joke and somehow i'm responsible for that, that's gotcha. >> is the press trying to paint santorum as intolerant? tucker carlson's pwebsite launches an attack on media matters saying they gave marching orders to msnbc. >> the line we had from someone at media matters was we basically write their prime time. >> based on what? there's a troubling memo about investigating the personal lives of folks at fox. we'll have a report. plus, buzz businessen injbi jeremy lynn. why do journalists keep tweeting their way into trouble. and meet washington television reporter andrea mccarran whose story about underage drinking sparked a huge reaction. >> andrea says she's been stunned and heart broken to find herself subjected to online name calling too foul to spell out on tv. >> a harassment campaign against her and her teenage kids. i'm howard kurtz, and this is "reliable sources." now that mitt romney has lost his front-runner status, at least according to the fleeting snapshot provided by national polls, some pundits in their infinite wisdom are giving him advice, and the media microscope increasingly focusing on his faith. >> as mitt romney continues to battle for the republican nomination, the question of faith continues to be in focus. whether americans are becoming more accepting of his rge, mormonism. >> because he's been afraid for the lastself years to talk about his mormonism because of some questions some people have especially in the bible belt, probably the area where he could most touch hearts and most testified to his humanity he's kind of blocked off from doing. >> "new york times" columnist frank bruney says that's precisely where the mormon question is fair game. there are valid reasons he writes for the rest of us to hone in on romney's religion, not in terms of its historical eccentricities but in terms ever its cultural, psychological, and emotional imprint on him. his aloofness, guardedness, and sporadic defensively, are these entwined with the experience of blnging to a minority tribe that has often been maligned and has operated in secret? scott conroy for real clear politics and cbs news. frank, rooney, start with you. so why is romney's faith or why should it be any of the media's business? >> well, i think when you're running for president, the public, the media, we have a right to know as much as we can about you. we want to take your full measure as a human being, and if a big part of your biography, if a big part of who you are is your religious faith, then i think that needs to be discussed. i think it's wise for the candidate himself to discuss it. and i think it's entirely fair game for us to ask questions about it. you're running for president of the united states. highest office there is. we need to know who you are, where you're coming from, what animates you, what's important to you. >> but, jennifer, ruand you hav been very supportive of mitt romney, is it fair for the press when a candidate doesn't want to talk about his religion. >> it's perfectly acceptable. we don't grill joe lieberman on whether he believes slavery in the old testament is still acceptable. there's a level at which in terms of doctrine that we don't think it's appropriate because we don't have religious tests in the united states. what is appropriate is to ask the question that's been asked many times in the debates and have been answered by these candidates and that is, how does your faith affect your judgment? how does your faith affect your politics? >> are you suggesting that the press sim posing some kind of religious test on romney. >> i am suggesting they have honed in uniquely on him as opposed to catholics or people of other faiths and secondly, he has every right to talk about i don't particularly want to talk about this. i think it's a little out of context. the real drum beat has been from the right telling romney to talk more about the economics and talk more about a specific agenda. >> should the press be in the position of ciriticizing romney for not talking about something that's so personal? >> i think pretty much every reporter likes to think they would be a great political operative if given the opportunity. a lot of roeporters look at romney and say this guy should be surging ahead of everyone in the poll. he should be the de facto nominee. he's struggling, why is that? that's the tendency to analyze especially with twitter around all the social media that puts us all in the same boat together. >> we are full of advice. frank rooney, coming wback to your point, if you're running for president your life needs to be an open books. >> most everything. >> but is there a danger here that this media narrative veers off into the strangeness as some people view it of mormonism? >> well, i actually think the media has been very responsible in that regard. and what i'm calling for what i was suggesting in that column isn't that we look at the most outrageous doctrines or tenents of mormonism. i was saying mitt could help himself if he talked more about it. one of his big problems as a candidate is he doesn't always come across as a full-fledged rounded human being, a certain warmth doesn't come across. and i was wondering if that column and i think a lot of people do rightly wonder, is part of that because he's sectioning off a part of himself, a very important part of his biography and not giving us access to it, not giving himself access to it on the stump. >> you say you're trying to help romney -- >> i'm not in the interest of trying to help anyone. i think what i was trying to say is i wasn't saying we need to look at every little byway of mormonism and how it applies to him. i don't disagree in large measure with what jennifer said earlier. i think when he i hdid d edits he closes himself off to us. >> i think there have been some spreads that skr behave been favorable. but "the washington post" and "the new york times" as his role as a lay leader in the mormon chum church. that showed a human side. he has talked a little bit about his role in mentoring people who have had problems, and i actually think without getting into religious doctrine, simply talking about his experiences with people in need, people in trouble would be helpful to him. >> one thing that's in the news lately -- >> go ahead frank. >> jennifer is exactly right. around the time a lot of us were talking about why aren't we hearing mitt romney talk more about his religion, he was getting hammered for being completely out of touch for anybody who didn't make over $1 million a year. one of the points that a mormon scholar made to me is if you do a mormon mission as mitt romney did for two years in france, you're not living high on the hog. you're mostly trying to convert people at the lower rungs of the economic ladder. he has spent time with people other than gazillioners. he could talk about that if he was willing to access the mormon dimensions of his biography. >> he was asked about this practice of mormons baptizing dead people and he said i have but not recently. i don't know if that's fair game or not. he said it, obviously it's news. it's news now because of his position in the polls, but it does make me wonder a little bit about the tone of the coverage going forward. i want to turn to rick santorum on cbs this morning the other day he got into it with charlie rose and had to do with a joke a bad joke, that was told by a santorum financial supporter, froster frees. when frees said, wlell, in my dy women practiced birth control by putting an aspirin between their knees. >> when you quote a supporter of mine who tells a bad joke and i'm responsible for that, that's gotcha. >> nobody said you were responsible. they said how would you characterize and what have you said to him, not that you were responsible. >> you don't do this with president obama. with president obama what you did was you went out and defended him against someone who he sat in a church for for 20 years and defended him that, oh, he can't possibly believe what he listened to for 20 years. it's a double standard. this is what you're pulling off, and i'm going to call you on it. >> does santorum have a legitimate beef that the media have a double standard. >> he stayed foster frees was a supporter. he's much more than a supporter. second of all, he brought up the jeremiah wright situation with president obama, candidate obama in 2008. you have to remember it is the media that brought that out into the forefront. it was the mccain campaign -- >> abc was one of the organizations. but let me go back to frank. santorum does talk about religiously themed things. he talked about a couple years ago a speech about satan corrupting the institutions of america. yesterday he accused president obama of having a phony theology. he contends and his campaign contends that we in the press are trying to paint him one dimensionally as a candidate solely of social issues. is there something to that? >> you know, i actually don't think so. we shouldn't be one dimensional with him and i think he -- there's a little bit of truth to the fact that we pay more attention sometimes to those things than to other aspects of his platform, but essex ub rantly and willingly wading into these waters. we're not labeling him a cull kurl wattor from nowhere. he's putting on the armor and grab the lance. he believes this stuff, he wants to talk about it, but when it become the entire foreground of the conversation, he gets upset. i think he's not being entirely honest. >> but his campaign tells me that the media are minimizing his other positions on manufacturing jobs and so forth. let's face, it birth control, abortion, gay marriage, these are hot button issues that make good copy. >> two things. first of all, it's not fair game for him to say don't play gotcha with froster frees because he himself haas made outrageous outlandish statements and that's what -- >> he's saying i shouldn't be held responsible 230r for a bad joke said by somebody else. >> yes, but it's very fair game to talk about his own statements and his own positions which are really far outside even the mainstream of the republican party. >> what about the double standard charge? >> that's for people like you and me to talk about. he's a candidate. he should stop whining about the media's double standards. i think the candidates have gotten, particularly on the right, and i will talk to my friends on the rye, have gotten obsessed with this. ronald reagan won the presidency twice with no fox news, with no talk radio, with no blogs. these candidates should grow up, get the message out, there's lots of other media outlets to get their message out. >> i think we have to be careful about holding candidates of different parties to the same standard. on that point we will leave it there. jennifer, frank, scott, thanks for joining us. when we come back, tweeting into trouble. david carr of the nor"new york times" on how far journalists can go in the twitter world. you know when i grow up, i'm going to own my own restaurant. i want to be a volunteer firefighter. when i grow up, i want to write a novel. i want to go on a road trip. when i grow up, i'm going to go there. i want to fix up old houses. [ female announcer ] at aarp we believe you're never done growing. i want to fall in love again. [ female announcer ] discover what's next in your life. get this free travel bag when you join at aarp.org/jointoday. the calcium they take because they don't take it with food. switch to citracal maximum plus d. it's the only calcium supplement that can be taken with or without food. that's why my doctor recommends citracal maximum. it's all about absorption. tweeting can be dangerous to your journalistic health. it became even more obvious after cnn suspended roland martin for a couple tweeter groups during the souper bowl. is the problem pundits keep crossing an invisible line? i tackled that subject earlier. david carr, alaska. . >> nice to be with you. >> you tweeted nearly 17,000 times which makes me feel like a slacker. did what happened to roland martin make you think about what you post? >> yeah. you know, i should make clear, one, that i'm not proud of the fact that i have tweeted that much and i'm ashamed that you have mentioned that. two, that many, many of those are retweets. so all i'm doing is seeing something and pushing the button, so it's not like i have actually written 17,000 tweets, although please don't do the math on how many i've actually done. three, what happened to roland, yes, he's a cautionary tale, as are many, many others. it seems like a friction-free, easy little push of the button, we often do it on our little phones, right? it doesn't even seem like much of a big deal. but if you have a significant following or even a following of certain folks, you can end up in a big bad jam in a hurry. >> well, do you like having that direct and unfiltered connection to people who follow you? is that part of the appeal or the seduction of twitter? >> yes. i mean, i do a combination of sort of i guess what jeff jarvis has called mind casting, which is i might see something that you wrote or someone else wrote and write a twitter and put the link in there and say, you know, people should look at that. but then the other night i tweeted out the fact that i went to the betsy johnson show with my 14-year-old just thinking, i don't know, that it was -- she's my kid, so i'm proud of the fact that she wanted to go out to the show, and a friend of mine just sent me a note and said, really? you're really tweeting about going to a show -- >> i think people like getting on the inside into the personal lives of those of us who are in the media, but let's come back to this question of how opinion yated you can be. you're a "new york times" guys, but this is your personal account. as long as you're not being abusive or inaccurate, why can't you say pretty much what you want? >> well, i can say pretty much what i want until it makes a problem for my ownership or for me. so i generally try to read my tweets with my boss' eye. that doesn't mean i haven't sent out a few i don't regret. i have never gotten talked to at work about it, but i think if the general tenor of my twitter stream made them uncomfortable, somebody would talk to me about it. we don't really have a policy per se, but people at our shop have gotten in a little bit of a jam for like tweeting out private business matters or we had one reporter that tweeted out personal matters that they didn't like. so, you know, i love having the ability not just to tweet out but to listen, and there's no risk in listening. you can look in and be a lurker on twitter. >> it's a great two-way communication. i really like that. but to the extent, david, that you are thinking about, okay, how is this going to look to the bosses at the office in manhattan, doesn't that tend to drain some of the personality from twitter? >> yeah, it's been a real problem for me. i have had trouble getting followers. i only have 350,000 so i guess i'm -- there's something bloodless and sort of without -- no, i think i know and understand that twitter, while at the same time understanding that whatever chip got implanted to me when i went to work in "the new york times," it's planted deep enough that hopefully i won't screw up that often. >> what about the fact that journalists are kind of giving it away on twitter. your first impressions on a lot of breaking controversies, and i wrestle this as well, instead of posting it for "the new york times" which actually takes a little time, you're doing the 140 characterings off on twitter. is that something you think about? >> i try not to break news on twitter. i do feel like "the new york times" pays my salary and that if i'm going to break news, i should break news there. in terms of annotating events in progress and giving my opinion about them, i think the value accrues to both my employer and to me. we all go through the math of do i break off what i'm doing in little bitty bits or do i save it all for the newspaper or for the web, and i do think that's math we all have to confront as journalists. >> i think it's a dilemma for journalists and at the same time you want to be part of the rolling conversation on twitter. somebody else says you have written who recently joined twitter is rupert murdoch. he doesn't exactly censor himself for opinions. he's written some nice things about rick santorum's presidential candidacy and took a short at andrew cuomo calling him chicken cuomo. does that raise questions about the news organization that is murdoch controls? >> no. i think that's very congruent with what people expect him to do. i think it's been a good luck into the inside of his head. he's rupert murdoch. he lives a life beyond consequence, let's face it. he controls his board. he can pretty much do what he wants. and i think he oddly understands twitter and what it can do, and it's been good. i mean, i don't think it's a bulletin to anybody who follows rupert murdoch or reads the news that he's somewhat conservative in thinks political views. >> and not to put too fine a point on it, who is going to tell him not to. david carr from "the new york times," thanks very much for joining us. >> always a pleasure to talk to you, howie. coming up in the second part of "reliable sources" the conservative daily collar. plus the backlash against a washington television reporter after her story about underage drinking. and later, why the media are making a huge hero of basketball's jeremy lin. hello, how can i deliver world-class service for you today ? we gave people right off the street a script and had them read it. no, sorry, i can't help you with that. i'm not authorized to access that transaction. that's not in our policy. i will transfer you now. my supervisor is currently not available. would you like to hold ? that department is currently closed. have i helped you with everything you needed ? if your bank doesn't give you knowledgeable customer service 24/7, you need an ally. ally bank. no nonsense. just people sense. immerse yourself in all over relief with alka seltzer plus. it's specially formulated to speed relief to every inch of you. liquidate your flu symptoms with alka seltzer plus. the daily caller is a conservative website trun by tucker carlson who doubles as a fox news commentator. media matters has openly targeted fox for a right wing bias. this memo came from carl fritsche. we should hire private investigators to look into the personal lives of fox news anchors, hosts, reporters, prominent contributors, senior network and corporate staff. private investigators? personal lives? anything happen as a result? joining us now to talk about the way these articles were report sd vince, senior online editor for the daily caller. welcome. >> thank you. >> what do you make of that memo? >> it's pretty jarring. this is a tax exempt organization looking to use -- go after fox level employees who work inside the company and to place yard signs on their lawns to buy advertising on billboards in their communities, targeting them personally. so this is some pretty shocking stuff. >> just to be clear, there is no evidence any of this happened. this was a memo that suggested these things. >> i'm sure the tracking mechanisms of media matters have existed in terms of the he can at the point to which private investigators have been involved, not that we're aware. >> we asked media matters to make somebody available, david brock is not able to come on, the founder, because he has a book coming out. carl fritsche, the former executive who wrote the memos, didn't respond. and tucker carlson said he could not come on because he has a contract with fox. they go through a list of reporters and accuses some of them of doing media matters bidding based on a couple ano