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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged President Obama

1. May 16, 2011 02:37 PM

   NYT On Why Journalists Like to Compare Presidents

   Did anybody think to ask journalists?

   By Joel Meares

   The New York Times’s Peter Baker had a piece in Sunday’s paper dealing with an issue close to many hearts at the CJR office—that reliable pundit go-to, the presidential comparison. You know the kind of thing: columns and covers suggesting Clinton’s having a Carter moment or that Obama’s walking in Reagan’s footsteps, about to take a Bush-senior-stumble, only to rise—Clinton-style—with...

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2. November 8, 2011 11:05 AM

   WaPo’s Misleading Social Security Piece

   Article doesn’t come close to telling the whole story

   By Trudy Lieberman

   By now we’re aware that The Washington Post supports serious changes in Social Security. In fact, the paper editorialized Friday that the word “thuggish” comes to mind when discussing ads from the AARP opposing Social Security cuts. “The crunch time for the congressional super committee has arrived, and with it comes a new round of self-centered, shortsighted intransigence on the...

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3. May 11, 2011 03:54 PM

   A 60 Percent Osama Bump?

   New approval rating raises a flap

   By Joel Meares

   An interesting debate about polling samples is underway this afternoon in the wake of a very encouraging new set of figures for President Obama. The figures come from a new and widely cited AP-GfK poll released today that shows the president’s approval rating hitting its highest point in two years (on the AP-GfK poll): 60 percent. That’s a significantly bigger...

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4. May 11, 2011 11:49 AM

   A Mining Disaster Follow-up Follows the Money

   L.A. Times’s revealing report on inaction after the WV coal mine explosion

   By Joel Meares

   A belated laurel to the Los Angeles Times team of Kim Geiger, Tom Hamburger, and Doug Smith, of the paper’s Washington bureau, for their story from last Sunday, “Families of dead miners feel let down by Washington.” The piece is a follow-up on promises made in the wake of the mining disaster that killed twenty-nine men at Upper Big Ranch...

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5. October 3, 2011 11:03 AM

   CJR Event: Science News and Government Transparency

   Access denied

   By Curtis Brainard

   Has the Obama administration lived up to its promise to make science more transparent and accessible to the public? An investigation in the current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) finds that despite President Obama’s early promise to create an open government, the nation’s science reporters feel there has been little to no progress since the Bush administration. Today,...

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6. April 14, 2011 01:11 PM

   Conservatives Get Colorful on Obama’s Deficit Speech

   More subdued libs are mostly pleased

   By Joel Meares

   The president’s speech yesterday was notable to my ears for two things: the surprisingly direct attack on Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan and the ideology underpinning it (un-American!), and Obama’s general vagueness on how he would achieve the ambitious goals he set. To be fair, though, it wasn’t as detail-lite as some of his previous orations, and pundits can...

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7. June 30, 2011 10:43 AM

   Halperin Sorry for Calling President a “Dick”; Still Suspended

   By Joel Meares

   Speaking on MSNBC’s Morning Joe today, TIME editor-at-large and Beltway Terminator Mark Halperin said the president acted like “kind of a dick” at yesterday’s press conference. Naturally, every Tom, Dick Mick, and Harry is seizing on Halperin’s comment because of its volcanic implications for the debate over how Washington should address the debt and job crises. Okay, that’s a...

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8. May 19, 2011 01:20 PM

   Obama’s Big Speech: Is Anyone in the Middle East Listening?

   By Greg Marx

   As the president prepared to deliver his remarks on American policy in the wake of the “Arab Spring,” the lead headline on the NYTimes.com home page read, “Obama Speech on Mideast Is Also Aimed at U.S. Audience.” But if some of the observations coming in from the Middle East are on target, the various domestic constituencies noted in Michael Shear’s...

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9. July 6, 2011 04:47 PM

   Obama’s Twitter Townhall

   "Win win" for White House and Twitter, 140 characters for everyone else

   By Erika Fry

   This summer Twitter brought us Anthony Weiner in his underpants; a Fox News-imposter who briefly hacked the President to death and surely a number of other hot but quickly forgotten scandals, gaffes and moments of personal disgrace. It would seem a strange time to step into this particular social media minefield, and yet the Obama administration has in fact leapt....

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10. June 2, 2011 04:04 PM

    On Monetary Policy and Presidential Politics

    The next election may depend on the economy. So where are the efforts to fix it?

    By Greg Marx

    In today’s New York Times, Binyamin Appelbaum notes what is thus far one of the most salient facts of the 2012 campaign: WASHINGTON — No American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has won a second term in office when the unemployment rate on Election Day topped 7.2 percent. Seventeen months before the next election, it is increasingly clear that President...

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11. December 15, 2011 05:48 PM

    Pinning Down the President

    Challenging Obama for overpromising on health care

    By Trudy Lieberman

    In an interview with President Obama on 60 Minutes Sunday night, it was apparent Steve Kroft was taking his questioning down a broad path. “It seems to be all the compromising is being done by you,” was one question. “If you look at the poll numbers, nobody’s particularly happy with you,” was another. When it came to the health reform...

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12. April 20, 2011 11:40 AM

    Presidential “Outburst” Much Ado About Nothing

    But Obama could have offered alternative critique

    By Joel Meares

    The magical algorithms that rank the importance and popularity of the day’s political stories at the website Memeorandum had this morning placed at the top of the heap a story about President Obama’s “outburst” during an interview with a Texas TV network. It is apparently, so far, the most distracting story on a day of many political distractions—Memeorandum also...

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13. May 2, 2011 01:25 PM

    Sunday Night Screenshots

    How the news websites did bin Laden

    By Lauren Kirchner

    This Monday morning, the headlines practically wrote themselves, and there was no question about which story would get top billing. Poynter has a selection of front pages from print editions taken from the Newseum website, with headlines ranging from the staid Wall Street Journal’s “U.S. Forces Kill Osama Bin Laden” to Edmonton Sun’s “BURN IN HELL!” to The Baltimore Sun’s...

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14. April 19, 2011 11:25 AM

    Uncivil Wars

    The president should be more civil, whatever that means

    By Joel Meares

    With Wednesday’s deficit speech and Thursday night’s leaked comments about “sneak”-ing through agendas and Paul Ryan not being “on the level,” the pundits are once again getting themselves tied up over questions of civility. Apparently, it was uncivil of the president to criticize Ryan’s deficit plan so directly in his speech Wednesday, when Ryan was in the room, and...

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15. December 30, 2011 02:41 PM

    What a Year!

    A foreign editor looks back in wonder at 2011

    By Thomas Nagorski

    On a weekend last January I sent Alex Marquardt, our newly minted Mideast correspondent, to cover a protest in Egypt. Tunisia’s long-time dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, had fallen in stunningly fast fashion a week before, and together Alex and I had wondered whether something similar was stirring in the Egyptian capital. I really didn’t think so—certainly we didn’t...

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