Tom Shales obsesses over the applause and non-applause of the president's speech last night before finally moving on to a laughable review of it.

What Shales does not mention, but he most certainly is well aware of, is that the members of the military that were present were actively discouraged from engaging in applause. All Mr. Shales can muster up is that they "were standing at attention."

Shales is surprised that the major networks covered the president's speech:

Bush's speech aired on all the major broadcast networks, something of a surprise since as of mid-afternoon yesterday, neither NBC nor CBS had plans to cover it. They felt, correctly, that the speech contained nothing new or newsy and that it didn't merit a half-hour or more of prime time. But something changed as the day wore on, and Bush showed up on NBC and CBS as well as on ABC and the various cable news networks that previously had announced they would cover the speech.

Perhaps the networks rightly figured that they might actually offend a sizable percentage of television viewers if they had not aired a major prime-time address by the president. Just because Tom Shales doesn't like him doesn't mean that a public address by Mr. Bush is not news.

Shales meanders on:

Refusing to air the speech probably would have led to unpleasantness -- or at the least given the new subculture of bellicose bloggers another alleged media conspiracy to shriek about.

You mean things like that RaTHerGate scandal, Mr. Shales? Shales is probably one of the few that still believes that those memos were the real thing, or that if they weren't authentic then the crux of the story was still true, therefore justifying it.

It goes without saying that Shales does not like bloggers, because they make him look like the media dinosaur that he has become.

This was not a major speech by Bush, nor was it particularly well delivered until the end, when he seemed to be straining to hold back his emotions as he spoke of the U.S. troops fighting and dying in Iraq. He referred several times to violent insurgents who stage daily sneak attacks -- calling them "ruthless killers," among other things -- but at the end of the speech said, "They are no match for the men and women of the United States military."

Wrong. It was a major speech, it was very well delivered, and it was received even better, unless you were viewing the speech through the stultifying and myopic prism that Mr. Shales obviously was.

Having made the decision to carry the speech, NBC and CBS could hardly then come on the air and say it wasn't important.

Perhaps those two networks actually thought that the speech was important, which would evidence an infinitely greater display of judgment about what is news than Mr. Shales has displayed.

(Article via Hugh Hewitt)

Let Freedom Ring wasn't too impressed with Mr. Shales, either.