The Washington Post's Roxanne Roberts, who also appeared on Matthews's show Monday, seems to think the White House staff messed up. Roberts, one of the writers of the Post's gossip column, broke the news that the Salahis had crashed the party. But she also says that since she asked two of First Lady Michelle Obama's press aides why they were there if they weren't on the guest list, the couple should have been removed. "The minute I realized they were not on the list, I asked a White House staffer to verify their names and explain why they were not on the list," Roberts wrote on a Post chat on Monday. "I told the same thing to another staffer a few minutes later. This was before the Salahis went through the receiving line with the president, and they could have been pulled aside and quietly questioned. I can only assume the staffers believed anyone already inside the White [House] was allowed to be there. Big mistake, and I'm grateful nothing serious happened." On MSNBC, she went even further. "This is a relatively inexperienced White House staff when it comes to these kinds of things," she said. "When a reporter says to two people, 'You know, they're not on the list,' it should have raised a couple red flags... They didn't, as far as I can tell, do anything about that."

Here's why this whole thing is preposterous. Like Matthews, I've been to social events at the White House in the past, since both Democratic and Republican presidents like to throw holiday parties for the press. And yes, it's true, there's usually some low-level Social Office staffer standing outside the gate checking to see whether the people in line for the security screening are on the guest list. But ultimately, it's the Secret Service that decides whether to let people onto the White House grounds (by federal law, according to Ron Kessler, author of a book on the agency). The White House staff -- who are appointed by each administration -- can put people on a list for access, but visitors only get in after the Secret Service runs a check on them. This is true for parties and official business alike; I've seen reporters credentialed by Congress and approved by the White House to go by for a news event get turned away at the gates because their names weren't in the computerized access system.

Besides that, why should a couple of questions from a reporter to the press office automatically set off red flags? It's easy for Roberts to say, looking back on the event, that the Salahis should have been pulled out of the dinner; as the world now knows, they weren't supposed to be there in the first place. But if her questions had led to an intervention last week, that would still only have helped get the Secret Service off the hook for a mistake. It isn't up to the First Lady's press staff to figure out who is or isn't supposed to have access to the building. Which is probably why Secret Service director Mark Sullivan has already apologized for the incident. "Although these individuals went through magnetometers and other levels of screening, they should have been prohibited from entering the event entirely," Sullivan said in a statement last week, calling the agency "deeply concerned and embarrassed" about the episode. "That failing is ours."

Fortunately, this whole argument is about who's to blame for a security lapse that didn't wind up doing anything except giving some pathetic celebrity hounds more exposure than they could have ever dreamed of. But turning it into yet another example of how Obama's administration is turning out to be "amateur hour" -- as RedState's Erick Erickson put it -- is disingenuous. Figuring out how the Secret Service blew it is important, so there isn't another more dangerous mistake in the future. Flipping the story around to make it about Obama is just a distraction.

CNN's average prime-time audience was third behind Fox and MSNBC during October, and it was even eclipsed by sister network HLN among younger viewers, according to the Nielsen Co. Perhaps more ominous, CNN finished well behind Fox when big news was breaking -- Election Night and the Fort Hood massacre. Big stories usually sent viewers flocking to CNN.

Prime-time success isn't a new problem in a place that has long lived and died by the news cycle, to which former hosts such as Aaron Brown, Connie Chung and Paula Zahn can attest. It seems more acute because CNN's younger rivals were faster in figuring out a way to make appointment viewing at night.

"We sometimes scratch our heads and wonder, 'Why can't they figure this out?'" said former CNN correspondent Charles Bierbauer, dean of the College of Mass Communication and Information Studies at the University of South Carolina, describing his talks with another old CNN hand on his faculty.

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, whose reruns often beat Anderson Cooper's first-run newscast on CNN, mocked his rival for trafficking in news rather than analysis at night: "CNN seems to still think it is the primary source for its viewers, that they know nothing until they tune in. This is, ever increasingly, nonsensical."

At CNN, they suggest critics take a narrow view of what it does.

The network could cast aside Cooper, Larry King and Campbell Brown for opinionated analysis and probably see its ratings go up, said Jim Walton, president of CNN Worldwide.

The benefit for one arm of the company isn't worth the potential damage to others, he said.

CNN has built its business -- encompassing international networks and wholesale news reports, mobile device services, a Web site, a wire service to print publications and radio -- around the notion that it is delivering nonpartisan, straight news reporting, he said. The company has shown double-digit growth for the past few years and is on pace to continue. It invests by hiring more personnel, and this month opening a new production facility in Abu Dhabi.

"People hear what's being said and it's branded CNN and (they say), 'OK, that's news. That's nonpartisan, that's factual, it's timely," Walton said. "That's what we want to deliver around the world. We compete against a lot more than Fox and MSNBC."

The rising fortunes of HLN means the company makes money off opinion, too. One of the reasons that network's name was changed from CNN Headline News was to avoid having CNN's name associated with that type of programming.

Of the flagship network's sagging fortunes, Walton said, "It matters to us. Trust me, it matters. We want all of our networks to grow their audiences. But the fact is, (CNN) is a vibrant, healthy company that's growing in an industry where we're pretty much one of one."

MSNBC's move to the left and Fox's ownership of the right would, theoretically, give CNN a wide middle to conquer. The problem is, that middle might be more inclined to watch Tom DeLay on "Dancing With the Stars" than on "Larry King Live."

Statistically, CNN's audience is far from nonpartisan.

Of people who say their main source of news is CNN, 46 percent identify themselves as Democrats and 13 percent as Republicans, according to a July survey by the Pew Research Center (the rest say they're independent or don't identify themselves politically). The same study found that Fox's main source audience was 38 percent Republican and 18 percent Democratic.

To a certain degree, it stands to reason: If so many Republicans find Fox a comfortable home, there are fewer remaining for CNN, particularly in a country where Democrats have an enrollment edge.

One-third of news viewers questioned by Pew this fall said they didn't perceive CNN as advancing an ideology, more than Fox (24 percent) or MSNBC (27 percent). Still, 37 percent of those questioned view CNN as liberal, and 11 percent as conservative.

It wasn't always this way. In a pre-Fox world, many on the right saw CNN as a good alternative to the broadcast networks, said Tim Graham, director of media analysis for the conservative Media Research Center. They loved "Crossfire," he said.

But conservatives began to identify CNN with President Bill Clinton, in part because a president is a natural time-killer for a network on 24 hours a day, he said. They believe conservative voices are weak and outnumbered on CNN.

"Could they claim to be in the middle?" Graham asked. "I think they could. I don't think they're doing it."

Liberals are suspicious about CNN because of Lou Dobbs and his anti-immigration efforts, said Karl Frisch of Graham's liberal counterpart, Media Matters. CNN points out that Dobbs' show has become less opinionated this year. In the meantime, Fox News Channel and the Obama administration have publicly squabbled.

What CNN needs is to find a way to bring the passion to stories that its rivals bring to arguments, said Frank Sesno, a former CNN Washington bureau chief and now professor at George Washington University.

"Will people sit down in the evening and find news reporting interesting?" Walton asked. "That's the question, really."

CNN is still searching for the answer.

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On the Net:

http://www.cnn.com

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EDITOR'S NOTE -- David Bauder can be reached at dbauder"at"ap.org

"It certainly didn't originate here, but someone on this newshour having advocated for Medicare for everybody two weeks ago tonight," Olbermann said. Then he introduced a video clip from his hour-long editorial on healthcare reform earlier this month. Then, he had said:

The public option is, in broad essence, Medicare for everybody. Frame it that way, sell it that way, and suddenly, it doesn`t sound like a threat, turning this seemingly solid insurance which people have now for better or worse into something optional, and turning anything private into everything public... Medicare for everybody might not be literally true, but instead of terrifying, it would be reassuring and the explanations and the caveats would be listened to and not shouted down as anger and fear.

Later on Wednesday night's show, Olbermann's guests, Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., and Bloomberg's Margaret Carlson, credited the host with the shift on language. "Well, Keith, you and my good friend [Minnesota Rep.] Jim Oberstar sold me on that branding sometime ago," Clyburn said. Olbermann didn't exactly complain. "I'm honored to be any part of it, sir," he said. Carlson said "in light of your rebranding," conservative Democrats were coming around.

It all seemed a little much, especially since, as Olbermann -- to his credit -- acknowledged, he wasn't remotely the first one to come up with the "Medicare for Everybody" idea. Last month, Bill Moyers had suggested that Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall should write Obama's healthcare speeches for him, specifically because Marshall had already started referring to the public option as, yes, Medicare for all. In a post on TPM in August, Marshall had raised the notion. "I think I could pretty much guarantee you that if the question in the public mind was 'Would you like the option of buying into Medicare before you turn 65?' the opposition would be vastly diminished," Marshall wrote. "This isn't just rhetoric. This is the most accurate and graspable explanation of what's being proposed."

Again, to his credit, Olbermann made clear Wednesday night that he knew he wasn't the one who came up with the concept. "We suggested two specific actions in that 'Special Comment' two weeks ago," he said. "No claim that either was my idea." But he certainly didn't seem to mind if people had that impression anyway.

Watch Olbermann Wednesday night here:

"When you preach this type of hatred and say that an African-American president hates all white people, you are playing with fire, and bad things can happen. And if they do happen, not only is Glenn Beck responsible, but conservatives who don't call him out are responsible," Scarborough said on his show Tuesday. "You can not preach hatred, you can not say the president's a racist, you can not stir up things that could have very deadly consequences. I was in Congress in 1995. I know where this can end. You can't do it and then say, 'I'm a rodeo clown.'"

Video is below.

In the piece, which was reprinted on MSNBC.com and caused a fair amount of controversy, Buchanan wrote:

[I]f Hitler was out to conquer the world ... Why did he let the British army go at Dunkirk?

Why did he offer the British peace, twice, after Poland fell, and again after France fell? ....

Because Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps ....

Indeed, why would he want war when, by 1939, he was surrounded by allied, friendly or neutral neighbors, save France. And he had written off Alsace, because reconquering Alsace meant war with France, and that meant war with Britain, whose empire he admired and whom he had always sought as an ally.

As of March 1939, Hitler did not even have a border with Russia. How then could he invade Russia?

Winston Churchill was right when he called it “The Unnecessary War” — the war that may yet prove the mortal blow to our civilization.

The column has now been removed from MSNBC's Web site. A spokesperson gave Politico an explanatory statement that says, "An editorial decision was made to remove the column from msnbc.com. Pat is a contributor to MSNBC, his syndicated column does not speak for the network or represent the views of MSNBC."