Howard Kurtz: “I started pondering this when we all got swept up in the spectacle of Hilary Rosen denigrating Ann Romney for not working… That, in turn, followed our collective enthrallment over Romney aide Eric Fehrnstrom describing their Etch a Sketch operation, which in turn followed the uproar over Rush Limbaugh calling a law student a slut, which followed…well, it’s hard to remember at this point.”

“Each of these episodes, considered separately, contains elements of substance that were soon overwhelmed by the rhetoric emanating from the media echo chamber. Collectively, they suggest that what should be a serious campaign in hard economic times has turned into a spectacle in which we are amusing ourselves to death.”

Texas Monthly: “Eight years ago, Dan Rather broadcast an explosive report on the Air National Guard service of President George W. Bush. It was supposed to be the legendary newsman’s finest hour. Instead, it blew up in his face, tarnishing his career forever and casting a dark cloud of doubt and suspicion over his reporting… Beyond the haze of elaborately revised fictions from both the political
left and the political right is a bizarre account that has remained,
until now, the great untold story of modern Texas politics. For 36
years, it made its way through the swamps of state government as it led
up to the collision between two powerful Texans on the national stage.”

Interestingly, Rather has a new autobiography out in a few weeks called Rather Outspoken.

Current TV terminated the contract of its lead anchor Keith Olbermann, “scarcely one year after he was hired to reboot the channel in his progressive political image,” the New York Times reports.

He is being replaced by former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

If you have a Kindle, you can have Political Wire automatically delivered.

Commentary: “Wonder how the left was able to mobilize so quickly on the Rush Limbaugh boycott? According to the architect behind it, Media Matters online strategy director Angelo Carusone, the project was actually created in 2009, but stayed inactive until the Sandra Fluke controversy boiled over.”

The New York Times reports that this week “new evidence emerged” that the ad boycott of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show “was costing Premiere Radio Networks — the show’s syndicator — money, though the total amounts are unclear.”

“This month, powered by online organizing tools, liberal activist groups and other critics of Mr. Limbaugh have successfully highlighted the host’s repeated attacks on a Georgetown University law student, Sandra Fluke, and persuaded companies to advertise elsewhere, at least temporarily.”

Bloomberg asked American voters whether Limbaugh should be fired after the uproar over his remarks, and by a 53% to 42% margin, they agreed.

Nonetheless, ABC News says Limbaugh used his show to declare the controversy all-but-over, claiming victory against Democrats and the “Obama media.”

The distributor of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show has told its radio station affiliates that they are suspending national advertising for two weeks, Radio Info reports. And Think Progress notes more than 140 advertisers have now pulled their ads from Limbaugh’s show.

But David Frum points out that Limbaugh will face “a more-serious challenge” on April 2: “That’s when the new Mike Huckabee show launches on 100 stations in Limbaugh’s very own noon-to-3 time slot. Huckabee’s competition threatens Limbaugh not only because Huckabee has already proven himself an attractive and popular TV broadcaster, but also because Huckabee is arriving on the scene at a time when Limbaugh’s business model is crashing around him.”

Premiere Networks is circulating a list of 98 radio advertisers who want to avoid “environments likely to stir negative sentiments… They’ve specifically asked that you schedule their commercials in dayparts or programs free of content that you know are deemed to be offensive or controversial (for example, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Leykis, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity).”

John Avlon notes “the irony is that the same market forces that right-wing talk-radio hosts champion are helping to seal their fate. Advertisers are abandoning the shows because they no longer want to be associated with the hyperpartisan — and occasionally hateful — rhetoric. They are finally drawing a line because consumers are starting to take a stand.”

In recognition of the Academy Awards, ABC News picks the best political movies of all time and includes a few of my favorites, including The Manchurian Candidate, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Wag the Dog.

But they don’t mention The Candidate or The Ides of March.

What else are they missing? Tell us in the comments.

In honor of Oscar weekend: Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics by Steven J. Ross.

Just published: Watergate: A Novel by Thomas Mallon.

New York Times: “In this stealth bull’s-eye of a political novel, Thomas Mallon invests the Watergate affair with all the glitter, glamour, suave grace and subtlety that it doesn’t often get. His cleverly counterintuitive Watergate even has the name-dropping panache of a Hollywood tell-all.”

From the political dictionary: “pen and pad briefing”

Sarah Palin infuriated Fox News chief Roger Ailes because she didn’t make the announcement she wouldn’t run for president on Fox News, Gabriel Sherman reports.

Instead, she made the October 5 announcement on Mark Levin’s radio program with Fox getting a follow-up interview on Greta Van Susteren’s 10 p.m. show.

Said Ailes: “I paid her for two years to make this announcement on my network.”

A new Fairleigh Dickinson PublicMind Poll finds that the Sunday morning political shows on television “do the most to help people learn about current events, while some outlets, especially Fox News, lead people to be even less informed than those who they don’t watch any news at all.”

“For example, people who watch Fox News, the most popular of the 24-hour cable news networks, are 18-points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government than those who watch no news at all (after controlling for other news sources, partisanship, education and other demographic factors). Fox News watchers are also 6-points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government than those who watch no news.”

These results mirror a University of Maryland study published last year.

Every presidential election season since 1984, Newsweek magazine “detached a small group of reporters from their daily jobs for a year to travel with the presidential candidates and document their every internal triumph and despair — all under the condition that none of it was to be printed until after the election,” the New York Times reports.

“Then two days after Election Day, the sum of their reporters’ work would appear in the magazine. But the ambitious undertaking, known inside the magazine simply as ‘the project,’ is no more. Newsweek, bleeding red ink and searching for a fresh identity under new ownership, has decided the project would not go forward this election season.”

From a profile in Making it in the Political Blogosphere: The World’s Top Political Bloggers Share the Secrets to Success by Tanni Haas, which is out next week:

“Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire has a special place in the political blogosphere. Operating much like a traditional wire service, it’s the site to which thousands of political insiders — Members of Congress and their staff, political consultants and pollsters, lobbyists, journalists, and political bloggers — go several times a day to get news, analysis, and commentary on the latest political developments that drive political debate in the U.S.”