhouse Backs Off Its No-Layoff Pledge

Advance Publications' Newhouse Newspapers, one of the only major newspaper chains to avoid non-union layoffs throughout the recent upheavals suffered by its industry, is planning to remove its long-standing "no-layoffs" pledge, writes Joe Strupp of Editor and Publisher today.

Publishers at the chain's 20 daily newspapers, which include The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.; The Oregonian in Portland, the Staten Island (N.Y.) Advance and The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, broke the news to staffers Wednesday.

"We wanted to communicate to employees that this is coming," said
Steve Newhouse, chairman of AdvanceNet, the chain's online division, and a member of the Newhouse family, the company's longtime owners. "We have had a pledge not to lay off employees for economic conditions or advances in technology."

But Newhouse said recent industry problems have forced the company to rescind the pledge. He said staffers are being told today that the pledge will remain for six more months, and then layoffs could occur.

"It was not a pledge that applied to the kind of transitional moment in the newspaper industry that is basically struggling to survive," he said, noting it only applied to the company's daily newspapers.

Sam Sifton Named NYT Food Critic

The New York Times has named Sam Sifton, its own culture editor, as its food critic to replace Frank Bruni in October, Executive Editor Bill Keller announced in a memo today.

Here's his memo:

To the Staff:

In the weeks since the announcement that Frank Bruni would be hanging up his napkin, we've received numerous applications for the job of NYT restaurant critic. We narrowed the list, and then narrowed it some more. We had some really impressive candidates, writers who know their food and have interesting things to say about the way we eat.

Then we threw out the list and drafted Sam Sifton.

The choice is both obvious and eccentric.

It is obvious because, as a brilliant editor of the Dining section, as an occasional essayist on food for our magazine, and as a writer of discernment and wit and erudition, he is the best candidate any of us can think of. This is a marquee job for The Times, and our next critic will have the unenviable job of following Frank Bruni. It is an obvious choice, too, because the prospect of reading Sam on a regular basis brings big smiles to our faces. Joe Lelyveld used to ask of any prospective appointment or promotion, "Where's the lift?" On this one, the question pretty much answers itself.

It is eccentric because we are stealing one of our finest editors from one of our most important departments. This is certain to be a cause of anguish and anxiety in Culture, where Sam has run things with great skill, imagination, energy and good humor. Everyone understands that Sam the Culture Editor will be as hard an act to follow as Frank the Resaurant Critic. We've set ourselves the task of finding a new Culture Editor who will give us a lift, too. And we expect the anguish and anxiety to be short-lived.

For the record, it is our expectation that this will not be the end of Sam's career as an editor/manager/entrepreneur/mentor. He has run two departments exceptionally well, and nobody would be surprised to see him running something in the future. For now, though, his running will be on a treadmill at the gym.
After some overdue vacation and a few weeks of warmup eating, Sam will take over the critic's chair in October.

Best,

CNN: Euna Lee and Laura Ling on American Soil

CNN is reporting that Euna Lee and Laura Ling have arrived in California aboard former President Bill Clinton's plane.

An aircraft carrying Clinton, Euna Lee and Laura Ling touched down shortly before 6 a.m. PT (9 a.m. ET) amid tight security at Bob Hope Airport in Burbank outside Los Angeles.

Crowds of dignitaries and journalists gathered for the arrival. The aircraft will be brought into a hangar for a scheduled news conference.

CNN also got some fresh reaction from the families and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:

Doug Ling, Laura Ling's father, reacted to the news of his daughter's release outside his home in Carmichael, California, saying it was "one of the best days in my life."

"I figured, sooner or later, they'd be back," he said.

In Los Angeles, family friend Welly Yang said the Lings had "done everything they could, while respecting the North Korean government, to try and get Laura home."

He predicted that Ling would remain a journalist. "Despite this terrifying experience, I can't imagine that Laura would give up her passion to tell stories that otherwise wouldn't be heard."

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed her relief that the two women were released. She spoke from Nairobi, Kenya, where she is taking part in a multination visit to Africa.

"I spoke to my husband on the airplane, and everything went well. We are extremely excited that they will be reunited soon when they touch down in California," she said. "It is just a good day to be able to see this happen."

Bill Richardson: Both Sides Won in Clinton's Trip to North Korea

Here's former Gov. Bill Richardson's take on former President Bill Clinton's trip to North Korea to secure the release of American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling. His main point is that the United States got a lessening of tensions between the two countries, as well as the freedom of the two journalists. North Korea got what it can call international stature in hosting a former American president on its soil.

South Korean Media: What About Our 300 Hostages Held by North Korea?

South Korean journalists in the United States seem pleased about Euna Lee and Laura Ling's release. But they are asking a bigger question: How about the approximately 300 South Koreans the North has been holding as hostages for years?

"It is very difficult to free our own South Korean hostages because North Korea intentionally treats our government differently. We are not America," Jong Hoon Kim, editor of Korea Daily in Atlanta told New America Media's Anthony Advincula and Eunji Jang.

The American government, Kim added, is willing to make negotiations. "South Korean President Lee Myung Bak is conservative. He doesn't want to negotiate. Under the Obama administration, American politics is more democratic and open to peace talks."

The result, Kim said, is that hundreds of South Korean hostages languish in North Korean prisons. These hostages – the most recent of whom include two fishermen – have been taken in small groups over time and stand little chance of release.

Albert Hong, reporter for Korea Daily in Washington, D.C., said that North Korea wants to show the world that its government can make a deal with America, the most powerful country in the world.

"North Korea is in dire situation, politically. They have the missiles and the world doesn't like it. So a negotiation (like the release of the American journalists) could alleviate the pressure," said Hong.

Kurtz Looks at Obama Press Conferences and Their Value to the Networks

The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz this morning examines the value of President Obama's news conferences both from the perspective of the major networks and their overall news value. He also looks at how Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel went to the top of the ladder to persuade the networks to broadcast the most recent event.

Rather than calling ABC, the White House chief of staff phoned Bob Iger, chief executive of parent company Disney. Instead of contacting NBC, Emanuel went to Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric. He also spoke with Les Moonves, the chief executive of CBS, the company spun off from Viacom.

Whether this amounted to undue pressure or plain old Chicago arm-twisting, Emanuel got results: the fourth hour of lucrative network time for his boss in six months. But network executives have been privately complaining to White House officials that they cannot afford to keep airing these sessions in the current economic downturn.

The networks "absolutely" feel pressured, says Paul Friedman, CBS's senior vice president: "It's an enormous financial cost when the president replaces one of those prime-time hours. The news divisions also have mixed feelings about whether they are being used."

But are the events worth it to the networks?

The financial stakes are considerable. ABC, CBS and NBC have given up as much as $40 million in advertising revenue to carry this year's East Room events. "We lose more than $3 million a show," Moonves told Mediaweek. The Fox broadcast network has declined to carry the last two Obama sessions.

Every president exercises considerable control over his encounters with reporters, picking on selected journalists and deflecting questions he doesn't like. But Obama's discursive style has also tended to depress the news value of the sessions.

He began the last one with an eight-minute opening statement. His answer to the first question, including a follow-up, lasted more than seven minutes. All told, the lengthy responses allowed time for only 10 reporters to be recognized. And Obama's professorial style of explaining policy at length, rather than offering punchy sound bites, may serve him well, but rarely yields dramatic headlines.

One result: The audience is gradually dwindling. The last presser drew 24 million viewers, a significant number but a 50 percent decline from Obama's first such event in February.

NYT's Ombudsman Dissects How So Many Mistakes Got Into Cronkite Story

We're all human, and journalists make mistakes every day. But The New York Times' ombudsman Clark Hoyt gave us a rundown this weekend on how so many mistakes went into its story on Walter Cronkite.

Pulling no punches, Hoyt took to task a reporter with a history of making errors, and editors who not only did not catch them, but introduce their own error into the story during the editing process.

“Wow,” said Arthur Cooper, a reader from Manhattan. “How did this happen?”

The short answer is that a television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not.

But a more nuanced answer is that even a newspaper like The Times, with layers of editing to ensure accuracy, can go off the rails when communication is poor, individuals do not bear down hard enough, and they make assumptions about what others have done. Five editors read the article at different times, but none subjected it to rigorous fact-checking, even after catching two other errors in it. And three editors combined to cause one of the errors themselves.

Here is the original correction that ran on July 22:

An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite’s career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite’s coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. “The CBS Evening News” overtook “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents’ reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of “The CBS Evening News” in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International.

For her part, Stanley took the blame and apologized for her sloppy reporting:

On June 19, Alessandra Stanley, a prolific writer much admired by editors for the intellectual heft of her coverage of television, wrote a sum-up of the Cronkite career, to be published after his death.

Stanley said she was writing another article on deadline at the same time and hurriedly produced the appraisal, sending it to her editor with the intention of fact-checking it later. She never did.

“This is my fault,” she said. “There are no excuses.”

Reporting and desk work are high-pressure jobs. You can get 99 facts fixed and no one on the planet will notice or thank you. Miss one, and you're sitting through an uncomfortable conversation with your boss the next day. And heaven's knows, I have made some beauties in my day. But readers should expect to see more problems such as these in the future, as newspapers as big as The New York Times and as small as your local Merchandiser trim staffs left and right to cut spending.

With reporters doubling up on stories nightly, and editors and copy editors plowing through 5,000 words or more per shift, we will undoubtedly see more of this in the future.

Geithner: New Taxes Might Be Needed to Revive Economy

The federal government is prepared to do whatever it takes, including raising taxes, in order to revive the economy, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on his Sunday morning news show this morning.

POLITICO reports the conversation in this transcript:

STEPHANOPOULOS: I know you believe that passing health care is central for getting the deficit under control. But independent analysts say even with that you are going to need to find new government revenues. The former deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman said it is no longer a matter of whether tax revenues should increase but how. Is he right?

GEITHNER: George it is absolutely right and very important for everyone to understand we will not get this economy back on track, recovery will not be strong enough to sustain unless we can convince the American people that we’re going to have the will to bring these deficits down once recovery is firmly established. Remember we inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit. The cumulative consequences of the policies this country pursued over the last eight years left us with $6 million of more debt than we would have had by making a bunch of commitments to cut taxes and add to spending without paying for those. We are not going to be able to afford to do that. And it is very important that people understand that. Our first priority now though is to get this economy back on track, make sure this financial system is repaired. Without that, we’re not going to get our deficits under control and the necessary path to fiscal responsibility, the necessary path to getting this country living within our means again is not just health-care reform, to bring down those costs, but we’re going to a range of other things and that’s going to be a very difficult challenge for this country. We can do this, it just requires the will to act.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Including new revenues?

GEITHNER: Well, we're going to have to look at - we're going to have to do what's necessary. Remember the critical thing is people understand that when we have recovery established, led by the private sector, then we have to bring these deficits down very dramatically. We have to bring them down to a level where the amount we're borrowing from the world is stable at a reasonable level. And that's going to require some very hard choices. And we're going to have to do that in a way that does not add unfairly to the burdens that the average American already faces.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But that’s the dilemma, isn’t it?

GEITHNER: That is the dilemma.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Because when you look at health-care reform again – I know you believe it’s going to bend the cost curve over time. But the Congressional Budget Office says, at best, the health-care reform plans out there are going to be deficit-neutral over the next 10 years. So to bring the deficits down, there is not enough money in the discretionary budget, we all know that. That means more revenues. The president has said that taxes won’t go up for any Americans earning under $250,000, but it doesn’t appear that he’s going to be able to keep that promise if you’re going to bring the deficits down.

GEITHNER: George, we can’t make these judgments yet about what exactly it’s going to take and we’re going to get there. But the very important thing, and no one is going to care about this more than the president of the United States, is for people to understand that we do not have a choice as a country, that if we want an economy that is going to grow in the future, people have to understand that we have to bring those deficits down. And it's going to difficult - hard for us to do and the path to that is through health-care reform. But that's necessary but not sufficient. We [are] going to do some other things too.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So revenues are on the table, as well?

GEITHNER: Again, we're not at the point yet where we're going to make a judgment about what it's going to take. But the important thing…

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you're not ruling it out, you can't rule it out.

GEITHNER: I think what the country needs to do is understand we're going to have to do what it takes, we're going to do what's necessary.

Sunday News Highlights for Aug. 2

While I'm enjoying BBQing more than five pounds of steaks for family and friends, you can enjoy highlights of this morning's news shows, compliments of POLITICO.

'Mad Bitch Beer' Video Gets Yanked From WaPo Site

After facing heat from the PC police, most notably the Columbia Journalism Review, Talking Points Memo and MediaMatters, The Washington Post has pulled Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza's latest edition of "Mouthpiece Theater" in which the pair mocked the now-famous "Beer Summit" with thoughts of what brews other political leaders might drink had they been invited.

Most notably, Milbank says, "we won't tell you who's getting a bottle of 'Mad Bitch' beer" as picture of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was flashed on the screen.

Washington Post Communications Director Kris Coratti emailed TPM the following statement.

"The video was a satirical piece that lampooned people of all stripes. There was a section of the video that went too far, so we have removed the piece from our website."

The skit, which is understandably tasteless to some, is an equal-opportunity offender. Both sides get slapped around pretty good. But what was telling was that TPM and MediaMatters seemed to only get worked up about the Clinton reference. While they did indeed mention the barbs thrown at the right, the real anger and protests that lead to the Post pulling the piece surrounded the Clinton reference. For some reason, Sen. David Vitter's drinking a "Happy ending" or the pontiff knocking down an "Angry Monk" didn't seemed to phase anyone one bit. Without a doubt, had Milbank and Cillizza flashed a picture of Sarah Palin instead of Hillary Clinton during the "Mad Bitch Beer" segment, TPM and others on the left would had probably praised the duo for their cutting edge comedy. Mocking someone on the right is generally OK, but please, please, leave the left alone. That's just tasteless.