The Kicker

Band-Aids are the new gauze

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Paul Farhi reports that the McCain campaign is offering incentives (points! prizes!) to people for spreading campaign rhetoric online (a.k.a., AstroTurfing, via comments sections on selected web sites). “Reward points” or other incentives for political work aren’t a new concept. The Republican National Committee started a rewards program for volunteer fundraisers several years ago. More […]

“The media can make anyone sound mysterious and unknowable,” writes Howard Kurtz in today’s Washington Post, and then tries to prove that by penning the “scary” voiceover for an imagined anti-McCain ad: John McCain was a Navy hell-raiser who got shot down over North Vietnam. What do we know about what really went on in […]

Can you tell a lot about a presidential candidate by which superhero he says he would be? Entertainment Weekly (Ew.com) asked John McCain and Barack Obama this question — among others about their “pop culture favorites” — and both candidates cited Batman, though their explanations were slightly (tellingly?) different. McCain: Batman. He does justice sometimes […]

Jeff Bercovici explores what he calls the “woman problem” at The Wall Street Journal, which he describes as “if not a pattern” of increased boy’s clubbishness since Murdoch bought the paper, then “at least a confluence worthy of comment.” My favorite part: “There are some ‘To be sures,’” says one staffer, referring to the sentence […]

Confirmed: the people who bring us our campaign news all read the same handful of blogs (HuffPo, Ambinder, TPM, The Page…).* Via AJR, some communications firm asked 69 political reporters to list their must-read blogs and the results are so ho-hum predictable. Doesn’t seem healthy. Conventional wisdom is catching. You guys need to get out […]

I’m a little late in seeing this, but the Wall Street Journal had a fantastic article this past weekend looking at various research suggesting that people don’t tell the truth to pollsters, on a whole range of issues. Including their opinions on race. A timely subject, to say the least, as people debate how solid […]

Over the last several weeks I’ve been making phone calls here and there, tracking the slow progress of the National Enquirer’s allegations against Democratic heavyweight John Edwards (namely that he has fathered a child with Rielle Hunter, a high paid former campaign consultant, and engineered hush money and an elaborate cover up of said child) […]

Obama this. Obama that. “48% of the public says they have been hearing ‘too much’ about Obama lately,” according to a Pew poll (26% say the same of McCain). Good timing: the candidate is apparently going on vacation soon. He’ll get a little break from us; we’ll get a little break from him. What, you […]

A true outrage

Two separate and unequal press centers; ever-changing rules for Who Can Report From/About Tiananmen Square (And Other Landmarks) and When; balancing “business prerogatives” and “saying serious things about serious topics.” These are some of the challenges for reporters covering the Beijing Olympics, per the New York Observer. And, there’s the sweat issue. Maybe all the […]

Today, the New York Times‘ Maureen Dowd

The Boston Globe has an article today about how the presidential candidates “strive to establish [an] image and make it stick.” Not once in the article does the reporter mention the very vital role reporters play in “making it stick.” The lede: This year’s presidential campaign is shaping up as a case study in how […]

I know I’m supposed to be focusing on the headline to the PEJ’s Campaign Coverage Index (that last week “McCain makes as much news as Obama” “for the first time since this general election campaign began in early June”) but I’m sort of hung up on what that “news” consisted of — or, the top […]