At the top of the 9 a.m. (Eastern) hour on Monday, National Public Radio news anchor Carl Kasell was reading the headlines. First, Kasell explained how Sen. Ted Stevens was going on trial today, how the matter is over tens of thousands of dollars in gifts he did not declare, and how Stevens hopes the trial with end in three weeks and he can campaign for an eighth term. Then for the next story, Kasell sounded like a broken record. He repeated that Sen. Ted Stevens was going on trial today, handed the story over to an Alaska reporter, who pretty much repeated everything Kasell had just reported. There’s nothing inherently unprofessional about doing two stories in a row on Stevens, but the stories were nearly identical. Why the sudden interest in Alaskan politics?

Just to underline the liberalism of NPR, the “enhanced underwriting” announcement came on, telling us that support for NPR comes from….Lions Gate Entertainment, who are proud to display the forthcoming Bill Maher God-bashing documentary Religulous. They deepened their identification with the NPR audience by recounting they were the distributors of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911.