Palin v. NYT Is Latest Salvo Against Free Press Protection
Sullivan, once seen as a necessary shield to protect independent speech from powerful figures, is being painted as a bad guy.
The Palin Campaign in Mark Halperin’s Head
Mark Halperin has a feature in Time magazine every week called “The Big Questions.” For a process-obsessed campaign reporter, this means a weekly who’s up, who’s down scorecard, in an easy to followQ-&-A format. This week’s questions: Is Sarah Palin in or out? What could hold her back? When does she have to decide? Part […]
Where Does Press Set Bar for Bachmann?
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote a rather apoplectic column about presidential candidate Michele Bachmann this week, lamenting the fact that other GOP candidates aren’t calling her out for being completely ill-prepared for the job: Bachmann does not deserve to be in the presidential race. Legislatively, she has done little, she knows next to nothing […]
Newsweek Touts Palin’s Wonky Insights on the Price of Slim Jims
Will the outrages ever stop? Newsweek‘s “I Can Win” cover story about Sarah Palin is awful. But Palin fans will have a hard time trying to figure out how to square this puff piece with the notion that the mainstream media is out to get Palin. The premise is that Palin could run for president–and […]
WaPo’s False Equivalence on Founder Misquotes
“Senators, congressmen and even President Obama have misquoted the Founding Fathers in recent years,” writes Washington Post reporter David A. Fahrenthold in a June 7 piece suggesting that there is a bipartisan trend of misquotation and misrepresentation of historical events. After citing Sarah Palin’s recent botched account of Paul Revere’s revolutionary ride, Fahrenthold implies that […]
Journalists Held Hostage by the Sarah Palin Bus Tour
The Sarah Palin hostage drama continues. In case you haven’t heard, Palin is taking a bus tour up the East Coast, visiting various sites of historic interest. Which naturally means that every media outlet is forced to follow along, covering this series of non-events as if they are of tremendous importance, asking the pertinent questions: […]
Don’t Joke About Sarah Palin: How to (Maybe?) Get Booted From Fox News
From comedian Joan Rivers’ Twitter feed (read from the bottom up if you can): Fox says, for the record, that Rivers wasn’t canceled due to the joke; the show was overbooked, and she’llbe rescheduled. As someone who has been booked–andthen canceled–by Fox a couple of times, I’m skeptical of Fox‘s story here.
New Frontiers in Pretend News About Sarah Palin
This is an actual CNN.com headline: Palin Re-Tweet Raises Questions And the actual lead paragraph: Normally, it’s what Sarah Palin tweets that makes news. This time it’s what she has re-tweeted. The “substance” is that Palin retweeted a comment promoting Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal. The piece ends: A Palin spokesperson was not immediately available […]
Mark Halperin’s Puppy-Killing Definition of Centrism
Time‘s Mark Halperin (12/27/10) joins his punditry colleagues in cheering Barack Obama’s wealthy-friendly tax plan as a great way for the president to end a rough year: But by ending the year with a bipartisan-compromise tax deal, Obama showed he is capable of delivering the kind of change that was supposed to be the hallmark […]
Sarah Palin’s Incomprehensible Press Criticism
Think Progress (6/7/10) claims Sarah Palin’s criticism of the press regarding Helen Thomas is wrong, but I can’t even figure out what she’s trying to say. Here’s Palin’s Twitter statement: Helen Thomas press pals condone racism? Heaven forbid “esteemed” press corps represent society’s enlightened elite; Rest of us choose truth. “Enlightened elite” would seem to […]
O’Reilly’s Hypocrisy on Sarah Palin & Joe McGinniss
Witless commentary and breathtaking hypocrisy are no strangers to Fox News, but Bill O’Reilly was in rare form on June 1. Discussing Joe McGinniss, the journalist who moved next door to Sarah Palin’s family home in Alaska in order to write about her, O’Reilly declared the move “immoral” and maybe even unconstitutional: “He’s intruding upon […]
Corporate Media Love to Be Hated by Sarah Palin
New York Times media reporter David Carr wrote the other day (4/5/10) about Sarah Palin’s wide-ranging appeal: Ms. Palin still gets a session in the media spanking machine every time she does anything, but the disapproval seems to further cement the support of her loyalists. Ms. Palin may or may not be qualified to represent […]
Kurtz Covers for Post, Palin
The Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz spends his Sunday mornings as the host of Reliable Sources, the media criticism show on CNN. Yesterday (12/13/09), one segment concerned the Washington Post‘s decision to print an op-ed (12/9/09) on “Climategate” by Sarah Palin. It prompted this exchange with guest John Aravosis of Americablog: ARAVOSIS: What newspapers aren’t supposed […]
Sarah Palin in the No Spin Zone!
Sarah Palin’s highly anticipated visit to Fox News Channel‘s O’Reilly Factor saw the famously tough-as-nails host ask the tough questions of the right-wing leader: O’REILLY: OK. The latest poll has you with a 23 percent favorable, 37 percent don’t know. You do the math, OK. And you’re up at 60 percent of people who could […]
Sarah Palin, Health Policy Expert
A bit of NBC Nightly News last night, from reporter Mike Viqueria: But now Mr. Obama faces more friendly fire. After a key committee passed a plan to pay for reform with a tax on high-cost policies, major unions, normally Obama allies, took out full-page newspaper ads complaining that the tax will hit labor hardest […]
News on Female Pols ‘Insulting, Irrelevant… Drivel’
Jennifer L. Pozner has a version of her new NPR commentary on the Women In Media & News website she founded (7/8/09), in which she asks you to “think carefully: Can you remember any passionate TV news debates about whether journalists or voters might want to get naked with former vice president Dick Cheney?” If […]
Right Media Darlings as Racist Double Murderers
A posting on Timothy Karr’s Media Citizen blog (6/17/09) contrasts Crooks & Liars‘ collection of cable news pundits like Lou Dobbs and Bill O’Reilly likening the anti-immigrant Minutemen to a giant, friendly “neighborhood watch” organization with the “chilling double-murder” Minutemen leader Shawna Forde is accused of–describing “the 911 recording of the mother as she witnessed […]
The ‘Serious Journalistic Conflicts’ of Fox’s Van Susteren
Blogging on “Greta Van Susteren’s defensive response” to reports “saying that one of the reasons that Sarah Palin has been caught up in a ‘series of public relations gaffes’ is because she is ‘taking advice from Greta and her husband,’” major GOP booster John Coale, the Huffington Post‘s Geoffrey Dunn (3/29/09) thinks the Fox News […]
Fox News and Sarah Palin, Like Family. . . Really
Upon seeing that, “on her show Tuesday night, Fox News‘ Greta Van Susteren devoted an entire segment to criticizing David Letterman” for having “made jokes about Sarah Palin and her family,” Political Animal blogger Steve Benen (3/19/09) notices that there seems to be a pattern here. In fact, it’s hard not to notice that Van […]
Beyond Clinton & Palin
With Sen. Hillary Clinton’s historic bid for the presidency and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s subsequent VP nomination on the GOP ticket, women were in the national spotlight in the 2008 election as never before. But while Clinton and Palin generated a good deal of media discussion around the problems facing female candidates, coverage of women […]
