"Fox News has launched a campaign charging that the mainstream media were opposed to Saddam's hanging," Howard Kurtz said on Sunday's Reliable Sources, referring to commentators like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. An excerpt from the conversation:

KURTZ: Michelle Cottle, what do you make of FOX News pounding this message that 'The New York Times' and others are in mourning over Saddam? COTTLE: I think is what FOX News does. It conflates every issue possible so that they can come up with some sort of liberal media bad spin. I mean, the fact that Saddam Hussein was a butcher and a terrible human being does not have an impact on whether this is a P.R. disaster. I mean, you can look at kind of how the Arab world has responded to this, even beyond Iraq. I mean, in Egypt, in Libya, they have responded by making Saddam into kind of an even more glorious martyr, and they're going to erect statues and stuff like this. There's no question this was handled badly. That has no impact on, you know, whether Saddam was a terrible, horrible human being or not.

Here's the full transcript...

On Sunday's Reliable Sources, NBC News Middle East bureau chief Richard Engel said his network's decision to call Iraq a "civil war" was "very much driven by what the reports are coming from the ground." Later in the show, Howard Kurtz asked:

KURTZ: Richard Engel, top administration officials, as you well know, have repeatedly criticized correspondents like you for painting an unnecessarily negative picture of what's going on in Iraq, staying in the Green Zone, and all of that. Now that this -- even the private doubts and reservations of the White House and the Pentagon are coming out, do you feel vindicated? ENGEL: No. It's been very frustrating all along to be at the receiving end of that criticism with acquisitions like we just spend all of our time in the Green Zone. For the record, neither your reporters, Arwa Damon right now in Baghdad, or almost any of the reporters who cover Iraq do so from the Green Zone, but go out every day either with the U.S. military or driving around the city of Baghdad. And to say that we somehow have been just lazy and picking up bad reports to try to make the American mission in Iraq somehow seem like a failure is inaccurate. It's also, in some degree, dangerous. I mean, I know reporters, colleagues of mine who have received so much criticism over the last three and a half, four years, that they felt they've had something to prove. And so they put themselves in extraordinarily dangerous situations. And I know one reporter who was kidnapped as a result of it. So it's not a sense of vindication, but it is good that people are finally starting to finally see that the situation in Iraq is tremendously difficult, and it is not just reporters who are looking for bad -- bad news stories.

Last week on The Daily Show, "senior legal analyst" Rob Corddry predicted "grave consequences" for the media organizations who shamelessly speculated about the JonBenet Ramsey case.

"Notably, noted ombudsman Howard Kurtz will join two print journalists, an NPR guy, and a well-known blogger for a half-hour of public pseudo self-flaggelation. Dozens of insomniacs will see it, Jon," he said.

Kurtz aired Corddry's remarks at the end of Reliable Sources. His prediction, by the way, wasn't very far off the mark. The first segment of Reliable Sources featured Denver Post TV critic Joanne Ostrow "former reporter for Court TV, CNBC and MSNBC" Diane Dimond, and Baltimore Sun TV critic David Zurawik, who hosts a weekly segment on a Baltimore affiliate of NPR. (The blogger didn't come on until the second-half hour, during a political segment.)

The self-flaggelation was pretty intense. Zurawik said the media is moving away from "the old journalism of verified information." Ostrow said the former divisions between tabloids and network newscasts are falling away "because everyone's chasing the same speculative stuff." And Dimond said the low public opinion of journalists was caused, to some degree, "by over-shouting ourselves on stories like this. It's one thing to report them, but it's another thing to just completely saturate the public with them." Here's the transcript...

Sunday on CNN's Reliable Sources...

KURTZ: Richard Engel in Lebanon, let's talk a little bit about your efforts to cover Hezbollah. Have you had instances in which Hezbollah guerillas have tried to interfere with your reporting? ENGEL: Yes and no; and the reason I'm giving you that answer is that until now Hezbollah has been very difficult to cover. We've come into town several times and only found Hezbollah fighters. They don't want to be on film. They will talk to us off camera, but when the cameras come out they suddenly go quiet. They've not tried to stop us filming other events while we're in the field, but they have, on several occasions, threatened reporters here in Tyre, south Lebanon. From the location where we're standing right now, we've been able to see, today and on other days, outgoing Katyusha rockets. And on more than one occasion people from Hezbollah have come and said, "Do not film the locations of these rockets when they're being launched." At one time, when we were talking and having a conversation with this Hezbollah representative, he said, "Look, we're serious, we will kill you if you film these outgoing rockets." So it is a threat, but when we've been out in the field, we've not had situations where they told us to stop filming.

Later in the program, CNN correspondent Brent Sadler added: "Hezbollah is certainly learning -- and has learned very well -- how to play the media card in getting its message out." Here's the transcript...

Today on Reliable Sources, a Howard Kurtz included this comment about Hardball's recent debate coverage:

"MSNBC should be commended for providing live coverage of that Connecticut Senate debate the other night between Joe Lieberman and Democratic challenger Ned Lamont. But what in the world was the network doing putting up an Internet poll in the middle of the debate, showing that more than two-thirds of those who bothered to comment on its web site thought Lamont was winning? Those supposed surveys are scientifically useless, and this was an absurd distraction."

Sunday's Reliable Sources briefly discussed the media coverage of the Sears Tower terror plot arrests:

KURTZ: Jeralyn Merritt, you know, the attorney general calls a press conference. We get hours and hours of coverage. Are the media kind of rolling over every time the administration wants to hype one of these arrests? MERRITT: You know, I think they are. This was such total hype. As you pointed out, they couldn't even get boots. How were they going to get to Chicago? These people were just bumbling warriors. They had -- who had discontent with the United States. They were infiltrated by an FBI agent. That was the -- or an informant for the FBI. That was the only connection to al Qaeda, was that he pretended to be al Qaeda. And yet, the networks covered it hour after hour, as if there was some actual threat going on.

Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz recently sat down for an interview with CBS Evening News anchor Bob Schieffer, but he couldn't get the CBS Evening News anchor to say much new about Dan Rather's departure. This didn't work:

KURTZ: ...Is it sad to see him end his CBS career like this? SCHIEFFER: Well, I don't know quite how to answer that, Howie...

And this didn't work:

KURTZ: ...Why couldn't some kind of role be found for him after a 44-year career? SCHIEFFER: Well, I don't do the hiring and firing there, so I would leave that question to others, Howie. I really don't know the answer to that.

And this didn't work, either:

KURTZ: ...So do you think that the corporate brass made just a cold calculation that he had become some sort of liability? SCHIEFFER: Well, I don't know the answer to that. These were not decisions that I was a part of. I didn't have any part of it, and I don't know what the final decision was and why it was made...

Schieffer did budge a little bit, saying that "I think all of us wish that it had not ended in quite the way that it did." Here's the transcript...

Sunday on Reliable Sources, Linda Douglass, David Zurawik, Rebecca Dana, and Gail Shister talked about the ABC anchor swap. Zurawik, the Baltimore Sun's TV critic, said:

"...Two things are going on here. One, I think part of the story we're not talking about is the new owners of these -- of the network news. One of the analysts I talked to said this isn't Bill Paley anymore. Like Paley's the good guy all of a sudden, because he doesn't act this way. They said you're no longer an anchor for 20 years when you get to be an anchor. These new companies, if the ratings are tanking the way they were for ABC News, they'll change on a dime. And that newscast was in trouble. Bringing in a co-anchor is not going to fix it the way this could. And also, Howie, as you said earlier, the shadow of Peter Jennings here is so important, and almost everyone at ABC News saw Gibson as the heir apparent. And if you wanted to bring stability to what was clearly a really rocky situation, who better to bring in?

Here's the transcript...

Mike Wallace was "among those who pioneered the use of hidden cameras in investigations," Howard Kurtz noted on Sunday's Reliable Sources. He asked:

KURTZ: Do you think that led to what we see today with "Dateline: NBC" using hidden cameras to catch sexual predators and all these local stations using hidden cameras to find people who park in handicap spaces? WALLACE: I have no doubt that what we started has become a plague. Because - and that's a million years ago but we got caught up in the drama more than we caught up in going after the facts. KURTZ: Why do you say it's a plague? WALLACE: Oh, because it's too much. Self conscious, confrontational, ambushing and news, as you know, has turned into that kind of thing. There's a lot of info-tainment in it and there's a lot of tabloid in it...

On Sunday's Reliable Sources, Howard Kurtz saw Tony Snow's new ride on the "great Washington merry-go-round" as a chance to look at other individuals who have traveled from politics to the press and back again:

KURTZ: Step right up and get your ticket. Here's Tim Russert, who worked for Mario Cuomo and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, now meeting the press for NBC. And here's Chris Matthews, who worked for Jimmy Carter and Tip O'Neill, now playing 'Hardball' for MSNBC. But they've been out of politics for awhile. More recent passengers on the merry-go-round: George Stephanopoulos, from the Clinton White House to ABC's 'This Week.' James Carville and Paula Begala, from Clinton operatives to CNN commentators. Joe Scarborough, a Republican congressman turned MSNBC host. Newt Gingrich, the House speaker turned FOX analyst. Bill Kristol moved from Dan Quayle's staff to FOX News and the editorship of 'The Weekly Standard.' And then there are the folks who ride that carousel so many times it's a wonder they don't fall off. Pat Buchanan worked for CNN's Crossfire, ran for president in '92, went back to Crossfire, ran for president in '96, went back to Crossfire, ran for president in 2000, and this time turned up at MSNBC. David Gergen of 'U.S. News and World Report' has worked for presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton. Mary Matalin went from Bush 41 to CNBC to CNN, Crossfire again, to Dick Cheney's staff. So what do we make of this dizzying ride? Journalists undoubtedly learn something from a stint on the inside, and political insiders learn a thing or two about the media. But when they keep going back and forth, you start to wonder, are they telling us what they really think, or as media analysts, are they spinning us on behalf of their former political colleagues? And just wondering, will FOX welcome back Tony Snow when he leaves the White House podium?