The Kicker

“Young people finding Obama way cooler than McCain,” reports the Associated Press, based on a few cool-kid-on-the-street interviews (prompted, it seems, by a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll showing “Obama has a 2-to-1 lead over McCain among 18-to-34-year-olds.”) Emily Goulding, a 25-year-old from Los Angeles, tells the AP: Obama is a tad cooler than McCain […]

Clutter=bad analogy

MSNBC loves Tuesdays!

Well-known news anchors for CBS, NBC and PBS will moderate the four scheduled presidential and vice-presidential debates this fall, per Swampland. Missing from that line-up? ABC News. (After those “shoddy, despicable performances” from Gibson and Stephanopoulos during that “dispiriting debate” in April?)

CJR writing about MSNBC talking about the New York Post writing about* Harper’s Bazaar (and its Tyra Banks-as-Michelle-Obama photo shoot and accompanying article in the magazine’s September issue). So, Harper Bazaar‘s got buzz of sorts (check out photo 6 in the slideshow of “the Obamas” in bed in matching Harvard sweatshirts! Read Tyra’s take on […]

Not only was that “could Obama’s skinniness be a liability?” Wall Street Journal article…let’s call it…thinly sourced, it also, according to Tim Noah at Slate, carried a “racial subtext.” Writes Noah: “When white people are invited to think about Obama’s physical appearance, the principal attribute they’re likely to dwell on is his dark skin. Consequently, […]

This ABC News-bentonite story that Glenn Greenwald has been all over at Salon raises so many Big Questions For Journalism (some of which we will get into as the week progresses). Kevin Drum asks a few: What should the standard be? In practice, most journalists refuse to identify their sources under any circumstances at all, […]

Remember that “could Obama’s skinniness be a liability?” story from Friday’s Wall Street Journal? The one about which Megan wrote, “No, this isn’t from The Onion“? The one in which the reporter, Amy Chozick, managed to find both a “housewife in Corpus Christi, Texas” who voted for Clinton in the primary and “a Clinton supporter” […]

“Would he still be alive if I didn’t write about him?” is one of the heartbreaking questions Kevin Cullen, a Boston Globe columnist asked himself yesterday. “He” being Rakan, a young Iraqi boy who in 2006 was shot and paralyzed when American soldiers “panicked and opened fire on the family car” — a wrenching incident […]

Did Forbes.com columnist James Brady perhaps just mean to think what he actually wrote? Brady is disappointed with Night of the Gun, the book by the New York Times‘ David Carr (or at least Brady’s disappointed with the excerpt he’s read; he’ll not read the book itself, he says). Why? Brady found the excerpt “an […]

Nightly network news ratings for the first half of 2008 are down from the year prior and broadcasters saw no ratings “bounces” from sending their Big Anchors overseas with Obama, according to today’s New York Times. But some news providers do seem to be benefiting from election coverage –like some cable news programs and web […]

Politico’s Avi Zenilman makes a great observation: The “race card” dispute between McCain and Obama has baredly shown up on the front page of swing-state papers across the country–so far–even if it made the front of The New York Times. A look at Newseum’s archive showed that the story made the front in Springfield, MO […]

Just when we thought it was over, the second season comes anon: it’s Politics As Usual time, folks, by which I mean it’s time for our celebrities, our golden calves, to weigh in and for Obama to rise nobly above them. We heard much since Black Eyed Peas front man will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” made […]