The President vs. the Peacock

"The White House letter also includes gratuitous swipes at Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann -- which may be a hint! Olbermann's ' shut the hell up, Mr. President' comment swept across the internet last week. It was maybe a bit more upsetting to the White House than a 'deceptively edited' interview."

On Cable

Here's Olbermann's own take on the complaint that NBC didn't show the full exchange: "Since they asked, we'll play it. Trust me, it makes him look worse." Olbermann's conclusion: "The White House apparently [doesn't realize] that in full it is clear the president never actually answered Richard Engel's first question and clear that the president either does not know what he talked about or what he is now talking about."

On Fox News's O'Reilly Factor last night, guest host Laura Ingraham and her guest, Karl Rove, applauded Gillespie's attack.

Laura Ingraham: "As you know, there has been a lot of criticism of NBC made by Bill that the news agency has gone far left. And this is just another piece of that evidence. . . .

Rove: "[T]his was either a very sloppy job of editing, or it was an example of bias. Either one of those doesn't speak well of NBC News. I mean, they deliberately edited out the president correcting Engel's depiction of what his speech was about. They deliberately left that on the cutting floor. . . .

"Look, NBC has got a real problem because we're now in a position where we are starting to see the journalistic standards of MSNBC, which are really no standards at all, creep into NBC, which is a respected news organization."

About Engel

TVNewser has NBC's announcement in April that Engel had been promoted to chief political correspondent: "Previously, Engel served as NBC News' Senior Middle East Correspondent and Beirut Bureau Chief since May 2006. Engel, one of the only western journalists to cover the entire war in Iraq, joined NBC News in May 2003.

"Engel reported as a freelance journalist for ABC News during the initial U.S. invasion of Iraq and was NBC News' lead Iraq correspondent from 2003 until his appointment to Beirut Bureau Chief in May 2006. He covered the war between Israel and Hezbollah during the summer of 2006 from Beirut and southern Lebanon. Engel continues to cover the ongoing war in Iraq as well as other assignments throughout the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Europe.

"A celebrated journalist, Engel received the 2008 Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University award and the Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism, the first ever given to a broadcast journalist, for his report ' War Zone Diary.' The one-hour documentary, compiled from Engel's personal video journal, gave a rare and intimate account of the everyday realties of covering the war in Iraq."

In a 2006 profile of Engel in The Washington Post, Howard Kurtz wrote: "Among the small circle of journalists who risk their lives in the region, Engel commands considerable respect. . . .

"'In an era of instant media criticism, he calls balls and strikes in the middle of a war zone,' says NBC anchor Brian Williams. 'He is completely unbothered by any Web site that may have problems with his reporting while he's over in Iraq dodging bullets. . . . He is the most agenda-less person I've met in our business, I think, in the past 20 years.'"

Iran Watch

An Israeli newspaper's report that Bush has plans to attack Iran was slapped down by the White House this morning.