Network news divisions got skittish about calling presidential elections following their colossally terrible performance in 2000. In case you forgot, they all called Florida for Al Gore, then uncalled it, then called it for Bush (following in the trustworthy footsteps of Fox News!), then uncalled the whole election. Their newfound prudence was rewarded in 2004 when leaked exit polls said John Kerry had the whole thing in the bag (oops). But this year the TV guys have their swagger back. Here's a CBS News executive telling the Times why California can suck it:

NBC political correspondent Andrea Mitchell is one of the network's news stars, so it's only natural that we've been seeing a lot of her lately. Even when the topic turns to the government's and the candidates' responses to the current financial crisis. But you will not see her, supposedly, when the discussion turns to "past economic decisions" that led up to the crisis. Because Mitchell is married to Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve Chairman who many say is basically responsible for the housing bubble. And that is their conflict of interest compromise: Mitchell will report as usual until the reasons we got to this point are discussed, at which point she'll quietly disappear from your television without explanation. Unethical! Or, you know, the standard way of doing business in political journalism. DC is an incestuous town and everyone knows and is basically friends with everyone else. The media-political complex has lots and lots of intermarried "journalists" and "operatives" and everyone has politely agreed to assume that everyone else is totally professional about it. So they get a bit tetchy when the Columbia Journalism Review is all "disclose your relationships or just be more independent or something" because what do those kids know? If Tom Brokaw wants to play golf with John McCain that is his business (note: we don't know if John McCain can play golf but the two are still definitely probably friends). The standard argument is that one has to find concrete evidence of "bias" before one can claim these chummy relationships are no good, but honestly the "bias" is so ingrained in the process that it's a useless task and one is best served by appyling a gimlet-eyed suspicion to everyone one sees on the TV and then voting for Ron Paul.

Tom Brokaw was determined last night that he wasn't going to put up with any crap from presidential candidates or their running mates, who had their way with previous debate moderators Jim Lehrer and Gwen Ifill. So every time John McCain or Barack Obama broke one of the debate rules, Brokaw delivered a verbal slap. The NBC News commentator got increasingly frustrated with infractions as the night wore on, but both candidates seemed to be on their best behavior yet, even when Brokaw rather oddly insisted they yield a heated moment to a question from the entire internet.

It was unthinkable that MSNBC could come out of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions without a major, public shakeup of its political news team. The incessant fighting between the cable network's most opinionated anchors — Keith Olbermann, Joe Scarborough and Chris Matthews — marred the chance to retain all those new young viewers Olbermann has attracted over the past year or two. But now that the other shoe has dropped, with the anchor team of Olbermann and Matthews being replaced by comparatively neutral White House correspondent David Gregory, it would be a mistake to think MSNBC has undergone some sort of deep existential crisis that will pull it back from the brink of becoming the Fox News Channel of the left. The network's ratings growth, driven by Olbermann, has been too good and too long coming, and the lefty anchor (according to the Times) is about to re-up his plush contract, which in any case has three of four yeas left on it. And MSNBC will have done plenty if it simply gets its big-name blowhards acting at a high school level of maturity rather than yelling at one another like a bunch of kindergartners. Network executives appear to appreciate this! From the Times:

Now that Hurricane Gustav seems to have safely blown past New Orleans and Baton Rouge, we can turn our attention to ridiculing TV journalists who pointlessly risked life and limb to set up more of those clichéd, wind-whipped hurricane-reporting shots. Even CNN can't resist making fun of those guys, and it employs half of them. The Washington Post said storms tend to produce a "High Chance of Blowhards" and added that "no one covers a house fire by rushing into the burning building, or reports on a war by doing stand-ups in the middle of a tank battle." True, but that's just because there are firemen and soldiers to keep journalists out of those dangerous situations. They'd totally shoot there if they could! Click the video icon to watch some of the most insane moments so far.

"NBC News’ strategy in hiring young Luke Russert is now clear: whenever anything happens, Brian Williams can ask Luke what his dead father thinks about it." [Wonkette]

Or maybe the cable network's program guide editor knows something interesting about how Kathleen Sebelius' husband likes to be addressed. Or how Bill Clinton will be known for the next eight years! Anyway, CNN already has not only the gender but also the NAME of the VP. [CNBC via Huffington Post]

Lewis Lapham's forthcoming Harper's column on Tim Russert is not entirely unexpected, given the cranky literary liberal's public pronouncements on the late host of Meet The Press. But Lapham, sometimes slammed as insufferable bore, has spun a compelling essay out of his rough initial pronouncement that "1,000 people came to [Russert's] memorial service because essentially he was a shill for the government." Maybe Lapham's thorough disassembling is so tasty this time around because the reverence for Russert (not to mention his son Luke) was so completely over the top: two days and three nights of televised memorial, or some 96 hours of airtime, by Lapham's count. Lapham's column is called "Elegy For A Rubber Stamp," entertains the concession that Russert was probably a good father and friend and Catholic, and then swifty moves on to saying Russert had "the on-air persona of an attentive and accommodating headwaiter," that his "stock in trade was the deftly pulled punch" and that Russert was a "pet canary." Further excerpts after the jump.

Moderators: Lehrer and Gwen Ifill of PBS, Tom Brokaw of NBC, Bob Schieffer of CBS. [WSJ]

"I have big shoes to fill." Meet The Press hosting gig still unsettled. [TV Decoder]

It was less than three years ago that Boston College student Luke Russert, in an indiscretion not uncommon among underclassmen, posted to Facebook pictures of himself sitting in a hottub, surrounded by girls in bikinis. He graduated from that same school this past May and, before the end of the following month, some of the most arduous responsibilities of adulthood were already upon him. Russert was to mourn, bury, and finally eulogize his father Tim, moderator of Meet The Press, before the entire country. By most accounts, he rose impressively to the occasion, particularly with his televised memorial speech, which mixed humor, humility and a moving earnestness of purpose in a way that reminded many of his father. Now, if the Post is to be believed, Luke Russert may reach a national audience once more. Thanks to the positive public response to his eulogy, "insiders say NBC is recruiting [Russert] for its team covering the presidential election." Either that or the Post is trying to embarrass NBC by forcing it to say it does not plan to hire Russert — not implausible, given that NBC News has vehemently denied as defamatory pretty much all other gossip the tabloid has tried to extract from the funeral. Video of Russert's memorial speech is after the jump.

Following the death of NBC's Tim Russert, White House correspondent David Gregory was considered to be on the shortlist to succeed him on Meet The Press. Gregory is known for aggressively questioning White House officials and at one point so upset Bush press secretary Tony Snow that Snow accused him of partisanship, a remark for which Snow later apologized. While such assertiveness no doubt provided some cathartic release to critics of the administration, particularly those outraged at the feeble White House press corps, it may not be enough to get Gregory that Meet The Press gig or any other anchor job. In fact, the Observer today paints a rather grim picture of Gregory's immediate future, asking if he's a "lame duck" at the network, destined end up like — gasp — fellow White House troublemaker Sam Donaldson:

NBC on Tuesday settled a $105 million lawsuit brought by a woman whose brother committed suicide amid a raid involving the series To Catch A Predator. The man, an assistant county prosecutor, had engaged in a sex chat with someone posing as a 13-year-old boy on behalf of Predator, and an NBC crew accompanied police as they raided the man's home, where he shot himself. Probably as part of settlement, NBC scrubbed nearly all mention of the case from the Predator website. But the news network left copies of key documents scattered around the internet, including a blog post and an ardent defense of the suicide case.

So the guy who posted early news Tim Russert's death to Wikipedia? He's been fired by the NBC News Web contractor that employed him, because the network had been trying to notify Russert's family before breaking the news. In fact, according to the Times, the network waited roughly an hour before putting word of the Meet The Press host's passing on-air and was "flabbergasted" to see it on Wikipedia. The "junior-level employee" who posted the information did not know the news was being kept quiet. But it's still hard to have any sympathy — he or she worked for a contractor that does newsgathering and publishing on behalf of a broadcast journalism organization. The employee had no business spending time writing for any site that didn't belong to NBC News. [Times]

• Tim Russert's son, Luke, asked Barack Obama and John McCain to sit next to one another at his father's funeral Wednesday. They complied, and listened as he urged them and the rest of the mourners to "engage in spirited debate but disavow the low tactics that distract Americans from the most important issues facing our country." [Times]

The New Yorker profiled MSNBC editorializer Keith Olbermann and the Post, as the designated attack dog of Olbermann enemy News Corp. excerpted only the most damaging bits. But it still left out plenty of juicy scraps of information about the many coworkers the MSNBC Countdown host has insulted and alienated over the years, and about the arguably insulting things even supportive NBC executives said about him. A quick roundup, starting with Olbermann's insults, including the co-host he moved to tears:

Tim Russert's wake is not until Tuesday, but there's already speculation about who will replace the NBC News stalwart as host of Meet The Press. Russert also served as NBC News' DC bureau chief and as a political correspondent on Today, NBC Nightly News and MSNBC, but no one believes a lone replacement will be able to match that hectic schedule. For the Meet The Press gig, the Times came up with the following shortlist, which includes the sure-to-be-controversial option of CBS Evening News host Katie Couric:

Looking for a decent excuse to advance his long-simmering feud with Rupert Murdoch and to do a weird Australian/pirate accent, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann seized upon the words of a former News Corp. insider, who claimed in one of our posts this morning that Murdoch fired Jane Friedman from HarperCollins because she canned powerhouse publisher Judith Regan in late 2006, and also because she squashed Regan's OJ Simpson book project. The source also claimed, tangentially and outlandishly, that Fox News chief Roger Ailes will soon be fired as well for his own role in the Simpson book fiasco. Predictably, this amused Olbermann to no end. For the crime of going to bat for the OJ book, Olbermann named Murdoch today's "worst person in the world," an honor previously bestowed to Fox News screamer Bill O'Reilly. He then did a killer Murdoch imitation that will surely put to rest those allegations that he's totally crazy. Clip after the jump.

Our source was right: Greg Gittrich is leaving the Daily News for NBC. "Insiders at NBC tell Media Ink that he is going to be the news editor of the digital operations of NBC Local Media Group, a new job." [Post]

Like CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, ABC weatherman Sam Champion has been inching out of the closet: he's basically out socially (just ask our commenters!) but remains closeted professionally. Michael Musto wrote in Out one year ago that Champion was in a "glass closet... the press still gives a free pass to people like... Champion and... Cooper, helping to keep their glass doors shut so they can lead gay social lives while carefully skirting the issue." And yet here's Andy Cohen, a senior VP at NBC's Bravo, blogging about Champion, Champion's boyfriend, and their fabulous party in the Hamptons Memorial Day weekend: