FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
In the if-you-like-sausage category, the New York Times‘ Jeremy Peters has a piece today (7/16/12) about a new trend in journalism: Political sources demanding—and receiving—final control over what they are quoted as saying in news stories. Quote approval is standard practice for the Obama campaign, used by many top strategists and almost all midlevel aides […]
Paul Krugman writes today (New York Times, 7/16/12) on media’s failure to factcheck campaign claims: Perhaps in a better world we could count on the news media to sort through the conflicting claims. In this world, however, most voters get their news from short snippets on TV, which almost never contain substantive policy analysis. The […]
The New York Times has a long profile (7/13/12) of presumptive Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. Though I could have done without some of it (“ever polished in bright scarves and slim pantsuits”), reporter Susan Saulny gives readers a good–and rare–look at a third party political candidate. Stein actually debated Mitt Romney in the […]
The New York Times has a piece today (7/10/12) that pairs Obama’s tax announcement with Republican attempts to kill Obamacare, presenting both as “politically charged proposals.” It’s hard to see how the two are at all similar, but the Times attempts to make the connection, noting that “lawmakers worry about alienating people who like expanded […]
Factchecking ought to be an everyday part of each journalist’s job, but instead it’s relegated to a specialty feature. Maybe lack of regular practice explains why those side efforts are so disappointing. Take Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post‘s piece (6/21/12) on Barack Obama’s latest ad critical of presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney. Kessler gives […]
Campaign coverage often gets bogged down in trivia—inconsequential polling data, the latest “off message” comment by an associate, and so on. But then there are the “gaffes,” when politicians say something that we’re told means a lot more than it might seem. Barack Obama’s 2008 comment about small-town voters clinging to their guns and religion […]
As we’ve written before, some political flipflops are better than others. The ones that Mitt Romney commits, or might commit in the future, are often seen as being the good kind. That argument was advanced once more this Sunday (4/29/12) on the Chris Matthews Show, by Time editor Rick Stengel and the host himself, who […]
Last week Barack Obama declared some sort of class war on Mitt Romney–at least that’s what Fox, the New York Post and a few other outlets would have you believe. On April 18, Obama gave a speech at a community college touting, among other things, a rather common only-in-America underdog spirit: Somebody gave me an […]
Richard Cohen says he envies people who are persuasive liars. He really ought to envy people who are persuasive writers. His column today (4/17/12) is ostensibly about how Mitt Romney is a big liar. It goes almost its entire length, though, before citing any compelling examples of Romney lying. (Cohen does say call Romney’s claim […]
Rush Limbaugh’s attack on Georgetown student Sandra Fluke–calling her, among other things, a “slut” for advocating for contraceptives coverage–has caused some stirrings on the right that are worth looking at. One outcome is the idea that Limbaugh’s an outlier who sensible people repudiated. Kathleen Parker‘s Washington Post column on Saturday (3/2/12) cheered Limbaugh for uniting […]
There’s this notion in the elite press that Mitt Romney’s flip flops are a good thing–we’ve written about it here and here. In the latter post, I pointed to Nicholas Kristof’s take: I’d much rather have a cynical chameleon than a far-right ideologue who doesn’t require contortions to appeal to Republican primary voters, who says […]
You often see pundits making suggestions to political candidates like David Brooks makes in his New York Times column today (1/10/12): If Romney is to thrive, he really needs to go on an integrity tour. He needs to show how his outer pronouncements flow directly from his inner core. He needs to trust that voters […]
Mitt Romney might need some help defending his considerable wealth or controversial career in private equity. But he doesn’t need the kind of help Bill O’Reilly is offering. Mitt Romney’s declaration that he pays about a 15 percent tax rate on his income has generated plenty of chatter, in part because it confirms that much […]
New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane wonders if the readers of the Paper of Record want to know if the politicians the paper covers are telling the truth.
The presidential campaign is breaking down along familiar ideological lines, according to New York Times reporter John Harwood (1/12/12): American voters loathe both major symbols of the forces squeezing their pocketbooks and life savings. President Obama will seek re-election vowing to rein in one of them: Wall Street. Mitt Romney will focus on the other: […]
In theory, presidential campaigns are a valuable opportunity for journalists to evaluate candidates’ positions on important issues so citizens can make an informed choice. Actual media coverage is different, of course. And it’s striking how some media voices diminish the importance of what the candidates are saying, treating it as meaningless theater that need not […]
We’ve been seeing a lot of this sort of thing lately–this time from Elizabeth Wurtzel on TheAtlantic.com (1/9/12): All the reasons Romney is disliked are all the reasons he would be an excellent president. Let’s start by recognizing that principled politicians are highly overrated–consider Jimmy Carter as Exhibit A. Despite our pretensions to pretension, we […]
The usual criticisms of the Iowa caucuses–that the votes of a small, demographically unrepresentative slice of America gobble up too much airtime–are basically correct. As David Sirota noted in Salon (1/3/12): The same journalism industry that pleads poverty to justify cutting big city newspapers’ editorial staffs, gutting coverage of state legislatures and city councils, and […]
The Washington Post launched a series of Republican presidential candidate profiles on Sunday (12/11/11). First up was Mitt Romney, and right away you sense there’s something a little off here. Here’s the headline and subhead: The Problem Solver Mitt Romney doesn’t want to talk about feeling voters’ pain. He just wants to get to work […]
Political campaign watchers seem to agree that the election will be about the economy, and that Republicans probably won’t have much to say about Obama’s foreign policy (partly because it doesn’t much differ from what a Republican president might be doing). The New York Times‘ Richard Oppel has a piece today headlined, “Republican Candidates Aim […]
