WHEN WILL THEY EVER LEARN? – AT 10:29 P.M. ET:  CBS News is trying to rebuild its image, following the end of the Couric years.  Katie Couric didn't cut it as anchor for CBS Evening News, and her obvious liberal agenda annoyed multitudes.

You'd think CBS would have learned its lesson, and there was cause for encouragement in the naming of Scott Pelley to replace Couric.   But now the once-great news division demonstrates that it has actually learned nothing.  It has appointed NBC reporter Norah O'Donnell, airhead extraordinaire, to the lofty post of chief White House correspondent.

O'Donnell, a committed leftist, makes Katie Couric look like a mild moderate.  And O'Donnell is not known as one of the deeper minds in broadcast journalism.  She has movie-star looks, which probably accounts for the appointment, but her journalism is often shoddy and argumentative.  NewsBusters has the sordid story:

"If Time-magaziner-turned-White House-press-sec Jay Carney ever tires of defending President Obama," wrote NB's Mark Finkelstein earlier this year, "Norah O'Donnell clearly seems ready to step in."

News broke Thursday that O'Donnell will, in fact, be moving to the White House briefing room, but she'll staying on the same side of the podium as CBS's Chief White House Correspondent. But that doesn't mean her incessant cheerleaeding for the Obama administration and its party will relent.

O'Donnell is one of television news's more blatantly liberal non-prime time personalities.

And...

For all of O'Donnell's fondness for Obama, she really does not like Sarah Palin. Norah appeared at a Palin book signing - crib notes in hand - last year to grill a teen Palin fan, but threw softballs to a pro-Obamacare child weeks later. O'Donnell's lame defense of Obama's decision to wear a tacky faux-military leather jacket to an address to troops in Afghanistan was a childish "Sarah Palin wears a leather jacket too!" Norah also harped on the Palin "hand note" non-story perhaps longer than any other television personality.

Filmmaker John Ziegler even called on NBC to fire O'Donnell for her vehement hatred of everything Palin.

The firing never came, but now O'Donnell has left for another network where, no doubt, the Palin hatred and the rest of the liberal quips will continue.

For the record, Norah O'Donnell is the only journalist I've ever written to in order to complain about her work.  I never got an answer.  She is a terrible choice for CBS, unless all they want is a pretty face.  That's all they'll get.

June 17, 2011