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Even when he's had other problems in the past -- I mean, you know, I think where people might want to question him is about his stance versus what he personally experienced. I think that's valid.
SMITH: Absolutely.
KURTZ: That's fair game. He actually introduced that into the debate by holding the news conference and talking about, absolutely nothing wrong with the American health care system.
Before we go, I want to give you my two cents on one other issue, and that is the Transportation Security Administration -- you may not know that this week -- in the wake of that Christmas Day plot, subpoenaed two travel bloggers. These are Steve Frischling and Christopher Elliott, because they had obtained a security directive, an internal document.
The TSA agents seized Frischling's computer. He now says the TSA later apologized for heavy-handed tactics. The subpoena was ultimately withdrawn.
This struck me as just bullying of a couple of small players. I question whether the agency would have issued a subpoena so quickly to a "New York Times" reporter, for example, who might have obtained an internal document.
Now, given the magnitude of this disaster and what went on, and all the failures that we now know crystal clear in letting this Nigerian would-be terrorist get on that plane, I would think that the TSA has more important things to worry about than a couple of bloggers.
Terry Smith, Jane Hall, thanks very much for stopping by this morning. We appreciate it.
When we come back, their television show pushed the limits of political satire during a tumultuous time until they were kicked off the air. A look back at why CBS pulled the plug on the Smothers Brothers.
KURTZ: The country may have been in turmoil back in 1969, but television was exceedingly cautious when it came to political dissent. There was no "Daily Show," no "Colbert Report," no cable channels with loud mouth commentators either denouncing or defending the president.
But CBS did have a show called "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour." That, by the standards of the day, pushed up against the boundaries.
KURTZ (voice-over): Tom and Dick Smothers kept running into problems with the CBS censors, which they started poking fun at.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Nothing funny in this. Hey, boys, we're through censoring your show.
KURTZ: Finally, after the third season, the corporate ax felt.
WALTER CRONKITE, "CBS EVENING NEWS": CBS announced that "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" will not return to the CBS television network next season.
KURTZ: Now, 40 years later, we have occasion to look back on that clash and what it said about television, American culture and dissent.
KURTZ: David Bianculli, former TV critic for "The New York Daily News," is just out with a book called "Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of 'The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.'"
He joins us now from Philadelphia.
That program became probably the most controversial show on TV, but the satire seems kind of mild by today's standard.
BIANCULLI: Oh, it really is mild. In retrospect, you wonder why they were upset about it at all.
But looking back on the '60s, that was when you had flying nuns and you had dreamy genies. There was nothing that was serious on TV in prime time. And the Smothers Brothers, in an entertainment variety show, were trying to talk about the war and talk about the presidential policies and sex and drugs and rock and roll. It was just the only place for a young generation to go to get that sort of information.
KURTZ: Right. Vietnam was a particular hot button.
How bad did the censorship get, as you went through the three seasons that did get on the air?
BIANCULLI: It got increasingly tense each season, where Tom Smothers, who was the one who fought most of the battles, would fight more and more and try and slip in more and more stuff. And the CBS censors would throw more and more rules and get more and more angry and intransigent themselves. Both sides were just sort of going at loggerheads. KURTZ: So, from your review, would you say now, in benefit of hindsight, that the CBS television network basically caved to pressure in yanking the show off the air?
BIANCULLI: I don't know if they caved to pressure so much, as they got really firm in saying these are our rules, and you either play by our rules or you're gone. And some of those rules were arbitrary and some of them, you know, Tom and Dick Smothers would not play by. And so they were gone.
They had been renewed for a fourth season. So they weren't canceled. They were fired.
KURTZ: Now, of course they did -- I had forgotten this. They did win $900,000 in a breach of contract suit, but they lost their primetime platform.
Did the press, once CBS made that decision, rally behind the Smothers Brothers? You quoted a "Life" magazine article at the time as saying that this had been one of the few programs on television with an independent and a reverent political point of view.
BIANCULLI: There were critics in lots of places that were for the Smothers Brothers and were supporting their fight. And when the program was actually given away to some stations in syndication to show -- this was a program that was never shown by CBS -- critics were very favorable about that program.
KURTZ: David, let me jump in here. Tom and Dick Smothers asked you to write this book. Why?
BIANCULLI: I think they wanted me to write the book because they had seen what I had written about them already and figured it would be an objective voice. And the great thing was they gave me total access, but total freedom, and that's something a journalist doesn't get very often.
KURTZ: But by doing this at their request, or at least at their instigation, do you feel in some ways you're taking their side in this 40-year-old battle?
BIANCULLI: Well, no. Actually, I think that I was pretty evenhanded and made sure that when I did the interviews, I would talk -- I got to the head CBS censor, I got to former CBS executives.
I'm interested in it as a TV historian. I love what they did in terms of entertainment. And CBS gets some credit for that, for putting it on the air, also. I think what the Smothers asked me to do was to be the right person to write the book, but it wasn't that I was favoring their side.
KURTZ: Right. Got about a half a minute here.
I was a Smothers Brothers fan, both of their albums and their television show. So I have to ask you, four decades later, are they still somewhat bitter about what happened?
BIANCULLI: No. They seem like they had their place and they had their time. Dick never blamed Tom, and Tom now says he sort of was glad that he went through all that, that he thinks the times made him as much as he made the times on that show.
KURTZ: It was an interesting cultural moment.
David Bianculli, thanks very much for a fascinating look back at what was a very hot show, a very controversial show at that time.
BIANCULLI: Thanks so much.
KURTZ: I spoke to him over the holiday break.
Coming up in the second half of RELIABLE SOURCES, carried away. Celebrity deaths and reality show scandals seemed to hypnotize the media in 2009. But after the year of "Balloon Boy," is it time to ground those wild and crazy stories?
Plus, a look back at some of our biggest guests and news-making moments from the past year of RELIABLE SOURCES.
BORGER: I'm Gloria Borger. And this is STATE OF THE UNION. Here are the stories breaking this Sunday morning.
President Obama's top counterterrorism adviser says human error allowed a terror suspect with explosives to board a U.S. airliner Christmas Day. Speaking earlier on this day, John Brennan said government agencies had "bits and pieces" of information on the suspect but failed to connect them together. Brennan says there was no deliberate concealing of information between different government agencies.
And Brennan says the U.S. Embassy in Yemen closed today because of threats by al Qaeda to attacks against U.S. interests in that country. It's still unclear when it will reopen. The British Embassy in Yemen is also closed, but may reopen tomorrow.
Yesterday, President Obama linked the air terror suspect to an al Qaeda affiliate based in Yemen.
Those are the top stories here on STATE OF THE UNION.
And now to Howie Kurtz.
KURTZ: Gloria, before you go, let me get you in on this debate about the Christmas Day terror plot.
John Brennan told you this morning, last hour, the system didn't work. But, of course, Janet Napolitano, on this program just seven days ago, said the system did work. Do you think journalists just kind of rejected Napolitano's spin as being rather ludicrous?
BORGER: Yes. And I think she probably rejected it herself after she said it, the minute after she said it, because it was clear to everyone that the system did not work.
And as you saw today, the first thing practically that John Brennan said to us was, look, the system did not work, the system failed. So, it was one of those cases of spin that she probably wishes she could take back.
KURTZ: Changed the tune within about 24 hours.
All right. Gloria Borger, thanks very much.
KURTZ: As we look back at the press's performance in 2009, there were times when the news business was just swept away by strange and sensational stories. These ranged from the death of world famous celebrities to runaway reality shows to high-profile hoaxes. And they all became Category 5 media storms.
KATIE COURIC, CBS NEWS: Michael Jackson had an extraordinary career and a troubled life marked by incredible highs and terrible lows.
LARRY KING, HOST, "LARRY KING LIVE": The child prodigy who lived through illness, a sex scandal and massive money trouble.
GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, FOX NEWS: He's enormously talented, Bret (ph), but there's also such a freak show associated with him.
SHEPARD SMITH, FOX NEWS: We believe there is a little boy in this balloon, and it's been flying now for about an hour, at least. It was attached in his father's back yard. And now it's going around in circles.
VIEIRA: By the time there were all those rumors swirling about, about Jon with other women, when I sat down with you in May, had he already moved out of the house by that point, Kate?
KATE GOSSELIN, REALITY TV STAR: To be very honest, I don't remember. There's so much going on.
KURTZ: So why do journalists allow themselves to be hijacked by frivolous fair? Our year in review panel last week got so carried away, that we went into overtime.
KURTZ: Joining us now, Jessica Yellin, national political correspondent for CNN; Lauren Ashburn, president of Ashburn Media and a former managing editor of "USA Today"; Bill Press, nationally syndicated radio talk show host; and Chris Stirewalt, political editor and columnist for "The Washington Examiner."
Lauren Ashburn, let's start with Michael Jackson's death. Huge pop star, seriously weird guy. The covers went on for two solid weeks.
ASHBURN: I remember you complaining about that.
KURTZ: I'm still complaining about it.
ASHBURN: But, OK, so it went on for two weeks. Yes, it was overkill, but this was an icon of pop culture. I think that the country, in a way, needed to mourn.
Yes, it went on and on and went on too long. But, you know, we're talking ratings here. The ratings went through the roof for this network.
YELLIN: People were genuinely interested, too. And Michael Jackson was the most Googled term of last year. I mean, this is -- he was fascinating to generations of people. It's not a surprise he would get the coverage he got.
KURTZ: But how was the volume of the coverage by day 10, by day 11?
YELLIN: You know, Howie, if there had been something major happening in the world...
KURTZ: There couldn't have been anything major happening. It was all blacked out.
KURTZ: Bill Press, looking back in media terms, Michael Jackson's death was bigger than Ted Kennedy's passing or -- and certainly Walter Cronkite's.
PRESS: I know. I think the fundamental problem is, which we can never fix, is we have too much time in our hands in the media, particularly cable TV.
PRESS: You've got a lot of hours to fill. And I'm telling you, I've been there with the shows, and something comes along like a train derailment or a scandal. And boy, you just eat it up because that fills wall to wall. And then you get in the copycat thing. And as long as one cable channel is still covering it, all the others will still cover it. So there you go.
ASHBURN: Well, you have the overnights, too.
KURTZ: The overnight ratings, absolutely.
My problem, Chris Stirewalt, just to finish up on this, is that after the first day or two, the child abuse allegations, the sleeping with boys at Neverland, the dangling the baby over the terrace, that all kind of gave way to a lot of gushing praise.
STIREWALT: Well, that's right. There is definitely something macabre about Michael Jackson's life.
It's a -- it worked on two demographic segments. The whole story worked on two demographic segments -- people who were repelled by his life and what he symbolized about a decayed, corrupted society, and, on the other hand, people who -- it was part of their growing up, that they listened to "Thriller" 8,000 times when they were 13 years old and it meant so much to them.
But we failed in this regard -- and I think this is a fair criticism. We failed because we quit talking about the macabre part of his life and we let that drop and made this into hagiography. And it was not appropriate.
YELLIN: It's true. And that's what we seem to do with death in this country. As soon as someone dies, even Ted Kennedy, we have to lionize them. And we don't talk about them as nuanced, complicated people, that Michael Jackson may have been extremely talented and also troubled in this many ways. He has to be just perfection.
STIREWALT: And bygones can be bygones. With a politician, there's greater consequences.
ASHBURN: Death can be a good career move.
(LAUGHTER) PRESS: My first reaction with the Michael Jackson death was to be critical of him as a person for all those reasons. And then I got slammed by my listeners.
PRESS: And I realized that the music was really important to a lot of people.
KURTZ: Sure. Oh, absolutely. And I don't want to denigrate that.
PRESS: And that's what they wanted to hear about.
KURTZ: But let me move on to the creeping influence of the reality show culture. Jon and Kate became this media obsession, and they wound up being interviewed on "The Today Show." In other words, it began as a fun, entertaining thing, and "US Weekly" put it on the cover for six straight weeks, and then it ends up on NBC and every other channel in America.
ASHBURN: OK. Let's talk about Generoso Pope. Let's go back, OK, to the king...
KURTZ: Explain who that is.
ASHBURN: Yes, I will. He's the person who founded "The National Enquirer."
And in the beginning, he started in the '50s with these gory headlines and murders. And then all of a sudden, ding. He decided that people, the personalities, were the thing that were going to sell. And by the '70s, he had six million - - more than six million people were reading that magazine every week. And so, the point is here, it is what sells.
KURTZ: The media went crazy, Jessica, over the Salahis, the White House party crashers. Last week, "The Washington Post" did a million-word reconstruction of the whole event.
Michaele Salahi was, of course, trying to get on Bravo's "Real Housewives of D.C." And again, we see the merging of the two cultures.
YELLIN: It's the bubble inside the bubble. It's just too bizarre and fascinating that these people, in an attempt to gain fame, crashed the fame bubble, and then gained the fame they were seeking, and we're feeding it. It's so much about our culture, that it's almost worth covering.
PRESS: Almost.
PRESS: I was going to say, for me, the Salahis is sort of set aside a little bit, because that was a very serious security breach.
PRESS: I mean, we're talking about the president of the United States.