I missed Friday’s The Note due to time constraints but I think this Bill Shine statement to ABC News bears quoting because it goes into greater detail than I’ve seen in other reports on this subject…

In a statement to ABC News, Bill Shine, Senior Vice President of Programming for FOX News acknowledged that “the hosts of ‘Fox & Friends’ gave too much credence to the Insight magazine report and spent far too long discussing its premise on the air. Those remarks, however, were clarified on the next ‘Fox & Friends’ program. Furthermore, when John Gibson focused on the item, he, like other news outlets, presented Senator Obama’s statement on the subject. We consider the matter closed and believe the senator feels the same way.”

Now I’m going to put this story to bed, barring new revelations…

Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter writes about the Insight Magazine story and seems to relish writing about FNC’s part of the story…

The pathetic little saga begins on the Web site of Insight Magazine, a scandal sheet connected to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times. On Jan. 17, Insight reported that “Hillary Rodham Clinton’s camp” had conducted a background check that found Obama attended a madrassa (religious seminary) when he moved with his mother and stepfather to Jakarta in the late 1960s. The idea, according to Insight, was to show that Obama was deceptive about his “Muslim past.” Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson says flatly: “They made it up.”

True or not, this bit of grade-school innuendo proved irresistible to Steve Doocy, know-it-all host of “Fox and Friends,” Roger Ailes’ idea for a right-wing morning chat show. Doocy garbled the story into a reference to Obama “spending the first decade of his life raised by a Muslim father.” After John Gibson of Fox repeated this yarn, which managed to slime two campaigns simultaneously, CNN dispatched a reporter to Obama’s old school in Jakarta, where he revealed it to be a normal public school with religion classes only once a week and no indication of Wahhabism, the Saudi-inspired extremist philosophy. (Indonesian schools were even more secular 40 years ago than they are today.) The whole underlying tale was untrue.

But neither this solid reporting—later backed up by ABC News—nor a categorical statement from the Obama campaign that he “has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ in Chicago,” killed the story. Fox was “unwilling to stop when they knew they were wrong or correct what they knew was a lie,” says Robert Gibbs, Obama’s communications director. Executives at the network claimed that their on-air “clarification” was enough, but Fox’s own people didn’t get the message. Gibson—once a respected correspondent and host—went on the radio to malign the CNN reporter, John Vause. He “probably went to the very [same] madrassa” as Obama, Gibson said.

The AP’s Frazier Moore writes up the story…

The succession of events has focused media scrutiny on Bartiromo, who, like any reporter, is expected not to get too close to, or accept favors from, the people and companies she covers.

On Friday CNBC said Bartiromo, 39, has done nothing improper.

“Her travel has been company-related and approved, and involved legitimate business assignments,” CNBC spokesman Kevin Goldman said. “Permission was sought, permission was granted, and reimbursement procedures were arranged for her travel on corporate jets.”

Sundance Channel executives were unavailable for comment on past talks with Bartiromo about appearing on a planned three-hour programming block devoted to environmental issues, scheduled to start in April.

On Jan. 16 - just days before Thomson was dismissed from Citigroup - one of its divisions, Smith Barney, was announced as a “co-presenting sponsor” for that programming, titled “The Green.”

Yesterday I speculated that Maria Bartiromo’s trademarking of the term “Money Honey” was a defensive move and that it seemed unlikely to me that it was done so that it could be used for branding purposes. Well if Page Six is right, then I was wrong…

Bartiromo, meanwhile, wants to take her “Money Honey” nickname to the bank. She’s trying to trademark her pet name for potential uses ranging from stuffed animals to coloring books. Her lawyer filed on Jan. 16 at least eight applications for use of the moniker, TVNewser reported.

Page Six stays on the story…

A CNBC spokesman denied that Bartiromo took six rides on the Citigroup jet but declined to say exactly how many she did take. The rep also said that Bartiromo made 47 appearances last year for the network and that each was approved.

But every day the number of flights Bartiromo is said to have taken on the Citi jet seems to grow. Previously, she was believed to have taken just one - a 16-hour jaunt back from Beijing in late November with Thomson, who reportedly kicked three other bank executives off the plane for her.

One CNBC exec was quoted this week as saying Bartiromo made “no more than two” trips on Citigroup jets last year. One was a trip back from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, which Bartiromo was covering again last week.

If ever anyone wanted to see just how myopic the media is when covering itself, this week was a near textbook example. The week started out with FNC dealing with the fallout from the Insight Magazine article incident on Fox and Friends from the previous Friday. Wolf Blitzer, Howard Kurtz, and Anderson Cooper over at CNN did their share to keep the heat on their rivals right up until the moment Blitzer himself caused a commotion by badgering the Vice President to answer questions about his daughter. Suddenly nobody, outside of the blue blogs and the Obama and Clinton camps, cared anymore about what happened on FNC the previous week…it was all about CNN and Blitzer. But that didn’t last but a day or two because the Maria Bartiromo/Citigroup scandal broke and the week ended with CNBC (and by extension MSNBC) ignoring it while major papers and at least one cable channel (FNC…I don’t know if CNN covered it though I’m sure Reliable Sources will Sunday) zeroed in on that story. Now the question is, going into next week, what incident is going to take the heat off of CNBC?

The Washington Post’s Libby Copeland has an interview with Daryn Kagan…

(The greatest bias among newspeople is an -ism that has nothing to do with politics. It’s cynicism and it’s a source of pride for many. Kagan says that when word got around CNN that she was going to start a Web site focused exclusively on the warm and fuzzy, colleagues approached her to confess that they, too, dug those kinds of stories. It was almost like they were “coming out of the closet,” she says.)

Kagan, 44, says that when she found out CNN/U.S. President Jon Klein wouldn’t be renewing her contract after 12 years, she took it as a sign.

“Sitting in that office, it felt like someone else speaking through Jon Klein, just saying it was really time,” Kagan says from her home in Atlanta, which also serves as her studio. For a few months, “I had my sad,” she says, employing one of several unique phrasings her friends call D.A.K.-isms, for her initials. But she had always been “spiritual,” and she came up with the idea of starting this Web site. She also decided to hold a nurturing weekend she calls “Soulspa,” and that “helped me out of my sad.”

Launched last November, DarynKagan.com is in between advertising sponsors and is not yet turning a profit. Kagan views this as “all part of the journey,” and she’s already visualizing her pot of gold. She plans to shop a book proposal soon and she thinks her message is a natural for radio, TV and cellphone content. She has a publicist and a part-time staff of six. She’s been giving paid speeches about reinvention, a topic she has come to know well.

Kagan refers to her optimistic ethos as a form of spirituality, but takes pains to talk about it separately from her Jewish upbringing. She points out that her Web site is not affiliated with any religion.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Harry Levins reviews Marvin Kitman’s “The Man Who Would Not Shut Up”…

Say this for Marvin Kitman’s new biography of TV’s Bill O’Reilly: It’s fair and balanced.

Kitman sees both sides of O’Reilly. Like O’Reilly’s many critics, Kitman calls the man arrogant, Long Island-abrasive, impatient, rude, even miserly. Like O’Reilly’s many fans, Kitman calls the man smart, fast, skilled and a talented performer with genuine journalistic credentials.

Kitman also calls O’Reilly a contrarian conservative, or maybe a prime-time populist — somebody who usually comes from the right but who can veer to the left on issues like oil company profits, abortion and John Danforth’s trustworthiness.

Many major newspapers have an Ombudsman position. The idea behind the Ombudsman concept is to have a watchdog, separate from the editorial staff, to address reader and public concerns regarding the paper’s stories and to promote journalistic integrity. But, for whatever reason, the Ombudsman position never crossed the digital divide into TV. There are some “news watchdog” programs out there; CNN has Reliable Sources and FNC has Fox News Watch but both programs devote themselves to the media in general and neither do much address their respective networks’ coverage in a day in, day out manner.

So the question of the weekend is should the networks have an Ombudsman? This doesn’t need to be a TV position. All the nets have web sites and that would be an equivalent place, better in fact given the internet revolution, for an Ombudsman. If not, why not?