Campaign Desk
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November 06, 2009 03:45 PM
Jumping to Confusion
We can’t know what Fort Hood means until we know what happened
It’s been just over twenty-four hours since Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan opened fire on his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood—more than enough time, clearly, for our pundits to begin opining on what it all means. And though those interpretations are varied, there is one headline that could apply to nearly all of them: Tragic Massacre Vindicates My Pre-existing Political Convictions.
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November 05, 2009 12:58 PM
The Price of Medical Services
Is the conversation finally starting?
By now, most of the health care cognoscenti realize that we have not had a robust discussion of medical costs. You could say that the public has been misled by the pols and the advocacy groups, which have been preaching that affordable quality health care will magically appear at the stroke of the president’s pen. For months, Campaign Desk
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November 04, 2009 03:20 PM
Tea Leaves, Tarot Cards, and Ballots
One more round on divining what the off-year elections mean
The coalition of media outlets pushing back against over-interpretation of the national significance of off-year elections lost a key ally today. Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal offered a worthwhile reality check on the hype surrounding the voting, but, via Brendan Nyhan, here is the lede of a front-page story in today’s WSJ:
A Republican sweep...
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November 04, 2009 11:13 AM
Health Reform Lessons from Massachusetts, Part IX
What does the public say?
Three years ago, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts enacted a far-reaching health reform law that politicians and the media hailed as a model for other states and the federal government. That law has become the blueprint for health system change on a national scale, and its advocates have aggressively marketed some variation of the Massachusetts plan as the reform of choice....
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November 03, 2009 03:23 PM
Pushback on Polls’ Portents
Some outlets question broader meaning of today's elections
With the off-year Election Day now upon us, press outlets as diverse as Fox News and The New York Times are continuing to overemphasize the broader significance of today’s contests. (The lead headline at NYTimes.com all day has read, “3 Contests on Election Day Could Signal Political Winds”--with, of course, a caution deep in the text...
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November 02, 2009 02:31 PM
Press to Cliché: We Just Can’t Quit You
Media acknowledges narrative's limits; advances it anyway
On Tuesday, November 3, voters around the country will go to the polls to elect officials in a variety of races. These campaigns, known as the “off-year elections” because of the absence of regularly scheduled federal contests, are mostly obscure. But a few of them—the gubernatorial races in New Jersey and (especially) Virginia, and the House race in New York’s...
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November 02, 2009 09:51 AM
The Devil in the Details, Part II
Who can afford health insurance after reform?
Every lobbyist swarming Capitol Hill these days knows that, when it comes to legislation, the devil is always lurking in the details, not lounging in the concepts. Yet it is concepts, not details, which are drifting down to the public--who will be in for a surprise when they realize that reform is not what they think it is. How these...
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October 30, 2009 06:38 PM
Compromise Reached on Senate Shield Law
Q&A with Newspaper Association of America's Paul Boyle
Today the prime Senate sponsors of the Free Flow of Information Act—or, as it’s commonly known, the shield bill—announced that they’d reached a compromise with the White House on the bill’s most contentious issues: who would be considered a journalist, and just how much protection journalists would get from subpoenas demanding testimony.
The compromise bill’s definition of...
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October 30, 2009 05:01 PM
More on the Karzai Connection
Skeptics ask: What's the big deal?
When I compiled my round-up of responses to the New York Times’s story on the CIA-Ahmed Wali Karzai connections, I hadn’t yet seen Jeff Stein’s interesting contrarian take, given the following subhed by Foreign Policy: “Is the United States paying off Kandahar's first sibling? Maybe, but who cares?”
Stein has previously written...
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October 30, 2009 12:24 PM
“Dr. No” Gets a Pass
NYT lets Coburn's bogus diagnosis slide
The front page of today’s New York Times features a profile of Tom Coburn, the proudly obstructionist Republican senator from Oklahoma. Though Coburn is a staunch social conservative (according to the story, he favors the death penalty for abortion doctors), he seems to be less an ideologue than a crank, a stance that has a long tradition in...
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October 30, 2009 11:28 AM
The Times Misses the Mark
A health care lobbyist puff piece that goes nowhere
What could The New York Times have been thinking when it fronted a piece the other day serving up some personal tidbits about two major health care lobbyists—Billy Tauzin for the pharmaceutical manufacturers and Karen Ignagni for the insurance companies. Was it a health care celebrity piece a la People, or just another horse-race story?
Whatever it was...
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October 29, 2009 05:17 PM
Guess Who?
Wash Times highlights limits of Obama visitor disclosure policy
Yesterday, The Washington Times reported some none-too-flattering revelations suggesting a pay-to-play scheme inside the Obama White House.
According to documents acquired by the Times, donors who raise more than $300,000 for Democratic campaigns are rewarded with participation in bimonthly phone calls with senior administration officials, along with occasional face to face meetings and briefings. Matthew Mosk, the article’s...
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October 28, 2009 03:48 PM
Correction Fluid
Lessons from the Scalia misquote heard ‘round the Web
It seemed too strange to be true—and, in the end, it was. A story posted to The Huffington Post yesterday announced rather shocking news: “Scalia on Brown v. Board of Education: I Would Have Dissented.” On the site's homepage--where the story spent much of the day--the headline was even more provocative:
The story, it...
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October 28, 2009 01:09 PM
The Karzai Connection
Commentators react to the NYT's big scoop
Today’s New York Times leads with an extraordinary article reporting that Ahmed Wali Karzai—the brother of Afghan president Hamid Karzai, suspected of being a significant player in that country’s lucrative drug trade—has been on the CIA payroll for much of the past eight years “for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that...
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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
- Jumping to Confusion We can’t know what Fort Hood means until we know what happened
- The Price of Medical Services Is the conversation finally starting?
