Politics
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October 10, 2007 02:00 PM
The Frost Story
Bloggers portray a different "reality"
The fight over a bill calling for a $35 billion increase in funding for the SCHIP program, (passed by both houses of Congress and vetoed by the president last week), which helps states insure uninsured children in need, has been ugly, but over the past few days, it got a whole lot uglier.
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The kickoff to the latest... -
October 03, 2007 11:54 AM
Milbank on Blackwater
How WaPo columnist distinguished himself
It's hard to find anything new under the sun when cracking open the morning papers to read the accounts of Congressional hearings. Reporters dutifully quote the Congressmen and women asking questions, the witnesses giving answers, and toss in a few words from various outside "experts" to spice things up a bit.
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That's why Dana Milbank's story... -
September 26, 2007 01:12 PM
Iranian Media Claims Victory
Who cares?
On Monday afternoon, I was asked to do a radio interview reacting to the visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Columbia University earlier in the day. The host asked if I thought that the Iranian media--in the face of evidence to the contrary--would simply splice together clips of Ahmadinejad's applause lines and claim victory in the debate. I though...
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September 17, 2007 01:28 PM
President blogger panel gets mixed results
The blogs on the case
Remember the good old days of the 2004 election season, when the Bush campaign would hold "public" events that were stocked with rabid Bush supporters, and anyone who didn't unflinchingly back the president was escorted out of the event, or denied entry?
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Well, something akin to those good old days went down last week when the White... -
August 31, 2007 12:11 PM
FUBAR
PBS runs into the FCC's nanny-state regulations
It's official, we've become a nation of children. And like children, we can't be trusted to hear nasty swear words--even while watching violent, televised images from a war zone.
Got that? Violence, OK. Bad language, verboten!
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On September 23, PBS begins airing Ken Burns' fourteen-hour World War II documentary "The War," and in interviews with former... -
August 10, 2007 03:06 PM
Krauthammer, Goldfarb, and Emanuel
Getting the TNR mess wrong on purpose
In the continuing story of Private Scott Beauchamp and the disputed, and partially discredited, "Baghdad Diarist" stories he wrote for The New Republic, there's yet another wrinkle.
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I'm not talking about the debates over the anonymous source who told The Weekly Standard that Beauchamp signed documents stating that he made everything up--something that no one, not even the... -
August 07, 2007 03:27 PM
Obama blames the press
The senator wasn’t clear on Pakistan, and so he smacks an easy scapegoat
As Ben Smith at Politico points out today, Barack Obama has been blaming the media for misrepresenting his position on Pakistan, articulated in his big foreign policy speech last week. "The misreporting that was done needs to be cleared up," Obama told a Sioux City, Iowa, audience yesterday. "I never called for an invasion of Pakistan."
The original speech...
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August 03, 2007 02:15 PM
Obama Flamed Again
This time, though, he wuz robbed
Barack Obama is being pummeled again for his public statements about foreign policy. The candidate told the Associated Press yesterday that he would not use nuclear weapons against Al Qaeda "under any circumstances," drawing criticism from Hillary Clinton, among others. "Presidents should be careful at all times in discussing the use and nonuse of nuclear weapons," Clinton said. "Presidents...
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July 30, 2007 02:15 PM
Clinton v. Obama
The campaign’s first throw-down is thin stuff
Looks like we have ourselves a fight. All three major dailies today have accounts of the rhetorical rumble between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama over the answers each gave to a question at the CNN/YouTube debate earlier this week. The initial argument, over what value each candidate would place on diplomacy in a future administration, has now been almost...
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July 27, 2007 01:20 PM
YouTube Debate Has Legs
Incredibly weak ones
Newspapers and bloggers continue to pick over Monday's YouTube debate, arguably the most sensational story thus far of the campaign season. Unfortunately, much of this afterlife of the debate has centered on an insubstantial back-and-forth between the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama camps. "For Clinton and Obama, A Debate Point Won't Die," reads the Washington Post headline, referring to...
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July 24, 2007 03:03 PM
TNR And 'Scott Thomas'
Someone needs to step up with some proof
By now you're probably familiar with the flap over whether or not a soldier reportedly serving in Iraq, who has been writing for The New Republic under the pseudonym "Scott Thomas," has been telling the truth in a series of articles he has produced for the magazine since February.
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Thomas' latest "Baghdad Diaries" missive, in which he... -
July 24, 2007 01:18 PM
The YouTube Debate
After all the hype, coverage is sober, possibly boring
The arc of the YouTube debate phenomenon is a classic case of what the press does almost reflexively--help build something up (even if just implicitly) only to then tear it down, or at the very least undercut it.
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After weeks of anticipatory coverage (it wasn't all on CNN) that kicked around the titillating question, "Is the YouTube-CNN... -
July 20, 2007 02:23 PM
NYT, CBS parse new Clinton poll
In very different ways
Today's New York Times/CBS poll on Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was reported, as expected, by both outlets. But despite identical data, the stories' ledes drew a stark contrast. (The national poll was conducted between July 9-17 with 1,554 randomly selected adults across party lines.)
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The Times headline read "Women Supportive but Skeptical of Clinton, Poll Says." The... -
July 20, 2007 01:18 PM
Clinton's Letter to the Pentagon...
Misreported
It being summer and all, we realize that a lot of people are basically phoning it in at work, but when it comes to the press, doing half a job can be worse than not doing anything at all. Take the furor that has arisen in the blogosphere and the mainstream media over Defense Undersecretary Eric Edelman's pathetic response to...
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May 22, 2007 01:37 PM
Smart people gather to talk about politics and the Web, nothing interesting is said
Blogging confabs bring out the smart guys, but few new ideas are ever aired.
If you're anything like us, when you get an invitation to attend a day-long event that promises to bring bloggers, Internet activists, journalists, and political activists together under one roof, you think hard about it. But in the end, you go. So it was that I found myself at Pace University in lower Manhattan last Friday for the "Personal Democracy...
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May 16, 2007 02:05 PM
Banning the bad news in Iraq
The Iraqi government is chasing journalists away from covering stories.
The Guardian reported this morning that police in Baghdad "fired shots into the air to force a group of Iraqi journalists to leave" the scene of a car bombing that killed seven people.
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This follows on the heels of a declaration by the Iraqi government that reporters will no longer be allowed access to sites of... -
May 14, 2007 03:43 PM
Opposition research, tall tales, and the dregs of campaign reporting
Turnabout might be fair play, but it doesn't make for good journalism.
A zeitgeisty piece this morning by Michael Scherer on Salon explores how the Web--most notably Matt Drudge--is breaking stories that the mainstream media is ignoring thus far in this elongated election season.
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We explored the topic a few weeks back with regard to how Josh Marshall and his site, Talkingpointsmemo.com, doggedly connected the dots on... -
May 10, 2007 03:17 PM
Ooooooh, Web Ads!
Web ads are great, but the political battles will still be fought, for better or worse, in the old media.
Entering the third presidential election in the Age of the Blog, you'd think that people might stop marveling at the epoch-making power of the Internet, and just accept that this new(ish) form of media is influential, it's here to stay, and most importantly, it matters.
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But that doesn't mean that everything Web 2.0 touches is gold. Take for... -
May 08, 2007 04:12 PM
Look Who's Dining with the Queen
More mixing of reporters with politicians over a polite dinner shouldn't sit well with the public.
Remember the sturm und drang two weeks ago following the annual Washington Correspondents Association dinner? The capital press corps was chastised once again for their coziness to power, a few scathing columns attacked a culture of journalistic complacency, and eventually The New York Times announced, through Frank Rich's Sunday op-ed, that it would no longer attend the event.
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May 03, 2007 02:17 PM
Is This What the Army Thinks of Us?
A new Army manual paints American reporters as a national security threat.
It looks like it is official: the United States Army thinks that American reporters are a threat to national security. Thanks to some great sleuthing by Wired's "Danger Room" blogger Noah Shachtman, the Army's new operational security guidelines (OPSEC) hit the Web in a big way yesterday, and the implications they have for reporters -- who are grouped in...
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Desks
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- Baucus Watch, Part III Montana reporter digs deep into the senator’s white paper
- No More Questions A punctuation suggestion for Bob Herbert
The Audit Business
- WSJ Watchdogs Sketchy Conseco Insurance Move
- Ebony on the Fall of Detroit The magazine reports the U.S. car industry’s demise is hitting blacks especially hard