Does the Right Know Jack?

"RISEN: No, I don't. It's not clear to me. That's one of the questions we'll have to look into the future. Were there abuses of this program or not? I don't know the answer to that.

"MITCHELL: You don't have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, Christiane Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?

"RISEN: No, no I hadn't heard that.

"Despite the fact that it's framed as a question, Mitchell inevitably becomes in some sense a fact witness for the underlying claim. She legitimizes the question and strongly suggests she has at least some evidence that it is true.

"Okay, so someone at NBC screwed up. Mistakes happen. But the bell can't be unrung.

"In their response NBC confirms that they not only were but are in fact continuing to investigate whether Amanpour was in fact a target of one of these 'wiretaps'.

"Now, that really puts this into altogether different territory."

Tired of hearing about the MSM? So is Kos :

"I've recently been on a crusade against the term 'mainstream media' or MSM. The fact that it's a right-wing construct doesn't help. But the chief reason is that interactive media is now mainstream. In fact, there are tons of blogs and wikis and email lists that have larger readerships than most of the so-called 'MSM'. If Daily Kos was a newspaper, it would rank #5 in circulation (it would've been #3 last October, in the run-up to the election). The top blogs have more readers than most cable news channel shows have viewers. And while their circulation numbers and ratings fall, our numbers continue to grow.

"So really, why do we continue to self-marginalize by pretending we're not mainstream?

"Furthermore, MSM has become a negative word. While that plays nicely into the Right's efforts to destroy objective journalism ('reality' is their enemy), we just want journalists to do their job better and report without undue influence from the conservative reality distortion machine.

"That's why I call old-school media the 'traditional media'. It's political neutral, it has no negative connotations. It doesn't put old media on a pedestal, as though it was more 'legitimate' than new interactive media. It doesn't imply that we are tiny niches while they speak to the mainstream and the masses.

"It's time to proudly take our place in the mainstream. But to do that, we first need to stop implying that we're not with that stupid 'MSM' moniker."

Okay, how about the BBM -- Big Bad Media?