Campaign Desk
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November 20, 2009 04:43 PM
Greg Craig and Transparency
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...
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November 20, 2009 12:01 PM
Not For All the News in China, Part I
Former NYT Shanghai bureau chief Howard French on the coverage of Obama's trip to Asia
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...
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November 20, 2009 11:44 AM
Let’s Get this Party Organized
Strong Politico story takes a close look at the Tea Party movement
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...
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November 19, 2009 04:52 PM
Popular Diplomacy
The press pretends to be surprised that Obama's charm didn't work wonders in Asia
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....
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November 19, 2009 02:24 PM
Thoughts on the Gelman/Silver Op-Ed
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...
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November 18, 2009 04:10 PM
Laurel to the Missoulian
For telling the human story of health reform
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...
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November 17, 2009 01:33 PM
Straying from the Facts
AP's fact check of Palin reaches too far
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,
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November 17, 2009 08:00 AM
What Money Can’t Buy
Times story offers a unique picture of lobbyists at work
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...
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November 16, 2009 10:48 AM
Missing Persons
How will reform affect ordinary folks?
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...
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November 16, 2009 09:50 AM
Strike a Pose—Rogue (Rogue, Rogue…)
Sarah Palin’s Newsweek cover isn’t sexist. It’s actually kind of empowering.
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...
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November 13, 2009 02:38 PM
Do Doctors Always Tell the Truth?
No, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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...
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November 13, 2009 02:24 PM
Sarah Palin: Just Not That Popular
Continetti's unpersuasive pitch for a Palin comeback
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,...
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November 12, 2009 09:28 AM
A Shield for Bloggers?
Just who is a journalist today?
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...
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November 11, 2009 03:44 PM
Organizing Armey
Good Times Mag piece notes importance of institutions
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...
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Campaign Desk Feature
Q & A: The New York Times’s Damon Winter
The Pulitzer-winning photographer on covering contentious town halls
Splashed across the front page of the August 12 New York Times was a four-column photo of a man shouting at Sen. Arlen Specter at a town hall held earlier that morning in Lebanon, Pa., taken by photojournalist Damon Winter, who won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. The photograph neatly illustrated the recent trend of angry voters—usually white and usually seniors—confronting their senators and congressmen with practically apoplectic rage over health reform and other matters.
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Campaign Desk critiques media coverage of politics and policy each weekday, separating spin from substance through close reading, original reporting, and serious analysis.
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Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- Greg Craig and Transparency
- Not For All the News in China, Part I Former NYT Shanghai bureau chief Howard French on the coverage of Obama’s trip to Asia
