The Kicker

Hey, Ron Fournier! You know that whole “accountability journalism” thing you’re trying? Well, there’s a fine line between accountability and mockery. Take this little gem of a lede (h/t: TNR) from your organization’s assessment of Sarah Palin’s most recent TrooperGate turnabout: ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Less than a week after balking at the Alaska Legislature’s […]

Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezenski, and the Financial Times‘s Chrystia Freeland on MSNBC this morning: SCARBOROUGH: Chrystia, let me tell you what I would love for you to have somebody write an article on. I’m serious. I would like to have a study of all of the CEOs who were fired over the past eight years […]

From Katie Couric’s blog: Friends come up to me wondering if I’ll ask [during an interview with Sarah Palin this week] about the rumors online, all the gossipy stuff that seems to sell magazines and mean so little in terms of Palin’s preparedness for the job. This election is too important, and we have only […]

Ah, yes: CNN: “McCain drifts away from legacy of deregulation.” “Drifts away” sounding more benign than, say, “slinks away” or “would rather you not focus on.” (Personally, I’m hearing Christopher Cross’s voice: “Sailing! Takes me away! And soon I will be free” of my deregulation legacy.) CNN might then have done a bit more to […]

From the pool report* from Gov. Sarah Palin’s “meeting” with Afghan president Hamid Karzai in New York today: Palin, her legs crossed and at one point patting her heart, was leaning in eagerly and smiling. Karzai, wearing his traditional clothes but without his trademark karakul hat, was also grinning while discussing [his] child. His remarks […]

The world’s largest gumball, for one

But what on earth would they call it?

When Sarah Palin joined the Republican ticket last month,

And I was hoping I could ignore O.J. Simpson Trial, Vegas Edition. The New York Times reports that a key witness, Thomas Riccio, yesterday testified that ABC News paid him $15,000. ABC News said it paid not for the interview but for “other materials.” Mr. Riccio’s recording of the planning and execution of the meeting […]

CJR has praised it before, but the best explainer I’ve seen—scratch that—the best explainer I’ve heard on the how the world’s financial system became mired in bad mortgage debt was a May episode of Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life, co-produced with NPR News. The hour-long piece entitled “The Giant Pool of Money” was reported […]

Bono (of U2 and the One Campaign) and Jeffrey Sachs (of Columbia’s Earth Institute) are blogging for the Financial Times this week (on the occasion of the the Millennium Development Goals summit). Bono describes himself as the FT‘s roving reporter in the canyons of Manhattan. While the world upends on Wall Street, I’ll be mostly […]

Washington Post: As of this writing, it has been 39 days and 22 hours since Sen. John McCain last held a news conference (despite having promised to hold weekly Q&A sessions with the press if he’s elected). According to the Democrats, it’s been 24 days and 11 hours since his running mate, Sarah Palin, held […]

The American Society of Magazine Editors has named the finalists for its annual magazine cover art contest. “Cover of the Year” finalists below; full list of finalists here.

60 Minutes last night featured “a revealing side-by-side look at the candidates and their positions” (Steve Kroft interviewed Obama; Scott Pelley interviewed McCain). The results were better, journalistically-speaking, than the “side-by-side look” 60 Minutes gave us of Obama and Clinton back in February (Kroft on Obama, Couric on Clinton) in that actual issues were actually […]

The “press tent was a lonely place to be” at last night’s 60th Primetime Emmy Awards, reports Variety, due “the distance between the [Nokia] theater and the press tent, which was perched on the roof of a parking garage some distance behind theater” such that “more than two hours into the show, only a half-dozen […]