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A look at the sad day when "Meet the Press" threw in the objectivity towel and went the anti-gun way of many in the so-called "mainstream" media.

Back when the late Tim Russert moderated NBC's long-running news program "Meet the Press," I suspect that guests appearing on the show would have rated it as the most anxiety-inducing—albeit one of the fairest—political talk shows on television.

Not anymore.

Sadly, under new moderator David Gregory, "Meet the Press" has now turned into a farce.

If you want proof, just get on the Internet and look at the Aug. 8 installment of the show, when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg appeared as a guest.

When Gregory asked Bloomberg about his increasingly aggressive attempts to impose New York City-style gun bans on the rest of America, Bloomberg responded with his usual litany of half-truths, emotional rhetoric and political boilerplate.

Yet instead of cornering Bloomberg with the lack of logic underlying his arguments—or even challenging the mayor to substantiate his various claims—Gregory let the whoppers and tall tales float off unquestioned like the balloons at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

And New York's Mayor Mike Bloomberg just grinned like the cat that ate the canary.

The greatest shame and danger of it all is this: "Meet the Press" is the most-watched public-affairs talk show of the Sunday TV lineup.

So when moderator Gregory allows a politician's lies to stand unchallenged, he doesn't just let down his audience. He also fails in his duty to be a watchdog of government, instead becoming a lapdog of the politicians in power.

That's not journalism. It's PR, publicity, flack and fluff. And when it undermines or attacks the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, it directly endangers your firearms and your freedom.

Unasked Questions, Unchallenged Lies Any journalist who had done even the most minimal background research on Bloomberg's proposals, existing law and violent crime statistics could have come up with a thousand follow-up questions for the mayor that might have revealed some truth.

But Gregory couldn't seem to come up with a follow-up question to save his life.

In fact, in questioning Bloomberg, Gregory was so deferential and utterly unquestioning of Bloomberg's responses that he might as well have been a cub reporter for a high school newspaper interviewing the principal in the principal's office. It was a sham!

When Bloomberg spoke of the scourge of "illegal guns," Gregory could have asked him how passing another law could possibly affect behavior that's already illegal.

Yet Gregory didn't say a word.

When Bloomberg painted a tragic word picture of what it's like to go to the hospital to see a police officer felled by an armed criminal, Gregory could have asked the mayor why his own city's police want more prosecution instead of the new laws that he tries to push.

Gregory could have said, "Mr. Mayor, many police say the problem in cities like New York isn't a lack of laws, but a lack of enforcement. Police get some guns off the street, only to be faced with the same people back on the street within days or weeks to commit the same type of crime over and over again."

Yet Gregory didn't say a word.

When Bloomberg said that he planned to urge President Barack Obama to ban millions of semi-automatic firearms, any journalist worth a nickel would have challenged him to explain why, considering that murder has hit a 43-year low since the 1994 gun ban expired, and that Americans are buying those firearms for sport and self-defense at unprecedented rates.

Yet Gregory didn't say a word.

When Bloomberg told Gregory how Obama's secretary of education, Arne Duncan, adopted an anti-gun agenda after witnessing a criminal shooting in Chicago, that was a golden opportunity for Gregory to ask Bloomberg how yet another anti-gun law—in a city where handguns are already banned, even among the law-abiding—possibly could have prevented that crime.

Yet Gregory didn't say a word.

When Bloomberg said, "This is just an outrage, there's a federal law that says criminals can't have guns, and we should enforce the law and get guns off the streets," Gregory had a perfect chance to point out how, in cities just like Bloomberg's New York, existing laws aren't enforced—yet he just nodded, and Bloomberg just grinned.

Gregory never mentioned how it was the NRA—not Mayor Bloomberg and his "blame-guns-but-not-us" mayors club—that demanded, drafted and won legislation requiring that armed felons serve strict, mandatory sentences through "Truth in Sentencing" and "Three Strikes and You're Out" laws, "Project Exile" and other criminal justice reforms.

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