The Kicker

More Americans may want to BBQ with Barack, but the Associated Press-Yahoo News throws John a polling bone today: More pet-owning Americans prefer McCain (particularly Americans with dogs) than Obama. Is it me, or is this poll presented with more detail (“analysis”?) than the average poll story on a Topic of Greater Concern? We learn […]

Josh Marshall argues that the press coverage of McCain’s economic plan (which Marshall summarizes as, “He’s pledging to balance the budget in four years and when asked for details he says, ‘We’ll get back to you on that.’” ) is representative of “the mad pass John McCain gets on everything.” Writes Marshall: Now, the general […]

That news meeting? The one where the editor introduced the New Business Model? Here’s what it looked like through the eyes of the intern in metro (because of course she blogged about it): Through most of this meeting, I just wanted to shout, “Amen!” and “You go girl!” because Janet [Coats, editor-in-chief of the Tampa […]

Here’s an Associated Press article that pretends to be about what the White House offers child residents (“an unparalleled view of history in the making, and worldly experiences other children can only dream of”) when it’s really about what child residents in the White House offer us, the press. Which is to say: Seriously, how […]

Bill Clinton famously suggested to Charlie Rose last December that to vote for Barack Obama, given what Clinton called his limited experience in national politics, is to “roll the dice” on the presidency. Time this week suggests that a vote for McCain might actually be more dicey, so to speak. How so? Well, McCain likes […]

About all those election-related “media firestorms over supposedly revealing incidents that never actually took place,” as Paul Krugman described them in his column* Friday (What Wes Said being the most recent, Howard Dean’s “scream” being a familiar one from four years ago): Are we likely to see more of them between now and November; and, […]

Thoughtful post today about the newspaper industry on the New York Times‘s Outposts blog. In the wake of “perhaps the bloodiest week yet of a year where many papers are fighting for their lives,” Timothy Egan notes that, be it in print or online, more people are reading newspaper content than ever before. Why, then, […]

The Nation is running a little contest to get people to sign-up for their email lists. The grand prize? One lucky subscriber will spend “A Day at The Nation.” The promo offers a peek at editor in chief Katrina vanden Heuvel’s datebook (“9:30 am-finish article, 11 am—editorial meeting…”). Now doesn’t that sound exciting! The problem […]

The Onion gets it, at least

So the people at Fox & Friends aren’t feeling so Fox-&-Friendly, apparently, toward The New York Times. On June 28, the Times published an article, “Fox News Finds Its Rivals Closing In,” written by media reporter Jacques Steinberg and edited by TV editor Steven Reddicliffe, that discussed “ominous trends” in the network’s viewership: The most […]

Over at Time.com, Michael Scherer (who once worked here at CJR) observes: Every day, flip-flop charges bang up against the political press like moths on a screen door. And we let some of them in, sometimes with the unexamined conceit that any shift in position is a window into the candidate’s lack of character, toughness […]

Yesterday, my colleague Justin questioned the Washington Post‘s news judgment in running its Obama mortgage story. At Washington Monthly, Kevin Drum “demand[s] that Barack Obama release his FICO score” before wondering, “seriously, folks,” whether “the beltway press corps” has gone “insane,” calling the story “a complete non-scandal over the fact that people with high incomes […]

Pat Kiernan, the NY1 News anchor who reads New Yorkers’ newspapers to them every morning in his In The Papers segment, offers these thoughts– in a New York Observer profile — on what ails TV News : I think the presentation of TV news is as much the problem as the technological changes. People like […]

At one point in his 7,000-plus-word profile of Rush Limbaugh for this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, reporter Zev Chafets lays out his purpose: “I had come to talk to Limbaugh about his role in Republican Party politics.” But along the way, it seems Chafets was distracted by all the bling in Rush’s World, so […]

“Even human rights purist [and New York Times columnist] Nicholas Kristof” has lauded President Bush’s HIV/AIDS work, writes Danielle Maestretti in the Utne Reader in a piece headlined “Bush, the AIDs President? Don’t believe everything you read in the newspaper,” in which she convincingly questions the congealing conventional wisdom about this Bush “legacy” and whether […]