The Kicker

or, We’ll Become Silhouettes

On Friday, apparently, a week from today, the waters will part, the heavens will stir, and the light of Democratic Party Unity will shine down from above. That’s right: Obama and Clinton will make their first public appearance together. Cue the choirs. Or something. We’re already looking forward to the detailed body-language analyses, the deep […]

On today’s Morning Joe on MSNBC, Willie Geist ran, as he normally does, a segment called “News You Can’t Use”: a lighthearted, sometimes-snarky look at a smattering of the silly-but-entertaining news stories of the day. This morning’s segment was at once especially memorable and especially can’t-usable: it involved fifty-two-year-old Macrida Patterson, an L.A.-based Department of […]

Per Politico, the late Tim Russert was one of several journalists who signed a June 6 letter to the Obama campaign complaining about stingy access to the candidate, about having been “misled” by aides who flew the press corps to Chicago without Obama, and threatening to withhold payment for that flight. (And this letter pre-dated […]

Yes, this campaign season has already suffered a SnubGate. Yes, we’ve already had a -Gate involving Muslim (or at least suspiciously Muslim-looking) head gear (TurbanGate). Now again, we’ve got -Gate! And it’s got both snub-by and head garb-led elements. CNN calls it Barack Obama’s “Muslim Scarf Controversy.” (Hey, haven’t we already had one of those, […]

For anyone looking forward to seeing Al Roker do a stand-up from Tiananmen Square this summer when the Today show ramps up into Olympics mode, the Wall Street Journal regrets to inform you: TV crews from around the globe had assumed they would be allowed to broadcast live images from the host city’s iconic locations, […]

Charles Lewis, who founded the Center for Public Integrity, is launching the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University’s School of Communication and explains to PBS’s Marc Glaser how Children’s Television Workshop (Big Bird’s Baby Mama) inspired the idea for the workship — which “will include ‘all-stars’ of the investigative journalism world, undergraduate and grad students […]

As of 2:20pm, the word “makeover” (in relation to Michelle Obama) has been mentioned on MSNBC today at the following times: 2:17 2:12 2:04 1:34 1:21 12:52 12:49 10:51 9:30 9:29 9:13 7:44 7:43 6:45 6:39 6:13 6:01 Five mentions so far today on CNN, two on Fox News, and here at The Kicker, we’ve […]

Per PEJ: In the first official week of the general election, the differences between Barack Obama and John McCain on issues ranging from the economy to Iraq constituted the media’s main campaign narrative. Together, the debates over several key issues accounted for almost one-third—29%—of the campaign newshole, as measured by PEJ’s Campaign Coverage Index for […]

Michelle Obama has taken her image makeover tour to ABC’s The View this morning. But so far, we’ve learned more about The View‘s regular hosts than today’s honored guest host, including that Barbara Walters– “out of respect for you,” Michelle– today “put on panty hose” (close-up leg shot) and that Whoopi Goldberg is grateful to […]

It must have been, um, agony maintaining the required poker face of detachment while writing the “straight news” account for the Washington Post or any news outlet of yesterday’s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing (including such revelations as what a CIA counterterrorism lawyer “told a group of military and intelligence officials gathered at Guantanamo” in […]

Is this, in some part, media criticism on the New York Times op-ed page? In today’s column Thomas Friedman writes: “What we do next in Iraq– and how and why– is barely getting discussed in the presidential campaign,” and “navigating these conflicting moods and trends on the ground in Iraq is going to be one […]

The Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank writes up John McCain’s evolving stance on offshore oil drilling and his overall efforts to appeal both “to independent voters” and “the still-suspicious Republican base” as choreographed, if not particularly fluid, dance steps (kicking off the piece with his own age-related battement): If John McCain keeps dancing like this, he’s […]

Per the Associated Press: Confined to the bench back in his high school basketball days, Barack Obama felt the fierce urgency of now….[But] Obama found himself stuck behind a couple of veteran forwards. Thirty years later, as the presidential campaign went into motion, another team stocked with veterans stepped up to compete. Obama resolved to […]

The following strikes me as bad advice, all around. Not the least because can you imagine the column Maureen Dowd would write (earth tones, anyone?) if Michelle Obama actually made the radical dress and comportment transformation suggested to Bonnie Fuller by Houston Chronicle newspaper columnist Whitney Casey and published at HuffPo: [Casey] believes that in […]