The Kicker

Radar Online “polled a number of current and former producers—the people with the best view of the tantrums and shouting matches—as well as some professional TV reporters and had them dish the dirt” (anonymously, of course) on who’s nasty and who’s nice in cable punditry. Oh, how the “former P.A. at CNN who has since […]

Except the horse isn’t dead—and neither are our nation’s guerilla satirists! Not surprisingly, they’re hiding out, starved yet resolved, in the tropical caves of the Internets. Joshua David Stein, formerly of Gawker fame, slammed this week’s New Yorker cover as anti-Semitic:* This week’s cover depicts a bunch of affluent whites carousing while their crustacean dinner […]

Here is Ashley Gilbertson, a photographer for the New York Times, talking about some of his (pretty stunning) images from Baghdad on MSNBC just now: Here is the New York Times‘ John F. Burns who between 2003 and 2007 reported extensively from Baghdad: Same newspaper. Same city. Same rooftop-perch-stand-up-location (well, maybe). Same hair. Same facial […]

What was that John Heilemann was saying in New York magazine about the McCain campaign turning into the Clinton campaign? The press is fetching pillows for Obama! the McCain campaign seems to be saying (also: We Want You, Anti-Chris-Matthews voters!) with this new video called “Obama Love” and featuring, among others, Matthews’ infamous “thrill up […]

I don’t know why I was even initially startled, given Today’s Media Environment. But: today, six weeks before the Republican National Convention, the Republican National Convention sent out a press release touting that “Convention Preparations On Target.” But don’t take the RNC’s word for it! The media say so. Quoted at the top of the […]

According to the new PEJ study, last week’s New Yorker cover* only came in fourth in quantity of press coverage received — behind “Obama’s trip,” “Iraq war as an issue,” and “Obama and McCain speak at NAACP.” Except that the time period studied was July 14-20, which only covers the very, very beginning pretty much […]

Barack Obama in response to a question just now during his press conference in Jordan (I couldn’t hear the question, but safe to assume it contained some variation on the words “McCain says”): My hope is to avoid a colloquy with the McCain campaign over the next few days. Good luck with that, Senator. (You […]

Last night, Jon Stewart compared Obama’s courting of the press prior to and during his overseas trip to the reality TV show, The Bachelor (“As I understand it on each night of the trip Barack Obama will give a rose to the anchors he wants to stay.”) It isn’t hard to see a similar application […]

The WaPo‘s ombudsman, Deborah Howell, joins the choir pleading for more substance in campaign coverage: My monitoring of political stories since Nov. 12, done with my assistant Jean Hwang, shows that almost twice as many “horse race” stories (675) have been written as stories on issues (295) and biographical background (99). Part of that reflects […]

Sneaking in one last pundit punch before the New Yorker hits newsstands with a new cover this week, meta-media critic Howard Kurtz weighed in—twice!—on Sunday to reiterate that he just didn’t get the joke. Appearing on Lou Dobbs on Sunday night to cover the coverage of Obama’s coming-of-age trip abroad, Kurtz rattled off all the […]

Per Lyn Sweet: During one school year at Columbia, Obama was a telemarketer in midtown Manhattan selling New York Times subscriptions over the phone, wearing a headset. He did not like the job because “he worried that some of the people he called couldn’t really afford the subscription.” Back in the early ’80s, years before […]

The LA Times reportedly will replace its Sunday Book Review with “a smaller number of pages appended to the Calendar section,” a move that several former editors of the section, including Steve Wasserman, are protesting. Wasserman wrote about the decline of books coverage (“Goodbye To All That”) for CJR’s September/October 2007 issue.

MSNBC teasing a segment on Obama’s overseas travel: Will this trip add enough meat to his foreign policy experience to quiet the critics? Sort of sums up what’s often wrong with campaign reporting: The focus on strategy, whether something Campaign A does will suffice to “quiet” criticisms from Campaign B. Not if/specifically how this trip […]

“Obama spoofers walk a fine line,” reports today’s LA Times. Didn’t the New York Times tell us this last Tuesday (“Want Obama In A Punchine? First, Find A Joke)? Well, the LA Times‘s story is datelined Chicago; surely, the Times likely figured, there is something to be learned in this city (the one where Obama […]