With the media focused on the horse race (and Mitt Romney’s ongoing tactical miscues), the claims by President Obama and his allies that his re-election would “break the fever” or pop “the blister” of steadfast GOP opposition in Congress have received relatively little attention. But with the incumbent now a 3:1 favorite in betting… Powered
Audit Notes: Digital First takedown, here comes the WSJ, debt and taxes
Brett Sokol, writes one of the most brutal piece of media criticism I’ve read in a long time. He examines the promise of Digital First Media by looking at its flagship newspaper, the New Haven Register—and its website—and comparing it (very unfavorably) to the upstart New Haven Independent. It’s hard to imagine a worse-designed, more
The lying game
In 2007, investigative journalist Ken Silverstein went undercover to test Washington lobbyists’ taste for sleaze. Using an alias, Silverstein created a fictitious energy firm that ostensibly did business in Turkmenistan and approached professional lobbyists to see if they could help cleanse the regime’s neo-Stalinist reputation. The bill for services rendered—newspaper op-eds bylined by established think-tankers
Eureka! The media discovers Medicaid
Ah Medicaid! What can we say about it? Until the last couple of weeks, the press has said almost nothing. It’s not sexy; not fun to write about. It affects poor people who don’t bring in traffic. And it can get us tangled in the weeds pretty fast. But lately we’re on the case. Perhaps
Global warming coverage cools in Europe
Had the annual climate change summits sponsored by the United Nations fallen out of favor with Western journalists? That was the question on my mind when I arrived at the Reuters Institute at Oxford University earlier this year to research coverage of the meetings following the Copenhagen conference in December 2009. Most of the climate
