The Kicker

Remember when a Swift boat was just a Swift boat — or, if you prefer, a Patrol Craft Fast — rather than a political attack? The New York Times has a piece today on the Swiftboating of “Swift boat” and how some Swift boat veterans (including one associated with the group responsible for the word’s […]

New Hampshire’s own Ken Burns is in the audience, witnessing UNITY first-hand! Ironically–or, perhaps, fittingly–MSNBC’s cameras, when focusing on the famous documentarian, slowly panned across his smiling face. Talk about added Unity Drama!

Per a chyron flashing on MSNBC in its currently uninterrupted Unity coverage: “COLOR COORDINATION: OBAMA’S TIE MATCHES CLINTON’S SUIT” The color in question, by the way, is light blue. As in, the color of water (under the bridge). As in, the sky (is the limit). As in, as MSNBC commentators went out of their way […]

Can’t you just feel the excitement in the air? Can’t you just feel the Winds of Change starting to blow? Can’t you just feel the love? That’s right, kids…it’s UNITY DAY! Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, hot on the heels of their “nono, we’re cool now” joint event in Washington last night, will be conducting […]

…can be forced still, to think for a moment. At least once a month the New York Times stops me cold and breaks my heart with a mere photograph on their front page (and I know they’re not even close to the only ones doing powerful photojournalism, but it’s the only hard-copy newspaper that arrives […]

Per the New York Times, “NBC has settled a lawsuit filed by the family of a man who killed himself when confronted with cameras for the documentary series To Catch a Predator.” As you may recall, back in February “a judge dismissed some of the lawsuit’s claims, but declared that a jury ‘could find that […]

On MSNBC a few moments ago, Monica Novotny announced Barack Obama’s participation today in an economic summit at Carnegie Mellon University. Wow, what a great opportunity for the network to report on substance rather than horserace-y silliness! What a great opportunity for us to learn, with more detail and nuance, about the presumptive Democratic nominee’s […]

McClatchy’s John Walcott would like us all to see its “Guantánamo: Beyond the Law”

Another excerpt from that valedictory interview with the Washington Post’s Len Downie, this one on his plans to write fiction in retirement: West Lafayette, Ind.: Why write a novel? Are you perpetuating the “every journalist has a manuscript hidden in a desk drawer” myth? Not that it’s a bad thing. Leonard Downie Jr.: It was, […]

As flagged by Romenesko, here’s a hard to believe exchange from an online Q&A with now-officially outgoing Washington Post editor Len Downie: Arlington, Va.: You are known for being so objective that you don’t vote. Now that you are retiring, will register and vote? Leonard Downie Jr.: I’ll have to think about that since I […]

Last week, Megan

On Monday and Tuesday, several hundred lovers of technology and democracy converged on New York’s Time-Warner Center to talk about how the internet is reshaping our politics. The Personal Democracy Forum was, not surprisingly, an Obama friendly crowd, serious about using online tools to reinvigorate (or, in the conference’s phrasing, “reboot”) our government and boost […]

“Outsourced Edit?” is the headline of a short piece by Ben Frumin in the current issue of CJR about Express KCS, an “Indian back-office company that designs and produces advertisements for more than one hundred U.S. publications, many of them in MediaNews Group papers like the San Jose Mercury News,” a company that hopes to […]

That (New York Times goes National Geographic) was the reaction of one of my co-workers to the Times completely fascinating A-1 piece on the 40-some remaining “sworn Virgins” in rural Albania –now-elderly women who took an oath of virginity sometime around age 20 in order to live and be treated as men. It is a […]