News media lost a lot of credibility last week

The nation's mainstream news media has just completed a very bad week that has reduced its credibility beyond its Bush-like standing in the eyes of the American people.

CNN and its vaunted iReport feature uses regular folks to report news. And CNN allowed one of its iReporters to publish a story that Apple genius Steve Jobs suffered a heart attack. Apple stock fell 5.4 percent because of the report.

CNN has acknowledged the mistake but not apologized to viewers for its dysfunctional system. Incredibly, it is still in place.

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The fact that CNN and other major TV media outlets are discending on Nashville for Tuesday's presidential debate is no cause for cheer. It will take weeks for a city already troubled environmentally by bad air to get rid of the stench that the TV media will bring.

PBS will be here. And it employs Gwen Ifill, who shocked me and many Americans with her conflict of interest in writing a book to make money off a victory by Sen. Barack Obama in November. Ifill -- who has not really distinguished herself journalistically in awards or citations -- portrays herself as an objective political analyst. She is not. And she outrageously served as moderator for last week's vice presidential debate.

With the exception of FOXNEWS, other TV media outlets did not analyze the outrage. Some reported it briefly. The New York Times on the print side wrote a story for inside its pages. No media outlet or bigtime columnist called for her to be removed from the debate or recuse herself. And Ifill arrogantly said she would survive any controversy. Incredible pomposity.

Yet this morning, Tom Brokaw had Ifill on NBC's Meet the Press as a supposed objective analyst. All is forgotten among friends first ahead of professional standards and the American people. NBC has shown itself to be the Obama network, particularly on its cable network MSNBC. Keith Olbermann has been especially embarrassing to my profession with his partisanship.

As I wrote before, if Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity had been in the same position, the outrage and coverage from the mainstream media would have been overwhelming.

Yes, the media lost a lot of the little credibility it possesses last week. The biggest losers, however, were the American people. They need a fair and objective press from which to receive the needed information to make good choices to keep America free.

Last week, the American people continued to be held hostage by a partisan news media with just 30 days to go to a presidential election.