Progressive author and Internet powerhouse Arianna Huffington has appeared on MSNBC more than 30 times over the last 12 months, offering up her combative opinions on current events. The tally probably would have been double that if the stretched-too-thin writer and editor had accepted all the channel's requests that flood her office.

So when Huffington set out late last month to promote her new book, MSNBC seemed like an obvious first stop. In fact, producers had already been in touch, asking about Huffington's availability during her book push. And I hear an informal memo circulated within MSNBC detailing the order in which Huffington would appear on the various MSNBC news programs in coming weeks.

History continues to unfold on many levels as the protracted Democratic Party primary race marches on, featuring the first woman and the first African-American with a real shot at winning the White House.

Here's another first: the press's unique push to get a competitive White House hopeful to drop out of the race. It's unprecedented.

Looking back through modern U.S. campaigns, there's simply no media model for so many members of the press to try to drive a competitive candidate from the field while the primary season is still unfolding.

Until this election cycle, journalists simply did not consider it to be their job to tell a contender when he or she should stop campaigning. That was always dictated by how much money the campaign still had in the bank, how many votes the candidate was still getting, and what very senior members of the candidate's own party were advising.

Poor Michelle Malkin.

When I wrote last year that warbloggers like her would have to find a new Iraq-based media conspiracy to chase in light of how spectacularly their then-beloved controversy surrounding the Associated Press and its allegedly fictitious source, Jamil Hussein, had imploded, I never thought she'd take my advice literally. I was making a rhetorical point.

But lo and behold, she and her press-hating warblogger friends did go chase another media conspiracy out of Iraq. They did target an innocent Iraqi: Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Bilal Hussein. They did lob wild, unsubstantiated allegations against the AP (again). They did reveal their hatred for hard-working journalists trying to cover the extremely dangerous war in Iraq. And they did make collective fools of themselves.

Tongues are still wagging over The New York Times Magazine's cringe-inducing cover story about MSNBC talker Chris Matthews. The cringes came courtesy of the name-dropping Matthews, whose raging insecurities danced across nearly every page of the piece. As Digby noted after reading the opus, "He fulfills every single Village media cliche: obsessive social climbing, deep personal insecurity, primitively sexist and racist and just plain dumb."

Question: Is Chris Matthews the Michael Scott of political talk show hosts? And if so, does that make MSNBC the Dunder Mifflin of cable news?

Matthews has harvested a bumper crop of outrageous remarks during this extended primary season. Specifically, fueled by his obsession with the Clintons (he can't recall attending a single Beltway party where the couple has not been discussed), Matthews has unleashed a flood of sexist commentary.

Jake Tapper followed his nose.

Last week, relying solely on his sense of smell, Tapper basically accused Sen. Barack Obama of being a liar because, seven months ago, Tapper, who claims to be a bloodhound of sorts, got a whiff of smoke on Obama when he ran into the senator for "a second" outside the Senate chamber in the Capitol. When Tapper inquired whether the candidate had smoked any cigarettes after announcing he was going to try to kick the habit, the campaign, after checking with Obama, insisted he had not. The reporter never saw Obama light up, but Tapper "knew what [he'd] smelled."

During the recent commemoration of the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, there was lots of media hand-wringing about how Americans no longer were interested in the war and how Iraq had recently fallen off the country's collective radar. The observations were usually tied to the fact that mainstream media coverage of the war has sharply declined.

Releasing a news study on the topic, the Pew Research Center reported, "As news coverage of the war has diminished, so too has public interest in news about Iraq." A Chattanooga Times Free Press editorial noted how the Pew study had "found a steady falloff in public focus" and suggested "public fatigue" had set in. The Hartford Courant noted "[t]he waning interest" in the war, while the Fort Worth Star-Telegram bemoaned "the public's loss of interest in this war."

How dreadful was the news coverage last week surrounding the official release of Hillary Clinton's public White House schedule from her eight years as first lady? So bad that I found myself in rare (unprecedented?) agreement with at least two prominent conservative bloggers who noticed the same thing I did: The Beltway press corps is, at times, a national embarrassment.

The unusual document dump came after professional Clinton snoops at The New York Times filed a Freedom of Information Act request to see the voluminous paperwork. That was followed by a lawsuit from the right-wing Judicial Watch organization, which owes its fame to the Clinton scandals from the 1990s. As Hillary Clinton noted last week, the highly unusual schedule release from the National Archives likely confirms that she is "the most transparent person in public life." (Former vice presidents Al Gore and Dan Quayle, for instance, never released their old White House schedules while running for president.)

What a strange coincidence that the Bush administration recently submitted the largest funding cut ever proposed for public broadcasting, and next week, PBS' distinguished Frontline series will mark the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion by airing Bush's War, which PBS describes as television's definitive documentary analysis of the war. The program reportedly draws from 40 separate war-related Frontline reports aired over the last five years. I have not previewed the television event, but I doubt that Bush aides, not to mention most Americans, will draw much comfort from what they see.

So, yes, the timing between the Frontline airing and the massive budget cuts is curious, but also accidental, since the Bush administration has been attacking PBS' funding for years, and in 2005 actually helped plot a public -- and bogus -- campaign to rid public broadcasting of its alleged liberal bias. And to be accurate, Bush now proposes to curb the funding set aside for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the government-created umbrella organization that doles out tens of millions of dollars annually for public television and radio programming. Frontline, in fact, does not receive direct CPB funding.

Less than one second. That's how long it took Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to answer, "Of course not," to Steve Kroft's question on 60 Minutes about whether she thought Sen. Barack Obama was a Muslim. You can time it yourself by watching the clip at YouTube.

Still, that didn't stop MSNBC's Chris Matthews from complaining on-air last week that it took Clinton "the longest time" to answer Kroft's question.

Lots of eager, tsk-tsking pundits and reporters agreed. They said Clinton was guilty of "hemming and hawing" in response to Kroft's peculiar, repeated insistence that she make some sort of declarative statement about her opponents religious beliefs. And then when she did, Kroft asked that she do it again. That's when Clinton, looking befuddled by the multiple requests, added some qualifiers to her response, including "as far as I know." What stood out in the exchange was not Clinton's responses, but Kroft's weird persistence in asking a question that Clinton addressed unequivocally the first time, as though he was trying to draw out something she was not saying.

The Associated Press last week got a preview of how this presidential season is going to unfold, and how online liberal activists aren't going to stand down when the press takes cheap shots at Democratic front-runners.

After AP reporter Nedra Pickler wrote a news story highlighting how some fringe Republican operatives were raising questions about Sen. Barack Obama's patriotism, angry readers dispatched nearly 15,000 electronic letters protesting the piece. Why? Because instead of providing balance and context, which is what good journalism does, the article simply offered a platform for Obama's opponents to roll out their smears, to broadcast their dark doubts about the senator's character.

With Sen. Barack Obama now emerging as the Democratic front-runner, clear signs suggest that his press treatment will soon change and that the media will fall back into their routine of viewing -- and critiquing -- leading Democrats through the eyes of Republican spin.

Just last week, we saw how a single line from a Michelle Obama speech was seized upon by conservative partisans, led by Fox News, to suggest she is not patriotic, and how that attack was given a wider airing in the mainstream press. (CNN casually raised questions about Barack Obama's patriotism, as well.) We've also seen the media-manufactured narrative take root that Obama is the leader of a cultish following (more on that below), which dovetails with the creeping media meme that Obama is a phony.

Rush Limbaugh, the marauding Frankenstein's monster of the Republican Party, is on the loose again, causing all kinds of political damage with his signature off-balance swings. But as has become his custom recently, the pain from Limbaugh's rampage is being felt by his creators -- his enablers -- inside the GOP.

Limbaugh and the rest of his get-John McCain brain trust -- Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Michelle Malkin, and campus instigator Ann Coulter -- have been tripping over themselves to get in front of a microphone (preferably a television one) to denounce the Republican Party's presumptive nominee and to suggest that perhaps conservatives should even vote Democratic come November.

Two presidents made headlines last week: The current one, for delivering his final State of the Union Address, and the former one, for making miscues on the campaign trail.

Which was deemed more newsworthy? For the press, the choice was obvious: Bill Clinton garnered an extraordinary amount of press attention -- more so, in fact, than any of the Republican candidates running for president, according to one news survey.

That simply highlights the media's over-the-top obsession with Clinton. What really struck me was the difference in tone from the recent Bush and Clinton coverage. The sitting president was delivering his final State of the Union, capping off his failed presidency, which has provoked deep despair among most Americans about the future of the country. And for that, Bush has been tagged the most consistently unpopular president in modern history.

My guess is that Fox News guru Roger Ailes has been reaching for the Tums more often than usual early in the New Year, and there are lots of reasons for the hovering angst.

Let's take an extended multiple choice quiz. Right now, which of the following topics is likely causing the discomfort inside Ailes' Fox News empire?

A) CNN's resurgence as the go-to cable destination for election coverage.
B) The incredible shrinking candidacy of Fox News' favored son, Rudy Giuliani.
C) The still-standing candidacy of Fox News nemesis and well-funded, anti-war GOP candidate Rep. Ron Paul.

"I get it."
-- Chris Matthews, January 17

When Chris Matthews' long-winded monologue at the opening of the January 17 Hardball program eventually touched down with an apology to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) for the way the cable talker had been treating the candidate on the air, the moment represented an unmistakable victory for the liberal blogosphere.

By not only getting Matthews to apologize, but by also forcing the rest of the press -- post-New Hampshire -- to back off its, at-times, overtly sexist coverage of a prominent Democratic contender, the blogs have already had more impact on how the traditional press covers this presidential campaign than they did during the entire 2004 White House run.

The dismal truth about New Hampshire was this: Never has a Granite State primary received so much media attention and been covered by so many journalists. And never has the press so badly botched a New Hampshire vote.

Recall that one of the apparent turning points in the New Hampshire primary came during the January 5 ABC News-Facebook debate, broadcast by ABC News, when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) launched a passionate soliloquy about her accomplishments and her desire to "make change" after an opponent tagged her as being "status quo." Her forceful response created an immediate buzz in the debate's press room.

Was The New York Times' decision to hire de facto Republican consultant Bill Kristol as a political columnist really such a shock? The more upsetting realization for longtime readers may be that the move actually made sense, since the Times has been broadcasting with increasing frequency -- and long before the head-scratching Kristol hire -- that it doesn't really take political opinion writing seriously. Readers need look no further than recent columns by Maureen Dowd for proof of that.

In fact, just prior to the holidays Dowd manufactured a key allegation in one of her assembly line columns attacking Bill and Hillary Clinton. After reading the fabrication I thought -- yet again -- how odd it was that the Times allows a high-profile columnist such as Dowd to routinely manufacture portions of her column; usually a portion that belittles and demeans a prominent Democrat. Dowd's practice has become so routine I doubt that she or her editors give it a second thought since, as far as I can tell, that's what the Times pays her to do: make stuff up.

"No wonder people think experience is irrelevant. A lot of people covering the race think it is."
-- Bill Clinton, December 4, 2007.

He might be the former president of the United States, but when Bill Clinton dared critique the press for the vacuous way it covers campaigns, he got smacked down by the media elites who unleashed their contempt and, fittingly, misstated what Clinton had said.

Such is the state of affairs where, as Clinton noted, campaign issues have faded so far in the rearview mirror for the press that they've dipped below the horizon. What's worse is not only has the press shifted into hyper-horserace mode where tactics reign, but lots of media players can't even do the horserace stuff right. Bloomberg's Al Hunt displayed that nicely with a recent tactics-only campaign column where he mangled a key fact in order to prop up his favorite narrative.

Attentive readers of Howard Kurtz's washingtonpost.com weekday media column may have noticed that on the fifth and final page of his 3,000-word December 6 post, Kurtz finally addressed the media controversy that erupted when Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald highlighted an egregious error made by Time magazine columnist Joe Klein. Klein had mocked a supposed Democratic legislative maneuver in Congress for being "well beyond stupid" and stressed how Democrats remain soft on the war on terror.

Greenwald's original fact-checking quickly set off an embarrassing chain of events in which Klein at first refused to forthrightly acknowledge his error, confused the issue further with additional updates online, and then threw up his hands and declared, "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right." Meanwhile, as the story unfolded online, a Time magazine editor rudely hung up on a blogger who called to ask about errors in the column. And when Time eventually published a timid, misleading correction, Democratic members of Congress took the unusual step of publicly complaining about the column and demanding a chance to rebut Klein's false and malicious claim that Democrats weren't serous about fighting terrorism; that they wanted to give suspected terrorists the same legal protections as everyday Americans.

Republican bloggers need to grow up and stop their schoolyard whimpering.

The incessant whining last week over the non-story about how some Democrats were allowed to ask Republican candidates legitimate questions during the CNN/YouTube debate was as revealing as it was embarrassing. When did Republican bloggers conclude that their candidates were so brittle and fragile that they had to be protected from unnecessary exposure to everyday citizens?

Last Friday marked something of a milestone for ABC's widely acclaimed news program Nightline when it aired a detailed look at life inside the chaotic emergency room at the 28th Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad. The significance? It was the first time since July 18 that Nightline had broadcast a firsthand news report from Iraq examining the on-the-ground effects of the still-unfolding war there.

In the four-plus months in between, Nightline produced more than 230 separate news segments covering a kaleidoscope of topics, but just one was filmed in Iraq: a Green Zone-based profile of Gen. David Petraeus on the eve of his Capitol Hill testimony. As for the daily or weekly events of the war itself, for 18 straight weeks (or one-third of the calendar year), Nightline effectively walked away from Iraq. What took its place? Lots of Nightline reports on pets and pop music.

Why does Bill O'Reilly despise the American military? Why did he refuse to report -- in prime time -- on the heroic, fallen soldier who gave his life in Iraq and was posthumously awarded the national highest combat award, the Medal of Honor? What is it about O'Reilly's strident ideology that blinded him to the U.S. military's achievements to the point where he simply ignored the White House presentation of the Medal of Honor? And honestly, doesn't that really tell you all you need to know about O'Reilly and the state of right-wing media?

I'm referring here to the Medal of Honor presented in April 2005 to the widow and then-11-year-old son of Army Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith, who died in April 2003 while defending the Baghdad airport from an attack of Iraqi Republican Guard soldiers. Smith was the first Medal of Honor recipient of the Iraq invasion. But according to a search of the Nexis database, Bill O'Reilly snubbed the story on his Fox News program, and John Gibson never uttered a single word about Smith, although a news report about the Medal of Honor ceremony aired on Gibson's Fox News program.

Searching for more proof that celebrity Beltway journalists enjoy warm, friendly relations with Republican presidential hopefuls? Look no further than last week's cozy sit-down between NBC News anchor Brian Williams and GOP front-runner Rudy Giuliani.

According to the running tally posted at MSNBC.com, where video of the full 34-minute interview is hosted, the Q&A has been viewed less than 6,000 times. But it deserves far more attention since it conveniently captures how the media landscape is unfolding for the 2008 campaign, where prominent Democrats are bedeviled by all sorts of probing press inquires while their Republican counterparts skate through the primary season without a media care in the world.

At least reporters covering last week's Democratic debate didn't openly mock Sen. Hillary Clinton during the session by emitting loud groans and hisses in the press room whenever she answered questions for the nationally televised audience.

That's what contemptuous journalists famously did to Vice President Al Gore backstage during a 1999 Democratic debate in New Hampshire. ("The room erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers.") So I suppose it was progress last week that excited reporters and pundits waited until the debate was over before they poured out of the bleachers to announce how badly Clinton had done.

Did you notice the contrasting media responses to comedian Stephen Colbert's announcement that he plans to get his factually-challenged TV namesake on both the Democratic and Republican ballots for the South Carolina presidential primary? The mainstream Beltway press could barely contain its glee as it cheered the stunt on, lavishing all sorts of media attention on Colbert, and basking in the entertainment industry glow that his act brought to the White House campaign trail.

By contrast, it was mostly left to non-traditional online outlets to strike a skeptical chord; to make the grown-up observation that perhaps this wasn't the best idea. Over at the Huffington Post, Rachel Sklar, a major-league Colbert fan (as am I), wrote that the comedian's candidacy comes at the wrong time: