October 16, 2006

Oh, the Hypocrisy

On Thursday's Grapevine segment, Brit Hume has this to say about a Tennessee television station's post-debate analysis of the Harold Ford vs. Bob Corker Senatorial campaign debate:

Mea Culpa

The news director for Knoxville, Tennessee TV station WBIR is apologizing for not including a supporter of Republican Senate candidate Bob Corker in an analysis of Corker's debate with Democrat Harold Ford Jr. Tuesday night.

Bill Shory says last minute changes beyond his control left the station with a Ford supporter on set — but no one from Corker's camp. He calls it "a failure of planning and judgment" and says the mistakes will be corrected.

But this sort of thing is standard fare for Brit Hume's "Special Report", where round panel discussions (including Fox News' post-debate analyses which are usually assigned to Hume) frequently include right-wing pundits Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes, editors of the conservative opinion journal The Weekly Standard, right-wing opinion columnist Charles Krathammer, Roll-Call editor Mort Kondracke (a so-called "conservative Democrat" with an emphasis on the conservative part) , and a non-partisan member of the mainstream media (often NPR's Mara Liasson), with no representative from a self-professed partisan left-wing publication to counter-balance Kristol, Barnes or Krauthammer's heavily pro-Republican spin.