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Yesterday, ABC News announced that it had reached a tentative contract agreement with the Writers Guild of America East, which represents roughly 250 ABC News employees. The previous contract had expired in January of 2005. The new agreement, which will go before union members for a vote on December 13, would institute a 3.5-percent wage increase.

"In addition to the annual wage increase, the new agreement, which expires Feb. 1, 2010, includes a one-time signing bonus of $3,700 for full-time employees," reports Crain's. "Part-time workers will get a pro-rated bonus."

Reached by phone on Friday morning, Mona Mangan, executive director of the Writers Guild of America East, told Media Mob that the issue had been "festering" at ABC for a long time.

One of the sticking points, she said, was that ABC management had previouisly demanded that a number of producers at ABC Channel 7 be taken out of the writers guild. According to Ms. Mangan, the WGA had filed a complaint on the subject with the National Labor Relations Board. She said the board was prepared to rule in the WGA's favor. Recently, ABC had dropped the demand--which was one of the factors leading to the new agreement.

"The board was prepared to rule in our favor," said Ms. Mangan. "I think that may be catalytic. But I think there might have been other reasons in terms of ABC management wanting a more harmonious workplace."

Does she think that the agreement with ABC News will put added pressure on CBS News to make a more generous offer to its guild members?

"I think it's difficult for them to justify their position when their competition has reached an agreement with the writers guild," said Ms. Mangan. "CBS is offering less than a 2 percent [wage] increase a year for the duration of the contract. That's an outrageous proposal."

The Clinton campaign thinks that the sort of questions Barack Obama faced last night—tough in a way that angered Obama’s sympathizers, but not at all unexpected—were appropriate.

On a conference call now, New Yorker legal writer Jeffrey Toobin just gave Howard Wolfson and Phil Singer the chance to perform some media criticism, asking them if questions about Barack Obama's acquaintances and other "trivia" were a valuable part of the political process.

"In an ideal world," said Wolfson, Clinton would only focus on policy, because she is a "policy wonk." But, he added, "we have learned that campaigns are about more than that."

Wolfson said that the questions were worthwhile because Obama's weak responses in the face of tough questions last night showed that he'd be flawed in a general-election race.

"I do believe," said Wolfson, that the sorts of questions about Obama's relationships with Weathermen members were made so "appropriately, effectively and candidly."

His response, Wolfson said, "does not speak well about the kind of candidate he'd be against John McCain."

Phil Singer then added that with the range of questions asked of candidates in the modern political and media culture, "the full measure of the candidate is taken by the public and it makes you a tougher candidate."

A few minutes later, in a sharp interaction with a reporter over a Bill Ayers questions, Singer pointed out that "Senator Clinton did not raise this question last night. It was raised by the moderators."

It's that time of the year when, all across New York, even more TV anchors, producers, and news crews are getting ready to pack up their bags and head out to the frontlines of the presidential campaigns.

That group includes, ABC's Charlie Gibson, who will soon be heading out to New Hampshire.

On Saturday, January 5, Mr. Gibson will be moderating back-to-back Democratic and Republican presidential debates at the campus of Saint Alselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. Mr. Gibson will be joined in the questioning by WMUR-TV anchor and political director Scott Spradling.

The 90-minute debates will air nationally on ABC beginning with the Republicans at 7:00 p.m, and followed by the Dems at 8:45.

In keeping with the recently announced Facebook-ABC partnership, Facebook users will be invited to participate in so-called "Debate Groups," coinciding with the back-to-back debates.

In a press release announcing the event, ABC News president David Westin said: "Coming on the heels of the Iowa caucuses, these back-to-back primetime events will let voters in New Hampshire and throughout the country see the candidates challenge each other at a moment in the campaign when the stakes couldn't be higher."

The Huffington Post notes that NBC Nightly News had almost a million more viewers last week than the week before, putting it back on top in the ratings--and attributes the bump, plausibly, to anchor Brian Williams' much-hyped November 3 appearance on Saturday Night Live.

The obvious lesson the networks will draw is that the best way to promote their news anchors to a younger audience is by putting them on shows that young people actually watch. In other words, brace for Charlie Gibson on Dancing with the Stars.

Andrew Rice emails his take on (part of) last night’s debate:

Due to unavoidable conflicts--it was my night to cook dinner, and I had to run to the grocery store--I missed the first 40 minutes of the debate last night. I came away thinking that it was actually a very sober, issues-driven affair. Just goes to show 1)you should show up on time and, 2)how little anyone in the press actually cares about, say, the fact that Obama dodged the chance to say he would extend the US’s nuclear deterrent to Israel. Like I said, I didn’t see the “important” part of the debate, but I think your take may be right, Steve—I suspect she turned off a lot of voters. I didn’t think he looked tired in the second half of the debate. Maybe he was just tired of answering all those dumb questions?

That said, by the standards of discourse under which this country apparently now operates, I think “my handwriting wasn’t on the survey” was an Obama stumble, possibly a big one. It was an uncharacteristically weaselly answer that jarred me right off the bat, and now it turns out his handwriting was on the survey...Well, that’s a lie, and people understand lies, and also it’s a lie intended to obscure the fact that he formerly took a pretty extreme position on a wedge issue that he’s now trying to finesse. Anyway, I don’t know what’s going on on the blogs or cable TV today, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see that moment from the debate turning up on television again—maybe in an attack ad in the general.

Yesterday, Long Island University announced the 14 winners of the annual George Polk Awards for excellency in journalism.

Among the winners, ABC News received the award for television reporting for work done by Senior Correspondent Jim Sciutto, producer Angus Hines, and field producer Tom Murphy on a series of reports called "Myanmar Undercover."

From ABC's press release:

The ABC News team was recognized for "Myanmar Undercover," a series of reports on "World News with Charles Gibson" they filed from inside the repressive country - both during the regime's brutal crackdown in the fall and secretly several weeks later. Foreign reporters are now banned in Myanmar, so on their return trip, Sciutto and team posed as tourists and worked undercover. They filmed their reports surreptitiously on digital cameras and cell phones, and evaded police by conducting interviews in moving taxis and filming on the sly. They spoke to monks, dissidents, and released prisoners and what they found was a rare and frightening view of a modern-day police state.

On Thursday evening, near a window in a banquet hall overlooking the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. in Times Square, Andy Rooney sidled up to a makeshift bar and asked for a bourbon.

No bourbon, explained the bartender. Wine?

Mr. Rooney shook his head no, furled his massive white eyebrows, and shuffled off into the crowd. The barkeep, having just witnessed the potential genesis of a future Andy Rooney rant on 60 Minutes (“The problem with cocktails parties today, is that there are no cocktails…) kept a straight face.

A few minutes later, Mr. Rooney stood nearby a plate of cured meats and talked with The New Yorker's Ken Auletta about football. "We're both Giants fans," explained Mr. Auletta. NYTV, who sports a terrycloth Redskins bathrobe at home, looked for conversation elsewhere.

We had gathered on the second floor of Disney's Times Square Studios at 44th and Broadway to celebrate the newly published book "Peter Jennings: A Reporter's Life," which bills itslef as "an intimate portrait of the late, legendary journalist and news anchor, in the words of his family, friends, and collagues." It was edited by Lynn Sherr, a former ABC News correspondent, Kate Darnton, a contributing editor of PublicAffairs, and Kayce Freed Jennings, co-founder of the Documentary Group and the late anchor's wife.

The mood was bittersweet. Photographs of the late newsman flashed on screens across the room. Mr. Jennings delivering the evening news. Mr. Jennings sporting a tuxedo. Mr. Jennings paddling a canoe.

Here and there, ABC talent mixed with members of the Jennings clan. Barbara Walters, looking radiant, stood nearby Christopher Jennings, tall and handsome like his late father. ABC News President David Westin spoke with Peter's sister Sarah. Elsewhere, Charlie Gibson was deep in conversation with Fox News interloper Bill O'Reilly, who once worked for the late Mr. Jennings at ABC.

Eventually, Mr. Westin, dressed in a dark suit, yellow tie and blue dress shirt, stepped to a microphone in one corner of the room.

"It's a terrific book, I'll tell you right now," said Mr. Westin. "Those of us who were fortunate enough to spend time with Peter, knew not only how valuable he was but also, I think, how complicated he was….I think all of us at one point or another probably described him as 'complicated.' I'll be honest, and say, some of the time we said that, it was sort of code for saying, he could be difficult."

Everyone laughed.

"This book, in my view, shows Peter as complicated, in a much truer and fuller way," said Mr. Westin. "Peter had a lot of facets."

Mr. Westin then ceded the spotlight to Peter Osnos, the dapper head of PublicAffairs.

"I think Peter would be pleased by this turnout tonight," said Mr. Osnos. "Peter's legacy remains very strong. Whenever you think about what is good and what can be good about broadcast news, Peter is right up there."

Ms. Jennings, dressed in a dark sports coat over a black knee-length skirt, stepped to the fore. She thanked her colleagues, ABC News, and PublicAffairs.

"Finally, I have to thank Peter," said Ms. Jennings. "What a life he had. For those of us who have to move on…even for a while, how lucky we were."

Her voice cracked slightly. She paused. "Peter is getting restless now," she said. "He'd want me to shut up and for you all to have another glass of wine."

She walked off into the crowd, where she was greeted by well wishers. Mr. Rooney leaned in and said congratulations.

"Very nice," said Mr. Rooney. "Not perfect. But very nice."

Last night, Time and ABC News political analyst Mark Halperin was talking to an audience at the at Barnes & Noble on West 82nd Street about his new book, The Undecided Voter's Guide to the Next President.

He said that his new book is geared toward people who "aren't particularly political," focusing less on the campaigns themselves than on "who can do the best job."

"I tried to say, with the information we have about the candidates, who would be the best," he told the audience of about 60 people. "I did what I thought a conscientious voter should do."

Unfortunately for Mr. Halperin, the audience did indeed seem like "political people," most of them retirees who admitted to having lots and lots of time to absorb political coverage. And most of the crowd seemed to be decided indeed, in favor of Hillary Clinton.

During a question-and-answer session, one woman who appeared to be in her late 60's shook her head and wagged her finger as she spoke on the topic of Hillary Clinton as a modern-day Eleanor Roosevelt. A petite, grey haired woman seated behind her turned to her neighbor and said, rather audibly, "she does this every time!"

Mr. Halperin's research as a "conscientious voter" did not lead him to very different conclusions from those of his C-Span addicted crowd: Hillary is the woman for the job.

"I think that today, this is not a prediction, it's not an endorsement, it's not saying that the other Democrats couldn't win," he said. "I think today she'll be the nominee, and she is the strongest candidate because she knows the way to win. She has taken what she has learned about how her husband has won two elections and how George Bush won two elections, and she's taken a la carte the best of what they have, of what they have to do."

He did cite her refusal to apologize for her initial endorsement of the Iraq War, which has angered lots of antiwar Democrats but which Mr. Halperin ticked off in her plus column.

"She is trying to do not just what she thinks is right and not just what will make her electable in a general election but to be able to govern as president," he said, "and I think it's one of the more admirable things about how she's conducted herself as a senator and as a presidential candidate."

Anyone who claims they know who the Republican nominee will be should be "committed," he said, but he gave Rudolph Giuliani a 35 percent chance of winning his party's vote.

"It's about three things, and he's successfully kept the press and the public focused on them: fighting terrorism, beating Hillary Clinton, and being the most electable person in a general election."

But in a general election, responding to pressure from the audience, he gave Mitt Romney the nod.

"I don't know who the strongest republican would be, it's related to the fact that I don't know who the nominee is going to be," he cautioned helpfully. "I think whoever the parties nominate…you're gonna see most of the red states stay red and most of the blue states stay blue."

The Upper West Side is also a sort-of Bloombergville, and Mr. Halperin was not above throwing out a bit of chum on the topic of a hypothetical Michael Bloomberg independent run.

"If the nominees are unpopular, if the country seems open to an independent candidate, and if the country seems open to, as he himself describes himself, 'a short, Jewish, divorced billionaire,' if all those conditions are met and he runs, I think he'd have a chance to win."

Hmm. He'd have a chance to win--if he had a chance to win!

Actually, Mr. Halperin was more restrictive than that. The only combination of major-party rivals that would suit a Bloomberg candidacy, he said, were Clinton v. Giuliani or Edwards v. Romney.

Mr. Halperin had four words to distinguish Mr. Bloomberg from the last serious independent candidate, Ross Perot: "more money, less crazy."

Last December, ABC News President David Westin threw a champagne cocktail party at the division’s executive offices, to celebrate the work of his star investigative reporter, Brian Ross.

Mr. Westin had good reason to toast Mr. Ross. Over the past few years, the network’s chief investigative correspondent has produced widely praised reports on topics ranging from secret C.I.A. prisons, campaign-finance reform, and Congressman Mark Foley’s lewd instant messaging. In the process, he has established himself as one of the preeminent enterprise journalists in TV news.

But in interviews with NYTV, several of Mr. Ross’ former competitors painted a picture of a reporter who, while capable of breaking big stories, also has a tendency to overplay smaller ones.

Jim Stewart, who recently retired as CBS News’ longtime Washington-based correspondent, expressed reservations about some of Mr. Ross’ work, in particular questioning the accuracy of some of Mr. Ross’ stories on the ABC investigative team’s Web site, The Blotter.

“Were they wrong some of the time? Yes,” said Mr. Stewart “I’d rather be right than be first.” (Mr. Stewart did not identify specific stories by Mr. Ross that failed to hold up.)

Mr. Ross has racked up myriad investigative awards during his career, including a George Polk Award for his 2005 work on the C.I.A. prisons and a shared 2007 Emmy for the Foley story. And in an interview Tuesday, he defended his record to NYTV. Mr. Ross noted that everything that appeared on The Blotter or on air was carefully vetted ahead of time by a team of ABC lawyers and standards czars. “Because of them, I sleep well at night,” he said. “Nothing is ever put out until they are satisfied with it.”

Mr. Stewart, for his part, added that he held Mr. Ross in high regard as a competitor, and said that over the years, Mr. Ross had beaten him on numerous stories. He attributed the problem in part to cable news and the rise of the Internet, which he said had ratcheted up pressure on investigative reporters to pull the trigger faster. “Brian pulls the trigger faster than most,” he said.

A former ABC News staffer, who is not currently a competitor of Mr. Ross’, told NYTV that there was pressure from ABC News execs to create page hits for The Blotter. “The pressure for Blotter reporting is intense,” said the former staffer, “to the point that Brian or his senior producer will sometimes keep information off the D.L.—internal e-mail distribution lists—so that it can be reported first on the Blotter.” Doing so, the source suggested, allowed Mr. Ross to plant his flag on certain stories before internal competitors could raise questions.

Mr. Ross acknowledged to NYTV that he was wary of putting his team’s investigative stories on internal ABC distribution lists—some of which go out to hundreds of people. But he said it wasn’t because of territoriality, but rather because of the sensitive nature of investigative reporting.

“When you put it on there, you’re essentially publishing it,” he said. “I really do stress that the investigative unit should not be putting out material in drips and drabs. When we have it, we have it. I’m different that way. … There are people who will write on there things like, ‘So and so has told me this, but it’s off the record.’ I can’t write that and have it go to 300 people.”

Still, a former producer at a competing show described Mr. Ross to NYTV as a good investigative reporter whose “exclusives” occasionally seemed to fall flat—often by the end of the segment.

“We were extremely careful whenever we saw a Brian Ross piece,” said the former producer. “He does some great work. But there were a lot of times that the pieces yelled one thing and seemed to suggest a crisis, and then he would dial it back almost entirely at the end of the piece by saying something like, ‘It’s important to know that the F.B.I. doesn’t take this threat seriously. And there’s no reason for concern.’” The former producer pointed to stories by Mr. Ross on the anthrax attacks and on Dennis Hastert’s role in the Jack Abramoff scandal, both of which received prominent play by ABC, but subsequently failed to ignite.

Similar concerns were aired in Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz’s book, Reality Show: Inside the Last Great Television News War, published in October. A number of passages described Mr. Ross’ competitors trying to follow up on his scoops, failing to do so, and accusing him of overreaching. In one example, Mr. Kurtz described a report by Mr. Ross, which appeared during the 2006 N.C.A.A. basketball tournament, that suicide bombers might be planning an imminent attack on a U.S. sports arena. At the end of the segment, Mr. Ross noted that federal officials “do not believe any imminent threat exists.” Afterward, Mr. Kurtz wrote, a team of CBS reporters were asked to follow up on the tip, and found nothing worth reporting. Ditto at NBC, where NBC Nightly News host Brian Williams, in Mr. Kurtz’s words, “saw it as a classic scare ’em piece of the kind that Brian Ross was doing too often.”

Speaking to NYTV, Mr. Ross defended himself on this charge too. “Maybe if Brian Williams knew all that I knew, and I was able to explain it to him like I’m able to explain it to Charlie Gibson, maybe he’d make a different decision,” he said.

“[Mr. Williams] didn’t think that the Foley story was worth leading with when we broke that,” Mr. Ross continued. “Everyone has different judgments. I don’t think we all have to be the same.

“I’ve seen investigative units come and go at various operations, and the ones that don’t work are the ones that spend two years and a million dollars on some project that falls apart, that doesn’t work,” Mr. Ross added. “And the ones that get it wrong, that doesn’t work. We’re trying to be productive—and productive in an area, online, that’s important for the future of our company.”

ABC News devoted the first 30 minutes or so of the roughly two-hour Democratic debate on April 17 to trivial and petty gotcha questions, which pretty much set the tone for the evening.

“Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?” George Stephanopoulos actually asked Barack Obama—twice.

Obama was also quizzed, via one of two video questions from voters that ABC saw fit to include, about his seeming reluctance to wear an American flag lapel pin. Of course, the kindly woman asking the question prefaced it by insisting that she wasn’t questioning Obama’s patriotism, even though her questions served no other possible purpose.

“I revere the American flag,” Obama assured the woman, thereby staking out the same position that every single person who has ever sought the presidency has had.

A moderator question allowed Hillary Clinton to talk about William Ayers, a violent Vietnam-era radical-turned-college professor who now serves on the board of the same Chicago-based philanthropic trust that Obama does.

In theory, this all should have made for the half-hour from hell for Obama, the convergence—on national television in prime time—of the various flare-ups that form the basis of his enemies’ efforts to portray him as a vaguely un- or anti-American character. Instead, though, it probably strengthened his already firm grip on the Democratic nomination.

For one thing, he will probably win sympathy from those who believe that the deck was stacked against him in the first segment of the debate. How many Democratic activists recoiled at ABC’s decision to utilize a line of questioning—epitomized by the “Who loves America more?” question—that Democrats ordinarily have to appear on the Fox News Channel to face?

It’s not that Obama was particularly smooth or nimble in his responses—he wasn’t and, on the whole, his performance seemed shakier tonight than in the most recent debates—but he did succeed, several times, at calmly making note of the absurdly petty level at which the debate was being conducted.

“You take one person’s statement if it’s not properly phrased,” he said after Clinton took ABC’s bait and hit him over the head with his much-discussed “bitter” comment from last week, “and you just beat it to death, and that’s what Senator Clinton has been doing for the past four days.”

And when Clinton brought up Ayers, Obama coolly dismissed her attack as “the kind of manufactured issue that our politics has become obsessed with.”

“This kind of game in which anybody that I know, regardless of how flimsy the relationship is, that somehow their ideas could be attributed to me—I think the American people are smarter than that,” he said.

When the Wright issue was introduced, Clinton tried to stick the knife into Obama without it looking like she was doing so, reminding viewers of some of the most inflammatory rhetoric associated with the minister but also saying that she had only spoken out on the subject because she’d been asked “a direct question” about it.

Later, when she raised Ayers’ name, she did so under the pretense that she was merely previewing what Republicans will say about Obama in the fall—part of her campaign’s strategy of convincing Democrats that only those with the surname Clinton are capable of defeating Republicans in elections.

Obama was able to throw this back at her by saying that “by Senator Clinton’s own vetting standard, I don’t think she would make it.” He was referring to pardons that Bill Clinton issued to members of the same Weather Underground movement to which Ayers belonged.

Like much else she says and does, Clinton’s attack tonight will work with a certain audience: Those who are, have been and always will be devoted to her. This is not an insignificant group. But just as many people have a very different opinion of her—like the 6 in 10 voters who don’t believe she’s honest, something she was asked about at the debate. As Clinton piled on with one cheap shot after another, her reputation with this latter group was only reinforced. Basically, she probably didn’t lose any supporters with her debate performance. But she didn’t gain any new ones either.

“What I think I’ve displayed during the course of this primary is that I can take a punch,” Obama said at one point. “I’ve taken some pretty good ones from Senator Clinton.”

What he didn’t say was that while Hillary Clinton throws all these punches at Obama, she’s hurting herself just as much as she hurts him.

Sort of like the idle Colin Powell rumors that swirled before the 1996 and 2000 Republican conventions, we’ve been forced this campaign cycle to endure months of sporadic chatter about Condoleezza Rice’s supposed candidacy for the number two spot on the G.O.P. ticket.

Except that the speculation may have just taken a twist that the Powell talk never did: There’s suddenly reason to believe there might be something to it.

The twist was provided by, of all people, Dan Senor, a Republican talking head who was once the spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. During the weekly political roundtable on ABC’s This Week, Senor announced that Rice is “actively, actually, campaigning for this” and that she presented herself 10 days ago to the meeting of conservative heavyweights convened by Grover Norquist every Wednesday—“and she wasn’t there to talk about the NATO meeting in Bucharest.”

Until this point, it’s been easy to dismiss the Rice speculation as the product of a celebrity-driven press corps. Publicly, she’s adamantly maintained both a desire to leave Washington and government at the end of the Bush administration and an utter disinterest in running for public office. But Senor is right: Wednesday Group ring-kissing thoroughly undercuts that posture.

If she really does want the VP slot, John McCain would be well-advised to give Rice a long, hard look. Just like McCain, logic says that any national political aspirations that Rice may harbor should be DOA, thanks to the disastrously unpopular war for which she is in no small part responsible. But, again like McCain, there is reason to believe that Rice’s personal appeal remains strong, even to independent voters who long ago turned on the war.

Public opinion polling on cabinet members is spotty, but two polls released last year gave Rice approval ratings near 60 percent, about twice her disapproval rating. These numbers are the exact opposite of her boss’s—even though her fingerprints are all over the foreign policy that, more than anything, has dragged George W. Bush’s popularity into the gutter. Another survey released last year found that about twice as many people have a favorable personal opinion of Rice compared to those who don’t.

This data confirms what has been clear for a while: Rice is one of a very few high-profile figures whose standing with the public hasn’t measurably eroded through a close association with the Bush White House. And it reinforces what, through McCain’s resurgence, we have learned (yet again) about mass opinion: If voters like and respect a politician at a personal level, that bond—more often than not—will override whatever policy differences they may have with that politician.

McCain is a case study. His reputation was made eight years ago, when he happily claimed the maverick mantle and went to war with George W. Bush and the Republican establishment. It made him a hero to independent voters—finally, a politician who’s not afraid to call BS even on his own party—and a villain to conservatives. In truth, what both groups of voters were really responding to was a caricature. But the electorate rarely sees gray.

The degree to which that image remained intact became clear earlier this cycle, when McCain defined his campaign by his commitment to the Iraq war. He has ridiculed those who call for a withdrawal of troops, adamantly maintained that the preemptive invasion was warranted, loudly blocked every legislative attempt in the Senate to scale back the war and even suggested that a similar war with Iran might be in the cards if he’s elected president.

Logically, this record should infuriate the independent voters who adore Maverick McCain. It should also make him a hero to the right. And yet: The old caricature has prevailed. McCain only won his key early primary state victories thanks to support from antiwar independents and Republicans, while Republican voters who most favored the war lined up with Mitt Romney.

And that goes a long way toward explaining why the personally popular and respected Rice would be a considerable asset to a McCain-led ticket—even though it makes no logical sense.

On This Week, The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel scoffed at the mention of Rice as a VP prospect, dubbing her “the worst national security adviser in modern history.”

Vanden Heuvel and other highly engaged liberal partisans know Rice as the national security adviser who ignored considerable evidence to the contrary and assured Americans in 2002 and 2003 that Saddam Hussein possessed a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, and that the smoking gun proof of this might take the form of “a mushroom cloud” over the United States.

But at the moment, this is not what most Americans think of when they think of Rice, even as they’re telling pollsters that they don’t think the war was a good idea and that they don’t like the work the Bush administration has done. It’s the same with McCain: The same surveys that show voters declaring the war a mistake by a two-to-one margin also show McCain significantly outpolling both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama when it comes to the war and foreign policy.

If McCain were to pick Rice, he’d be sealing his intimate attachment to the war for the rest of the campaign. This should be political suicide. But because voters think so highly of him and of Rice, they might see something completely different—and appealing.

Looks like it may not just be ABC News with egg on its face over the Alexis Debat story.

Earlier this week, a French magazine revealed that Mr. Debat’s recent interview with Barack Obama, that appeared in the respected French political journal Politique Internationale, was fabricated. Then today, ABC News’ Brian Ross reported that Mr. Debat—who from 2002 until this June was employed by Ross' news organization as a consultant on terrorism issues—had also published fake interviews in Politique Internationale with Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Alan Greenspan, and Kofi Annan.

But Media Mob has found that over the past several years, Mr. Debat has been quoted as a terrorism expert by a range of major media outlets, including Time, U.S. News and World Report, National Journal, the Associated Press, The Boston Herald, Newsday, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, and The Christian Science Monitor, among others. Along the way, he has also penned opinion pieces for The Financial Times and The International Herald Tribune, and made guest appearances on PBS’s The News Hour with Jim Lehrer—most recently, in June 2006, opposite The New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright, author of the Pulitzer-prize winning study of al Qaeda and 9/11, The Looming Tower.

As for ABC, Debat’s one-time employer, they haven’t yet explained how they got bamboozled into working with Debat for so long. But we’re guessing people are gonna be asking…

Larry Silverstein was on Nightline last night. The ABC News program depicted the World Trade Center developer as a striding, fast-talking, somewhat stubborn visionary "right out of central casting" who was "always, always selling." A pop-up video of the segment can be seen here.  

It can often to seem to rank-and-file Democrats as if the Republicans are still in charge of Congress: Nearly a year after their party picked up 31 House and six Senate seats, the war in Iraq still rages, with tens of thousands of more troops deployed now than then. This failure to force even a beginning to the end of the war accounts for the painfully poor poll standing of the Democratic-led Congress, with the party faithful even more restless and frustrated than independent voters.

But an appearance by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday hinted at one way Democratic leaders might find redemption with their base: By stopping the next war before it starts.

Asked by host George Stephanopoulos whether she agrees with a recent Senate decree that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, a branch of the Iranian military, is a terrorist organization, Mrs. Pelosi replied that, “Whatever Iran’s impact is on our troops in Iraq should be dealt with in Iraq.”

Asked by Mr. Stephanopoulos to elaborate, she said: “It means deal with them militarily in the country that you’re engaged in. There’s never been a declaration by a Congress before in our history, before the Senate acted, that declared a piece of a country’s army to be a terrorist organization.”

Her answer was significant because many of the same forces that drummed up support for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 have now turned their attention to Iran. They swear their endgame is not another war, but they speak of the Iranian “threat” in the same tone in which they once warned about Iraq.

If the U.S. doesn’t soon confront Iran, Joe Lieberman said recently, “they'll take that as a sign of weakness on our part and we will pay for it in Iraq and throughout the region and ultimately right here at home.”

Mr. Lieberman is one of the co-authors of the Senate amendment Mrs. Pelosi was asked about. The Kyl-Lieberman amendment, a non-binding statement of “the sense of the Senate,” urges President Bush to designate the IRG a terrorist organization. It passed on a 76-22 vote, with support from numerous Democrats including Hillary Clinton.

Even though it is non-binding, the measure’s opponents have voiced concern that it will be used by Iran hawks either to gin up fear of Iran among the general public or, worse, by the Bush administration to justify a unilateral attack on Iran without further Congressional approval. On “This Week,” Mrs. Pelosi vowed not to pursue in the House any legislation similar to similar to Kyl-Lieberman.

“It could be brought up (by someone else), but I’m not bringing it up,” she said. “It’s a Sense of the House. What is the point? This has never happened before, that a Congress should determine that one piece of somebody’s military is that. And if it is a threat to our troops in Iraq, and [Iran is] in Iraq, we should deal with them in Iraq.”

Asked about comments by Barack Obama—who was absent from the Senate when Kyl-Lieberman was voted on but who is now taking Mrs. Clinton to task for her vote—that the measure was “reckless” and opens the door to military action, Mrs. Pelosi stressed that Congress will be heard before any new wars are launched.

The amendment itself gives Mr. Bush no authority, she said, “because it’s a non-binding, in-one-house resolution. Creating an atmosphere of suspicion against Iran? Perhaps it could contribute to that. But of itself, it has no authority.”

“We don’t believe that any authorities that the President has would give him the ability to go in without an act of Congress,” she said. “Any President, if our country is attacked has very strong powers to go after that country. But short of that, he must go to the Congress.”

Mrs. Pelosi and her House Democrats have not been willing to try to cut off funds to end the war, and virtually all their attempts to affect the situation in Iraq by other methods has been thwarted by the White House and by its loyal Republican supporters in the House and Senate. But as maddening as this has been to anti-war Democratic voters, they’d be wise to consider how the Iran debate might now be playing out if the Republicans still led the House.

“They fought back hard,” said Brian Ross.

It was Friday afternoon, and Mr. Ross, the chief investigative correspondent for ABC News, was on the phone with The Observer. He was discussing NBC’s preemptive response to his latest story—set to air that night on ABC’s 20/20—which would raise troubling questions about Dateline NBC’s hit show, To Catch a Predator.

The buzzy Predator, in which Dateline investigators, working with law enforcement officials, conduct sting operations designed to expose and arrest potential child molesters, has turned into a surprise hit among NBC’s struggling prime-time lineup. Now Ross was readying an investigative report that aimed to shine a spotlight on Dateline’s sometimes questionable methods.

For weeks, said Mr. Ross, NBC producers and executives had declined to comment for his piece. Then, last Wednesday, NBC News president Steve Capus had publicly questioned Mr. Ross’ motives in an interview with USA Today. “I chalk this up to the usual network silly competitiveness, in a territory that deserves much more of a serious handling,” Mr. Capus told the paper. “The competitive wars right now are at a very high level. That’s fueling this.”

To NYTV, Mr. Ross batted down Capus’s implication. “Implicit in that was that we’re all in a club and we shouldn’t criticize or report on each other,” said Mr. Ross. “I don’t think that’s the way you should operate. It’s like the blue wall of silence with cops.”

Mr. Ross had never watched an episode of To Catch a Predator until this summer. But he grew interested in the story when a group of fellow reporters alerted him to the tragedy surrounding a sting operation that the show, coordinating with local police, had carried out in Murphy, Texas, outside of Dallas. During filming, one of the operation’s targets had committed suicide rather than face exposure on national television. To make matters worse, the local prosecutor eventually dropped all charges against all 23 would-be pedophiles caught on camera, citing flaws in the joint NBC/police investigation.

Mr. Ross was intrigued. “People said, ‘You’ll never go after NBC.’ I said, ‘Well, we’re not going to go after NBC. But we are going to take a look at this.’”

The show, which aired Friday night, used outtake footage, never aired by NBC, to detail the intimate working relationship that Dateline forged with the local police chief’s office, and the extent to which the show’s production requirements influenced police procedures—ultimately leading to the collapse of the D.A.’s case.

Mr. Ross said he was surprised by NBC’s defensiveness, contrasting the experience with his critical reporting on CBS, during the Dan Rather “Memogate” controversy of 2004.

“I remember talking to [CBS president] Les Moonves and he said, ‘You really opened our eyes,’” said Mr. Ross. “I thought that was commendable. CBS was straightforward. They answered our questions. They dealt with us. That was not the reaction we got at NBC from Capus.”

MEMO TO CNBC EMPLOYEES THINKING about jumping ship to the Fox Business Network, set to kick off October 15: Get your Kevins straight!

That advice comes a little too late for Eric Bolling. In June, Mr. Bolling, a high-rolling commodities trader-turned-charismatic CNBC talking head, informed his cable news bosses that he was quitting as a commentator on the market-analysis show Fast Money. Next Page >