mainstream media until now. fox news pounds eric holder after a house committee votes to hold him in contempt while msnbc acts as the attorney general's defense lawyer. >> nobody in the mainstream media was paying any attention to this scandal. fox news was. nobody else was covering it. >> well, not quite. but have journalists blown the story, or is this scandal manufactured by the right wing media? and we'll tackle these television topics. ann curry appears to be on her way out at the "to dashow. why was her partnership with matt lauer such a flop? "20/20" sits down with rielle hunter. >> do you think he wanted the baby? >> i think that he thought the timing was terrible. >> do we really need to hear more from john edwards's mercurial mistress? and erin sorkin's the newsroom debuts tonight. >> i didn't know people didn't like working for me. >> do you care? >> of course i care. anybody would care. but honestly, i don't. i do. i am a perfectly nice guy. i have the focus group data to prove it. >> does it capture the craziness of television news? i'm howard kurtz. this is "reliable sources." we want to begin by showing you live pictures of tahrir square in cairo. egyptian authorities this past hour announcing that mohammed morsi, the candidate of the muslim brotherhood, has won the presidential runoff election. thousands of people there favorable to the muslim brotherhood cause celebrating that announcement. candy crowley will have a live report later this hour. it's not that the media have utterly ignored fast and furious, the justice department sting involving gunsn mexico that tragically resulted in one agent's death. it's been mentioned at least 30 times in "new york times" i stories and 40 in the "washingn post." as the cases ebbed and flowed and republican congressman darrell issa has demanlded more and more documents, the case has been a fixture on conservative websites and on fox news. when president obama invoked executive privile to withhold the documents and issa's committee voted that eric er should be held in contempt, the story played out in very different ways on the cable networks. >> not only is the administration not willing to provide requested documents in the fast and furious investigation, it seems their testimony is also less than truthful. >> tonight, is president obama hiding something? if so, what and why? >> republicans are trying to take out president obama at any cost. today the united states attorney general was collateral damage. >> joining us now to talk about the way this highly partisan battle has been covered in new york, amy holmes. anchor for the blaze on gbtv. in washington, washington correspondent for the new yorker and now cnn contributor. were the media a bit slow on this fast and furious investigation or has it simply become a classic, idealogically driven con tro searcy? >> there seem to be these controversies that both sides become really, really interted and obsessed in. and pound the media for not covering. at a certain point it becomes inevitable it gets widespread attention because it plays into the back and forth between the republicans and the democrats. for a long time this issue was isolated to the conservative media because as essentially there wasn't much administration respse. so there wasn't this sort of food fight nature that, you know, cable and the newspapers thrive on. once yave issa pushing the contempt vote in his committee and you have the white house responding, you have -- you know, you have your classic le/right partisan spat .at gets a lot more coverage. >> amy holmes, is that right? it's a sleft/right partisan spat and you have accusations of a cover-up it's easier for the rest of the media to sink their selective teeth into? >> i think once the white hoe got involved with trying to assert executive privilege or suggest it. attorney general eric holder is a member of the administration. he's our attorney general. he's testified up on the hill over half a dozentimes. i think at this point it seems like it's a bit in the weeds. you have timelines. what did he know? when did he know it? now the mainstream media is really going to have to grapple with that and not just a he said/she said story but what's the real truth of the matter? >> one another point. one lesson from covering the inton era is do not ignore fringe stories. the fringiest stories of the clinton era eventually led to that man's impeachment. they burst into the mainstream media and don't go away. >> let's be fair in just pointing out that underlying this investigation is a very serious matt in which many guns were let loose in mexico. supposedly monitored by justice department officia. one ent, brian terry, ended up getting shot and killed. fox news has been pong this story for months and months. the theme we saw a little at the top is what is obama hiding. >> i think to say the media n't interested in scandal is preposterous. we love scandal. i love scandal. that's the theme that really drives us. >> what's the scandal? >> it's a scandal of government but not a political scandal. what's the worst case? the obama administration was continuing something basically going on under the bush administration. you know, did they try to cover up some embarrassing things afterwards? there's just -- there's nothing conceivable that would bring this into a major political scandal here. i think that's why people have been slo get on board. it's not an ideological thing. i think the media would love to have an obama scandal to cover. >> i would agree to this extent. eric holder doesn't look like a assic noncooperating witness. he's testified a number of times. let me toss it back to amy with this question. when the president invoked executive privilege, the media certainly reported. but i would say didn't pounce on videotape of candidate barack obama accusing george w. bush of hiding behind executive privilege. >> indeed he did. i thought you were going to play the tape. president obama, then senator obama, pouncing on president bush. yes, the media got interested in this idea of hypocrisy. i think saw jon stewart made great fun of it. intermof the mainstream media and their interest in this reason really is the f the partisanship of the media. i mean, brian terry should be a hoehold name. this died at the hands of guns that had been illegally pushed to mexican drug dealers across border without the mexican government's knowledge of this. when he's saying it started under the bush administratn, that's a little spin by the administration. the operation under the bush administrationas different from this one. i wonder if it's too technical in terms of these details. but in this story we actually do have a smoking gun quite literally. >> a little bit of spin? >> i mean, you know, they had -- the program had othernames. it's technical. this notion of gun walking started in 2006 and has been going on since then. i think issa's committee was terrific and sensible in doing this investigation. but it's interesting the fight over executive privilege now is not about anything that led up to agent terry's death. it's about things that happened months after agent terry's death. by definition it's not about the core scandal. >> i want to follow up, amy. you're accusing the media of partisanship. are you suggesting because brian terry unfortunately was killed in the line of duty, border patrol agent, is not more widely known because the media were covering up or minimizing this on behalf of the obama administration? >> some cld say gun control or walking guns across the border. but really at the heart of this is someone whose life was taken by illegal gun selling being pushed by the administration. i don't want to get into the details exactly of this case. however, i think if this were under the bush administration in this exact same instance, i think the media would be all over this. they would be exploding these characters. we know exactly who's who. we see missing girls in aruba and know more about that. >> why the media spends a lot of time on missing girls a whole separate issue, right, amy? i think one of the things that, you know, these things become so partisan so fast. >> that was true when democrats were demanding democrats from the bush administration. i covered controversies during the reagan administration where democrats were demanding documents. >> both sides become intrenched and marshal arguments to benefit their side. frany then the facts get a little bit out of control. there are allegations now that the administration was pursuing this policy to somehow crack down on gun control in the united states. >> right. >> so, you know -- >> pushed by the nra among others. i want to move on briefly to the veepstakes. you had a report on abc news by jonathan carl this week about the status of one senator, marco rubio, which is romney campaign reacted to rather quickly. let's roll it. >> abc's john carlos learned one of the most highly tout and popular choiced, florida senator marco rubio is not even being considered now by the romney team. >> that's right. this is a surprise. >> the story was entirely false. marco rubio iseing thoroughly vetted as pa of our dana milban. when abc said rubio had not been asked to turn over hundreds of pages of paperwork on financial and other interests, romney comes out and says he's being vetted. all depends on vetted. did he knock down that story? >> i don't think so. this is the reason why it's preposterous for us to speculate on the vice president. there's onrson w kns this. maybe one person. that would be romney. maybe he shares it with somebody leading his search committee. we have no ability to report on this sort of thing. maybe it was true when abc reported it. but romney can instantly make that untrue. we have no power over this. inevitably we speculate, come up with dozens of names. in the end the vice presnd who' vetted and not being vetted. it's certainly important to look at the actual candidates who are in the mix. look at their records. the ones that might actually be in the running. >> fictional short list a list probably -- so and so is being mentioned. politico went pretty heaven. amy holmes again, heavy a day or two later saying tim pawlenty, nowadvisers. i'm reminded of 2008 when nobody thought it was going to be sarah palin. >> absolutely. the scorecard is not good. oneaw sarah palin coming. no one saw dick cheney coming. when bill clinton chose al gore and the conventional wisdom was he would never choose a fellow baby boomer from the south. he wants geographic diversity. i looked at this story. i was thinking this is the kind of thing lindsay lohan does every day. head of hopper would have been proud of this. campaign manipulation. media hype. it's a win/win for everybody. marco rubio's selling a book. the campaign is selling a storyline. the media is selling newspapers. >> i would notave expected the lindsay lohan reference. >> alwaylike to work her in. when we come back, politico sus penlds its white house reporter for negative cable comments and tweets about mitt romney. was he way out of bounds? 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[ flo speakinga se ] [ shouting in japanese ] we work wherever you work. now, that's progressive. call or click today. joe williams is white house correspondent for politico. he's now been suspended for the what the website's editors call conduct that fell short of our standards for fairness and judgment. especially unfortunate way. part of this has to do with what joe williams said on c. t's take a look. >> romney is very, very comfortable, it seems, with people who are like him. that's one of the reasons why he seems so stiff and awkward in some town hall settings. why he can't relate to people other than tha but when he comes on fox and friends, they'relike him. they're white folks who are very much relaxed in their own company. >> dana milbank, did joe williams go too far as a reporter in what he just said about mitt romney. >> i think he's wrong in the sense that romney is equal opportunity uncomfortable with all people. on the merits i think he s wrong. i suspect that that comment by itself would not have gotten him into trouble. i think it was in combination with other things he had done. you could see how, look, when we're saying things unfiltered on live television you can sometimes say something that's not quite right in a way that wouldn't happen in print with editors. >> you're saying there's a pattern? >> that's certainly what his editors at politico were saying. there was a pattern. that's a different mat zbler amy holmes, when williams says there are white folks very relaxed in their own company, did that strike your ear as being what racist? >> i don't know about racist. not particularly insightful. it doesn't really give us any insight into mitt romney. agree with dana in terms of him being awkward and stiff, isn't that mitt romney's rap? you don't need to throw race into the mix to inflame the situation. it sort of reminds me, too, back in 2008 and the coverage of president, then senator, obama, and the idea he was so comfortable with groups. yet at the time mike allen told me that actually president obama was quite stiff and cool and aloof when it came to reporters. in terms of people's public versus private persona, there can be a real difference and di v inju divergen divergence. >> he didn't get into trouble for what he wrote for politico but comments he made on msnbc and twitter. >> look, i'm really reluctant to criticize people who say something off on television. >> because tomorrow it could be you? >> yeah, tomorrow it could be you. we speak a lot. we tweet a lot. sometimes we're going to say something that is off. look, politico encouraging their correspondents to go on television. >> yeah. >> they encourage them to tweet. it's a very different environment than when you're writing. one of the things that prevents bias and makes sure that reporters are doing things in a fair way and in a publication is many layers of editors reading the copy and getting that stuff out. you go on tv or on twitter and you're much more unfiltered. >> if a number of your comments are all in the direction of being somewhat negative toward romney and not negative toward president obama and you're a white house correspondent you've got a problem. >> i'm not excusing it. one of the issues is when you go into the lair of a very ideological host, whether it's on msnbc or fox, sometimes the questions are geared to sort of bait the reporter into being much more ideological than they would be in print. i don't know exactly if that was the case here. martin beshear is a man of the left. he may have baited joe a little on that. that doesn't excuse him. i think it's a danger for beat reporters who try and avoid that. >> it points to a much larger problem we're all dealing with now. that is when you tweet something or when you make some remark on the show, well, i'myingt for the "washington post" or for the new yorker or in this case for politico. and peopleay not make a distinction that, well, what you write in the newspaper or the magazine is actually edited and careful. otherwise you might just be popping off. it's treated the same. >> let me briefly touch on one other issue here in this segment. you had this odd coincidence where "the washington post" and "new york times" on successive daysad front page stories about bain capital. "new york times" saying bain got big fees when companies it bought failed or went bankrupt or lost a lot of money. "washington post" talking about companies taken over by mitt romney former firm, bain capital, outsourcing jobs over seas. ed gillespie saying this morning the post report was shoddy journalism and at no time ve enough details. what do we make ofthis? >> pajama clad bloggers unite. these sort of technical he said/she said wsh we talked about this before, stories tend to be left all over by the log sphe -- ogesphere. mainstream media is catching up. one camp makes an accusation. the other camp rebuts it. the media reports on the back and forth but doesn't actually get into the meat of the matter. >> this was real reporting about a company -- the experience which for mitt romney is one of his central credentials running for president. whether you think the stories were overplayed or not. >> i think it's legit if you're going to run on your record at bain and you're giving that as the central reason why you could get this economy moving in a way that obama hasn't,asicay every aspect of that record should be picked over. >> and both candidatese de bain an issue. on both sides. it's completely fair game. bain has jumped into this and is defending their record. in the case of the post story bain was working with them extensively on that. i don't think the romney c campaign wanted to get involved. >> you reject the charge of shoddy journalism? >> there has never been one column mention of shoddy journalism in the "washington post." >> thank you, everybody, for stopping by. we'll bright back. we all need it. to move. to keep warm. to keep us fed. to make clay piggies. but to keep doing these things in the future... at shell, we believe the world needs a broader mix of energies. that's why we're supplying natural gas to generate cleaner electricity... that has around 50% fewer co2 emissions than coal. and it's also why, with our partner in brazil, shell is producing ethanol - a biofuel made from renewable sugarcane. ♪ >>a minute, mom! let's broaden the world's energy mix. let's go. it doesn't look risky. i mean, phil, does this look risky to you? nancy? fred? no. well it is. in a high-risk area, there's a 1-in-4 chance homes like us will flood. i'm glad i got flood insurance. fred, you should look into it. i'm a risk-taker. [ female announcer ] only flood insurance covers floods. visit floodsmart.gov/risk to learn your risk. ryan lizza of the new yorker and cnn still with us. you said the other morning -- km kmuz me. you said a n a recent interview twitter and forms popping up online are ruining political media. >> giving the interview while riding amtrak. >> no more off the cuff. >> i just finished this long