CJR : Campaign Desk

Greg Craig and Transparency

2009-11-20T21:43:50Z

Time’s Massimo Calabresi and Michael Weisskopf have a months long tick-tock chronicling the steps and missteps of soon-to-be-former White House Counsel Greg Craig. There’s too much good stuff in there to bother with a block quote. In essence, the article lays out how Craig, who thought that both the rule of law and Obama’s campaign rhetoric pointed...

Not For All the News in China, Part I

2009-11-20T17:01:03Z

The past week’s flurry of stories and opinion pieces chronicling President Barack Obama’s fortunes in the Far East made much of the global recession and China's role as a major investor in the U.S. In almost every analysis of the trip, Chinese officials were portrayed as optimistic and newly emboldened to stand up to American interests and Obama...

Let's Get this Party Organized

2009-11-20T16:44:42Z

In Politico today, Ken Vogel has a very interesting and worthwhile article about the emerging internal conflicts—both philosophical and personal—within the Tea Party movement. Vogel writes: The grass-roots activists powering the movement have become increasingly divided on core questions such as whether to focus their efforts on shaping policy debates or elections, work on a local, regional, state...

Popular Diplomacy

2009-11-19T21:52:10Z

As media narratives go, this whole “Barack Obama is a popular individual and a gifted speaker with a compelling personal story, but doesn’t automatically get everything he wants!” thing is getting awfully old, awfully fast. The theme popped up months ago, when the press began to notice that though America had elected a “change” president, the world was—surprise!—not changing overnight....

Thoughts on the Gelman/Silver Op-Ed

2009-11-19T19:24:10Z

As anyone who’s read my writing can probably tell, I think political journalism should pay more attention to what political scientists have to say. So I was heartened to see that today’s New York Times includes an op-ed co-authored by Andrew Gelman, the Columbia statistician and political scientist, along with Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com and Columbia...

Laurel to the Missoulian

2009-11-18T21:10:47Z

Last Sunday, the Missoulian in Missoula, Montana did what Campaign Desk has been urging papers to do--it showed how its readers how might fare under health reform. Missoulian state bureau reporter Mike Dennison interviewed five families to see what reform would mean for them under the proposal crafted by their very own senator, Max Baucus. The Baucus plan...

Straying from the Facts

2009-11-17T18:33:31Z

Over the weekend, there was a bit of a dust-up between the Associated Press, Sarah Palin, and their respective supporters over the AP’s “fact check” of Palin’s campaign memoir, Going Rogue. Much of the discussion focused on the AP’s decision to put eleven different reporters on the story (for more on this, see here, here,

What Money Can't Buy

2009-11-17T13:00:00Z

Robert Pear’s excellent story in Sunday’s New York Times, about how lobbyists framed the health care debate in Congress, probably made the front page because of its “smoking gun” quality. Pear, having noticed that House members from both parties had offered strikingly similar statements on a provision of the reform bill into the Congressional Record, tracked down e-mails...

Missing Persons

2009-11-16T15:48:11Z

Come on now. We’ve heard enough about the political horserace of health reform—way too much of Nancy, Max, and Olympia. No doubt we’ll be overfed on the theatrics of the coming Joe and Harry Show; but that’s not where the story is. The real story is how reform will affect millions of people who will have to live with...

Strike a Pose—Rogue (Rogue, Rogue…)

2009-11-16T14:50:00Z

Move over, third-wave feminism. Second-wave Palinism is upon us. Yep: Sarah Barracuda is back. (Or, to be more accurate: she’s baaaaaaaaa-ack….) And with her, as always, comes the attendant entourage of excitement and frustration and hand-wringing and controversy: in this case, the dubiously factual memoir. The semi-awkward Oprah appearance. The Playgirl debut of Levi Johnston and a certain high-profile hockey...

Do Doctors Always Tell the Truth?

2009-11-13T19:38:06Z

Kudos to the Journal Sentinel and reporter John Fauber for digging up the difference between fact and fiction when it comes to medical researchers at the University of Wisconsin medical school. At least nine doctors there told the medical journals which published their research findings that they had no conflicts of interest with companies that figured into their...

Sarah Palin: Just Not That Popular

2009-11-13T19:24:40Z

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page takes a break from running Sarah Palin-authored op-eds today and instead runs a piece by one of her biggest journalistic supporters, Matthew Continetti of The Weekly Standard. It is, as Brendan Nyhan has already noted, not very persuasive. Continetti, whose book The Persecution of Sarah Palin comes out this week,...

A Shield for Bloggers?

2009-11-12T14:28:53Z

It’s been a long, winding journey for the shield law. But the bill, which would provide journalists with some protection from being forced to testify in federal cases, has never appeared closer to becoming a reality than it does today. On March 31, the House of Representatives passed a version of the Free Flow of Information Act—the shield...

Organizing Armey

2009-11-11T20:44:07Z

I’m late to the party in discussing Michael Sokolove’s profile of Dick Armey in last week’s New York Times Magazine, but for anyone interested in the current state of American politics, it’s really worth a read. Much of the discussion on the Web has focused on Armey’s entertainingly exaggerated sense of self or his apparent...

Infant Mortality, Abortion, and WellPoint's Tonik Policy

2009-11-11T14:40:24Z

First, there was last week’s news that the U.S. ranks thirtieth in the world when it comes to infant mortality. American infant mortality rates are more than twice as high as infant mortality rates in such countries as Japan, Norway, and the Czech Republic. Dr. Alan Fleischman, medical director for the March of Dimes, told The...