The Kicker

Breaking News! More Americans would rather barbecue with Barack Obama than with John McCain. How can McCain get a much-needed BBQ bounce? Time to (hand-)feed the press again at the old Arizona vacation home. But really, it’s just a poll (albeit one with an appealing holiday-weekend-during -election-year hook). Just a snapshot. And we have to […]

Already this morning I have been repeatedly exposed (and, admittedly, each time turned to be exposed) to the following “disturbing video” on MSNBC: “BABY LAUNCHED INTO AIR” An infant, seen lying on a large inflated pillow, is then launched into the air as a teenager jumps on the pillow, and finally lands with a thud […]

One New York Times columnist complains about another New York Times columnist’s column about yet another New York Times columnist… via a letter to the editor published in the Times. Sort of like IM’ing your cubicle-mate to ask her to turn down her music rather than swiveling your chair around and making the request yourself? […]

If that powerful McClatchy series whet your appetite for Gitmo news: the New York Times‘ Scott Shane reports today on “a chart of ‘coercive management techniques’” (like “Exploitation of Wounds” and “Filthy, Infested Surroundings”) and the effects of these techniques (like “Weakens Mental and Physical Ability To Resist”), a chart that was used by military […]

Thanks to a CJR reader for pointing us to The Onion News Network’s sharp parody of the always cringe-making, often crass product placement/promotion woven into the typical morning news show — in this case, it is Today Now!‘s “Home Depot Fallen Heroes Tribute” in which the anchors, in the course of interviewing the mother of […]

More on press coverage of What Wes Said. Zack wrote yesterday: It’s crucially important that we have a political debate in this country that’s at least sophisticated enough to be able to handle the following rather basic idea: Arguing that a person’s record of military service is not a qualification for the presidency does not […]

Yesterday, Zack wrote here that some of the press coverage of What Wes Said* (an exchange between Gen. Wesley Clark and CBS’s Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation on Sunday) “is the perfect embodiment of the press’s unbelievably destructive habit of assessing every piece of campaign rhetoric for its political acuity, rather than for its […]

Usually when something doesn’t happen or something isn’t expected to happen, it’s not news. Even if the government issues a bulletin to tell us about the absence of this thing. But I guess that’s pre-9/11 journalism. CNN has been reporting this morning: “NO JULY 4TH THREATS” — that is, that a”Department of Homeland Security and […]

From Jacques Steinberg in Saturday’s

The Washington Post goes above the fold on page one with about as good a slap-down of the bottled-water industry as you’ll ever read. We realize Bottled Water Is Bad has fast become conventional wisdom, but this is a great read: The supply of clean drinking water across America and in many other countries is […]

Over at Grist, the popular online environment magazine, David Roberts has a spot-on takedown of a recent Newsweek column by Michael Hirsh. Hirsh’s piece is all about the McCain campaign’s efforts to cast its candidate (who would be the oldest president ever elected) as a “grown up.” There’s “no better evidence” of that strategy than […]

And they’re “meander[ing] freely across the flatlands of northwest Ohio—through bars and baseball fields, retirement homes and restaurants,” and onto the front page of the Washington Post (a place, I’d add, some of these rumors have been before). The rumors have now gathered “enough word-of-mouth credibility to harden into an alternative biography,” one that the […]

Per the television transcript database TVEyes.com, and without further comment, below are the number of uses of the word “unity” in cable, network, and local news broadcasts over the past six days: Wednesday, June 25: 0Thursday, June 26: 0Friday, June 27: 2,198 Saturday, June 28: 1,558 Sunday, June 29: 509Monday, June 30: 142

If you don’t feel like you know a thing about Cindy McCain, this Newsweek profile by Holly Bailey is worth a look. The salacious bits in her bio—her 14 year age gap with her husband, the fact that their relationship began while he was married to another woman, and her drug addiction—are all there, although […]

The New York Times deemed newsy enough to merit lead story placement its piece, based on “more than four dozen interviews,” about Al Qaeda “rebuilding” and now “thriv[ing] in tribal lands” in Pakistan while in Washington a “secret” Bush administration “plan” to “make it easier for the Pentagon’s Special Operations forces to launch missions” into […]