Media Matters critiques MSNBC's debate coverage:

As MMFA noted before the first debate even began, Buchanan (teamed on a panel with three reporters) criticized Senator John Kerry and forecasted a quick electoral victory for President George W. Bush. Ginsberg, who has provided legal counsel this year for both the Bush-Cheney campaign and the anti-Kerry group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, consistently spun for Bush during coverage of the debates and even erroneously claimed that the 9-11 Commission "insinuat[ed]" that there were connections between Iraq and 9/11. For his part, Scarborough proclaimed that all viewers who indicated that Senator John Edwards won the vice presidential debate in an online poll must have been "drinking vodka." Then, apparently after silently reading the results of a CBS poll that also showed that Edwards had won, as MMFA noted, Scarborough crumpled up the paper showing the results and threw it away without reporting the outcome. MSNBC's debate panels did not feature any prominent Democrats or liberals to counter Buchanan, Ginsberg and Scarborough. In fact, many of the other pundits featured in debate coverage were just as adept at providing conservative misinformation. For example, NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell distorted Kerry's "much too accommodationist" Iran proposal after the first debate, and then cheered on Vice President Dick Cheney's false assertion during the vice presidential debate that he had never met Edwards. After the third presidential debate, Mitchell criticized a Kerry comment that was critical of Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan -- Mitchell's husband -- but neither Mitchell nor anyone else on MSNBC disclosed this conflict of interest. NBC's Meet the Press host Tim Russert also repeated without challenge Cheney's claim that he hadn't previously met Edwards, even though Russert knew it was false. The day after the third presidential debate, MSNBC anchor Randy Meier twice falsely claimed that the "context" around Bush's 2002 remark that he was "not that concerned" about Osama bin Laden showed that he meant that bin Laden should be more concerned about us.