A few days ago, PBS New Hour’s Judy Woodruff was interviewing Nancy Pelosi defending the pending payroll tax cut deal, and she wondered if Pelosi was concerned about the resulting loss to the Social Security Trust Fund. Huh?

The impression she gave was that a 2 percent reduction in the payroll tax would mean that funds available for Social Security would be reduced by that amount. Pelosi either missed the point or chose not to correct her. Someone will set her straight, I thought, and no one else will be confused about this.

But on ABC’s This Week, today, Jake Tapper made the same mistake, twice, though ABC’s writeup obscures this.

Another debate between GOP candidates for President, sponsored by ABC News, the Iowa GOP, Yahoo News, WOI-TV and The Des Moines Register,

A week ago, George Will advised Tim Pawlenty that now was the moment for him to make his move. On ABC’s This Week, Pawlenty did so. He got in the “let’s play chicken with the debt limit” car and headed it straight towards the cliff, joining the growing list of Tea-GOP presidential wannabes who should never be given a license to drive.

One can only wonder what an intelligent, worldly woman like Christiane Amanpour must have thought as she interviewed the Rev. Franklin Graham. Whether it was cynicism or cluelessness about Christianity that convinced ABC’s This Week to feature Graham, I cannot say. What I will say is that Franklin Graham came across as one of the phoniest, stupidest “religious” hucksters I’ve ever listened to. Happy Easter to you too, ABC.

This wouldn’t be the first time networks’ relationships with “consultants” has compromised their reporting.

The Kennedys, an eight part miniseries beginning Sunday, April 3, on ReelzChannel, has been fraught with intrigue and dismay since it was announced last year. It was originally scheduled to air on the History Channel, which paid $30 million to make the sex, drugs and scandal-scented series.

ABC’s This Week didn’t even make a pretense of being fair and balanced, let alone honest, in covering the historic labor protests in Wisconsin. The elite don’t want you to know that asking the working class to pay for the elite’s excesses is profoundly wrong.

And it only took us what, 16 years?

I’ve noticed a consistent but baseless distortion being spread by opponents of California’s Proposition 19, which would legalize, regulate and tax cannabis. They complain that Prop 19 is poorly crafted and/or would produce an unenforceable “patchwork” of regulation. The reality is that, compared with most propositions in California’s history, Prop 19 is very sensibly written, with the express purpose of giving state and local governments maximum flexibility to make legal marijuana workable. The fictitious, nightmarish “patchwork” of regulations caused by allowing local governments to craft local ordinances is no different than how local governments handle almost everything in our economy, including alcohol, parking, pizza ovens, farmers markets and building codes.

After watching White House Adviser David Axelrod on ABC’s This Week, one can easily understand the lack of enthusiasm for an aimless Democratic Party that can’t even stand up and fight for what it’s supporters believe because it’s led from the top down by incompetent and corrupt corporatists.