A veritable feast of giant yams, lead paint chips, and salt-and-pepper eyebrows

MediaBistro has the snippy snappish gossip about the ego-butting going on (allegedly) at NBC/MSNBC between a guy whose head looks like a giant yam, a guy who obviously feasted on lead paint chips as a kid, and a guy who looks like Eugene Levy doing Earl Camembert and Floyd the Barber on SCTV. I barely got past the headline.

"Russert Has Spent 20 Years Building Credibility. All Of A Sudden He's Taking Questions From [A] Daily Kos Blogger?"

Building credibility with whom, I wondered. Russert hasn’t spent two decades building credibility with me. To me, Russert has spent 20 years insinuating himself into the pundit power structure. That's not "credibility" that's reliability: Russert reliably will do what the pundit power structure needs to have done.

And they all yodel together

Over at The Daily Howler, Somerby critiques how exquisitely the on-air pundits play dumb.

Life would be better without cable “news” channels, we couldn’t help thinking last night. The problem is the same old problem—the problem of pundit gang-comment. Routinely, our pundits All Say The Same Things, thereby giving the (false) impression that their Approved Group Views are cast in stone. Through their gang-punditry, they construct your world—and viewers quite often don’t know it.

In particular, we were struck by the way the pundit corps gang-reacted to Clinton’s lack of a concession. It isn’t as if this was a surprise…. In short, all [the] pundits knew, when they went on the air, that Clinton wouldn’t be “conceding.”

Somerby also points out that, institutional amnesia be damned, such non-concessions are hardly unprecedented in American presidential politics and, for the edification of the nation’s pundits, produces a list (suitable for laminating) of some big political names who delayed their concessions or who never quite got around to conceding.

Anybody have the fax number for MSNBC?