It is no coincidence that Newt Gingrich's rise in the polls comes after pushing back against the traditional media in recent debates and elsewhere, as the unholy alliance between Democrats and the MSM becomes increasingly obvious to anyone who is paying attention.  

On five occasions now Gingrich marvelously took on the presumptive smartest guys in the room and simply annihilated them.  Two such instances  occurred during the CNBC debate on November 8.  After being repeatedly pestered by Maria Bartiromo into responding to the question "What is the media reporting inaccurately about the economy?" Gingrich quickly replied, "I love humor disguised as a question.  That's terrific.  I have yet to hear a single reporter ask a single Occupy Wall Street person a single rational question about the economy that would lead them to say, for example, 'Who is going to pay for the park you are occupying if there are no businesses making a profit?'"  When asked a question about health care a little later, he again pushed back, saying that a question about 18% of the economy couldn't be answered in a 30 second sound bite.  

Both responses were met with wild applause from the audience.  And in a debate held in South Carolina on November 13 Gingrich completely schooled a clueless Scott Pelley over the rule of law concerning killing American born terrorists overseas. Again, an eruption of applause, and even a "well said" from one of his competitors on the stage.  And after recently learning that the Washington Post's Aaron Blake was trolling ("crowd sourcing") for dirt on the former Speaker on Twitter, the Blaze reported Gingrich's response:

"It's a little sad to see a paper the quality of the Washington Post stoop to that, which used to be the National Enquirer approach to life. But that's just the nature of where we are today...I wish they would crowd-source to discover what [Obama] did at Columbia University, and I wish they would crowd-source to figure out what he did with Saul Alinsky's ideas on the South Side of Chicago.  But the news media's never quite found itself as excited about the facts about Barack Obama.  Would rather worry about rumors about conservatives than facts about the President." 

Finally, there is his masterful response to Juan Williams' assertion last Monday that references to our "food stamp president" and suggestion that inner city youths pursue jobs as janitors were somehow insulting to blacks. Newt's crescendo line that he will "continue to find ways to help poor people find a job, get a job, and learn someday to own the job" prompted the first ever standing ovation at a Presidential debate.

Memo to conservative candidates nationwide: taking on the establishment media is not tilting at windmills. It's scoring big points with the voters.