Chiding His Colleagues

(By Howard Kurtz, Washington Post) - Tom Brokaw said Sunday that MSNBC's premier anchors, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, have not always been fair in covering the campaign.

"I think Keith has gone too far. I think Chris has gone too far," the veteran NBC newsman said at a forum sponsored by Harvard's Shorenstein press center. But Brokaw said that they are "commentators" and "not the only voices" on MSNBC and that viewers could sort it out.

He was responding to criticism from Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Hillary Clinton supporter, who declared at the forum that "MSNBC was the official network of the Obama campaign."

CBS's Bob Schieffer defended the media's reluctance to cover John Edwards's extramarital affair, saying Edwards's candidacy was over and "I don't see that we have time to be fooling with this."

But ABC's George Stephanopoulos noted that "the level of the coverup here was kind of astonishing," and Brokaw expressed concern about this question: "What if it had been Mitt Romney? Would the press have gone after that story more aggressively?"