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BBQ is the New "Beer With"

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 […]

Old Media Intra-Office Communication?

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? […]

Oops! Gitmo Training "To Elicit False Confessions?"

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 […]

Cringe-Making Parody of Morning News Tools

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 […]

CNN Segment: "Swiftboating McCain?"

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 […]

Carville, Media Critic, On What Wes Said

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 […]

Breaking: Be Not Afraid, Be Not Very Afraid

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 […]

Water Boggle

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 […]

All Grown Up!

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 […]

Those "False Obama Rumors" Have Legs

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 […]

Unity, by the Numbers

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

Cindy, We Hardly Know You

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 […]

White House: NYT‘s A-1 Al Qaeda Story Old News

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 […]