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WaPo TV critic Tom Shales has come up with a creative new defense of Roman Polanski: Hollywood thirteen-year olds aren't really thirteen. NB reader FT pointed us to an online exchange between a reader and Shales today that included this: Tom Shales: Hello, Dunn Loring, I didn't want to sign off without trying to answer your question. I didn't realize I had written a column defending Roman Polanski and minimized his crime - are you sure it was me? I mean, I? There is, apparently, more to this crime than it would seem, and it may sound like a hollow...

"I'm a Dan Man myself, so I tend to look at this from his viewpoints [sic]." -- WaPo media critic Tom Shales, on today's "Morning Joe." It's a morning for candor on "Morning Joe." Earlier, Mika "Bubbles" Brzezinski had admitted that "the SATs were not my strong suit." Later in the show, the notoriously tough-on-conservatives [see, e.g., MRC item #3 here] Tom Shales acknowledged that he has a soft spot for Dan Rather, calling himself a "Dan Man." I'll say. Despite the overwhelming mountain of uncontroverted and incontrovertible evidence, Shales, loyal to Rather to the end, refuses to admit...

by Mark Finkelstein June 20, 2006 CBS radio news just ran an item on the departure of Dan Rather. There was a surprising bit of candor in which CBS reported that Rather had "expressed frustration, feeling he'd been shelved by the network." There was also a bit of - presumably - unintentional humor. We were treated to a clip of the Washington Post's [very liberal] media critic Tom Shales informing us that Rather "was a very activist anchor, and he changed the role of anchor." I'll say! So activist that when he didn't have the makings of a story with...

What used to be called "irreverent" is now called "edgy" -- and called it, and called it, and called it -- and "Arrested Development" finally pushed edginess over the edge . . . "The Book of Daniel" emulates "Development's" collection of zany, wacky family members, and the unintentional moral is that they ought to be arrested. *** I cannot recall a series in which a greater number of characters seemed so desperately detestable -- a series with a larger population of loathsome dolts. There ought to be a worse punishment than cancellation for a show that tries this hard to...

No doubt Morton Kondracke poured his heart into "Saving Milly: Love, Politics, and Parkinson's Disease," a book about the long, lingering illness and eventual tragic death of his wife, Millicent. But as translated into a CBS movie, "Saving Milly," the story becomes strangely dry and emotionless, even when the symptoms worsen and the heroine struggles bravely to survive -- standard cues, in this kind of film, for the audience to haul out the hankies. The movie, at 9 tomorrow night on Channel 9, stars Madeleine Stowe as the flinty and defiant Milly and Bruce Greenwood, outfitted with the proper pair...

Emptying out his cubbyhole office in the CBS News building on West 57th Street in New York, wading through stacks and boxes of memorabilia accumulated over the years, Dan Rather came upon a piece of framed embroidery made and sent to him a couple decades ago by a nun who was, one might say, among the faithful -- a regular and loyal viewer.

Rock, Well . . . Didn't By Tom Shales Monday, February 28, 2005; Page C01 Chris Rock jokingly welcomed viewers to "the 77th, and last, Academy Awards" last night but this Oscar show, nervously televised from Hollywood on ABC, will more likely turn out to be the first, and last, to be hosted by Rock. Though a brilliant and caustic stand-up comedian, Rock's stint as an Oscar host was strangely lame and mean-spirited. Since we are apparently still living in the aftermath of Janet Jackson's overexposure at the 2004 Super Bowl, and because Rock is a comic known for raw...

IT MUST BE stressful to be a Democrat. You never know what wars to oppose, what government bureaucracies to support, what lies to tell; everything changes everyday. Also, increasingly, it’s really hard to find friends. One reason for this may be Iraq, the country that was going to be just fine with Saddam, in which containment would do wonders, and in which there were no WMD because George Bush is a big fat stupid liar. All we heard from liberals for years was how risky and precarious and implausible elections were for that country, but now, like magic, the Left...

Media Hero Award "The best reaction shots were those of Ted Kennedy, whose stature seems to grow right along with his nose year after year after year. Kennedy has now reached a grand moment in the life of a Senator; he looks like Hollywood itself cast him in the role. Seriously....Kennedy looked great, like he was ready to take his place next to Jefferson on Mount Rushmore. He gives off the kind of venerable vibes that some of us got from an Everett Dirksen way back when." -- Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales in a January 21 Style section...

Man of Steel Flies Into Gotham By Tom Shales Wednesday, September 1, 2004; Page C01 People don't commonly associate adjectives like "cool" and "hip" with the Republican Party, but the first broadcast television coverage of the party's convention, from Madison Square Garden in New York last night, revealed the GOP to be more media-hip and glitzy than the Democrats were earlier this summer. The event, a giant rubber stamp convened nominally to renominate George W. Bush for president and -- unless Rudolph Giuliani comes riding out from the wings on a white horse -- Dick Cheney for vice president, was...

Anyone going to/did catch Medved tonight on Zahn's program debating The Passion with Tom Shales? He said he would be on at approximately 5:30 pacific time. I don't have CNN at my house so I can't catch it.

Jesus Christ was one groovy dude -- at least according to "Judas," an ABC movie that tells a very familiar story but from a unfamiliar point of view. In the modern-vernacular film, airing tonight at 9 on Channel 7, Jesus is certainly the Good Guy (okay, the Best Guy), but Judas isn't simply the bad one. History's most famous traitor, in effect, gets plopped down on an analyst's couch and probed, and though he's guilty as sin of betraying Jesus, we're asked to consider him as a complex human being with traces of decency as well as dishonor running...

Between commercials and halftime show, NFL should move game to Playboy Channel Viewers who tuned in expecting a big-time football game saw the Super Bowl of Sleaze instead. Sexy and violent commercials that included jokes about flatulence and bestiality mercilessly interrupted the CBS telecast of Super Bowl XXXVIII from Houston last night, making it a dubious choice for family viewing. But it was the unexpected climax of the MTV-produced halftime show that shocked viewers and set the CBS switchboard ablaze. As a musical number ended, out popped one of Janet Jackson's breasts. Fellow performer Justin Timberlake clearly exposed it to...

Bush: "Scary," Ted Kennedy worthy of Mount Rushmore. Reviewing President Bush's State of the Union address, nationally syndicated Washington Post television reviewer Tom Shales complained that "Bush had too many moments of cockiness" and fretted about how "the fact that Bush appeared to be so happy, so elated, so giddily primed for another political slugfest was a little bit disheartening, and even a little bit scary." But citing Senator Ted Kennedy's head-shaking, eye-rolling dismissive reactions to Bush, Shales gushed: "Kennedy looked great, like he was ready to take his place next to Jefferson on Mount Rushmore." An excerpt from "State...

So this was the man who had terrorized nations and murdered millions. He looked more like one of those sad old urban alcoholics who make their homes in alleys out of cardboard boxes. But as television viewers saw early Sunday, it was in fact the face of Saddam Hussein, the infamous Iraqi dictator who along with terrorist monster Osama bin Laden had been one of the two most hunted men in the world. CNN, the pioneering cable news network, was first to note -- at 5:03 Sunday morning -- that reports indicated Hussein had been captured, pulled, in effect, out...

Simultaneously dull and disgraceful, "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis," a new Showtime movie, uses the tragic attack on America in 2001 as the basis for a reelection campaign movie on behalf of George W. Bush. The film is an insult to those who perished in the attacks and, really, an insult to America generally, but it's so insanely boring that people aren't likely to become very outraged over it. Written by conservative Republican Lionel Chetwynd, who admits to a bias in Bush's favor, the film -- premiering on Showtime tomorrow night at 8 -- is primitive propaganda that portrays Bush...

George W. Bush kept seeming to lose interest in his own remarks last night as the president did that rarest of rare things -- for him -- and held a prime-time news conference. Televised live on all the major networks from the East Room of the White House, the occasion found Bush declaring this to be "an important moment" for America and the world, yet he spoke with little urgency and no perceptible passion. Have ever a people been led more listlessly into war? It's tempting to speculate how history would have changed if Winston Churchill or FDR had been...