Recently in Media Category

"So, I have been effectively fatwahed (is that how you spell it?) by the conservative movement, and the magazine that my father founded must now distance itself from me. But then, conservatives have always had a bit of trouble with the concept of diversity. The GOP likes to say it’s a big-tent. Looks more like a yurt to me." Old news by now, but just to get it on-the-record: Shown the door by the editors of his late father's magazine for his recent prObama apostasy, columnist and satirist Christopher Buckley bids farewell to the conservative "movement". "While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of 'conservative' government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case."

Along the same lines, see also former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan's most recent WSJ column. (Noonan, remember, is also on the outs with the stark-raving fundies because of her recent open-mic remarks regarding Palin on MSNBC.) Buried under the obligatory (if fanciful) McCain-won-the-debate lede is this telling passage: "In the end the Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics. It's no good, not for conservatism and not for the country. And yes, it is a mark against John McCain, against his judgment and idealism. I gather this week from conservative publications that those whose thoughts lead them to criticism in this area are to be shunned, and accused of the lowest motives...In all this, the conservative intelligentsia are doing what they have done for five years. They bitterly attacked those who came to stand against the Bush administration. This was destructive. If they had stood for conservative principle and the full expression of views, instead of attempting to silence those who opposed mere party, their movement, and the party, would be in a better, and healthier, position. At any rate, come and get me, copper."

"We thought this election would be a serious fight over the future of this country, but only one candidate showed up...Not even the presidency is worth what it's made John McCain do to himself." While it's been quiet here, Ted of The Late Adopter has been keeping tabs on big newspaper and magazine endorsements. Announcing for Obama of late: The Denver Post, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Seattle Times, The New Yorker (shocking, I know), the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune (its first-ever Dem endorsement), and Esquire (its first-ever endorsement, period -- the quote above is from them.)

Keep in mind, though, that the mainstream media hate Republicans (except, of course, when they're starting wars of choice.) And really, who in the hell do these bigheads think they are, trying to confuse us with their words?

"Of all the shortcomings of the establishment press today, none is more central to the corruption of the profession than the decision to prioritize balance over accuracy. That corruption is visibly on display in the current coverage of the McCain campaign's policy of deliberate lies...This is what gives liars a clear strategic advantage over non-liars. And it's an open question whether McCain's level of dishonesty turns out to be so great that it overwhelms reporters' unwillingness to report accurately on it." Over at TPM, Josh Marshall rails against media complicity in the McCain campaign's recent embrace of blatant falsehood as a political strategy. (You know it's bad when even the Post's Richard Cohen is renouncing his McCain-love.)

The other night, I caught the tail end of Bob Schieffer, Jonathan Alter, and Paul Begala on Charlie Rose, and Alter, Schieffer et al were blaming the pathetic, pathetic job by the mainstream media in this election on, of course, the blogosphere (much as Schieffer did in the interview here.) "We can't be responsible for all these bloggers. The Internet is the only vehicle to convey news...that has no editor. Even the worst newspaper has an editor." (Schieffer, 44:30) Uh, Judith Miller wasn't writing a blog, nor was the Gray Lady bereft of editors, when the NYT and the rest of the mainstream media basically inhaled the Dubya administration's lies about the Iraq war without complaint. And the same goes for the MSM's dancing around the obvious tripe emanating from the McCain campaign here in 2008.

Look, blogs aren't the problem right now. As Marshall and many others have noted, the problem is that all too much of the MSM, once again using "balance" as a cover for its cowardice, spends the majority of its time trying to ascertain -- and then straddle -- the exact middle point between the facts as they stand and McCain-Palin's recent spate of ridiculous deceptions. To paraphrase Colbert: If, as it has in recent weeks, the truth has a definite Obama bias, then it befalls the Fourth Estate, as the self-appointed referees of the political ballgame, to set the record straight. And if televised poobahs like Candy Crowley refuse to do their jobs, and even talking heads who should know better, such as my old employer, roll over like puppies in the name of McCain's presumed maverickness, then it's definitely up to the blogs out there to fill the void. (See for example, Andrew Sullivan, who's been compiling a sadly expansive list of the lies of Sarah Palin.)

The depressing slide of our major media institutions into frightened, ratings-fueled irrelevance didn't start with this election, or course. But the stakes are too high right now to sit back and let their abysmal erosion pay any more dividends for the McCain campaign. We need to fight back, and hard. (Ad below via Ted at the Late Adopter.)

"You know what's really the worst thing about it? The greatness of McCain is no cynicism, and this is cynical." Oops. When they're on the air, of course, most right-leaning pundits have very little criticism -- indeed, judicious praise -- of the Palin pick. Meanwhile, the media talking heads just nod along and pretend there might possibly some merit to such a ludicrous choice by the mythical maverick. Off the air, however, it's a different story. Just listen to Chuck Todd, Peggy Noonan, and Mike Murphy discuss their real feelings about Palin in-between segments on MSNBC. (They got busted by an open mic.) Says Noonan of the election (when she's not shilling for the right): "It's over." Update: In print this morning, Noonan scrambles.

Well, 162 years is a good run...but, sadly, the lowest-common-denominator, hyper-partisan idiocy derailing so much of the media these days seems to have now infected one of our oldest and most venerable American media institutions, the Associated Press. The handwriting's been on the wall ever since conservative ideologue and almost-McCain-employee Ron Fournier moved up the pecking order. But, in the past two days, AP has completely embarrassed itself no less than twice. First, the AP analysis (by some stone-hearted fellow -- paging Sinclair Lewis -- named Charles Babington) bashed Obama's nomination speech in purely Republican terms. Then, check out Fournier's headline on McCain's grotesque Palin pick: "Analysis: Palin's age, inexperience rival Obama's ." Uh, yeah.

Update: "As many of you know, some political groups and left-leaning blogs have aligned to organize a newspaper letter-writing campaign against AP Washington Bureau Chief Ron Fournier...Below you will find some talking points to help guide you as this issue plays out." The AP issues CYA talking points to its affiliates defending Fournier.

While I'm getting all the "look at me -- I'm embedded!" links out of the way, here's a Conde Nast Portfolio report on the Big Tent, filmed Monday, that features me briefly. Judging from the questions I keep getting asked, numerous mainstream media groups seem to be doing variations on this same sorta puff-piece story ("Who are these crazy "bloggers," and (gasp) will they take over everything?), although -- at least so far -- I've spent most of my own interview-time talking to foreign press.

Also, whatever Drudge is currently saying about "Google massaging journalists," they're in fact massaging bloggers. Yes, there's still a difference (and, no, I still haven't partaken -- big line.)

“'Lawrence Spivak, who founded ‘Meet the Press,’ told me before he died that the job of the host is to learn as much as you can about your guest’s positions and take the other side,' he said in a 2007 interview with Time magazine. 'And to do that in a persistent and civil way. And that’s what I try to do every Sunday.'" Moynihan man turned pundit-king Tim Russert, 1950-2008. Now, that's a surprise. Russert was a guy I actually met a few times during my Carville days (in fact, I once inadvertently hit him with a whiffleball bat...long story), and he always seemed a genuine, amiable sort, particularly by DC talking-head standards. Obviously, his unique brand of political interrogation left something to be desired in many circles. Still, he was taken relatively young (and before his father), which is always tragic. Rest in peace, Russ.

"Thank you all very much. Admiral Kelly, Captain Card, officers and sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln, my fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."

Do you remember the Iraq War of 2003? Remember those heady days of euphoria when it ended two months later, with only 139 American lives lost? Journey back with me -- TIME-LIFE style, if you will -- to the scene of our triumph: "Chris Matthews on MSNBC called Bush a 'hero' and boomed, 'He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics.' PBS' Gwen Ifill said Bush was 'part Tom Cruise, part Ronald Reagan.' On NBC, Brian Williams gushed, 'The pictures were beautiful. It was quite something to see the first-ever American president on a -- on a carrier landing. This must be very meaningful to the United States military.'"

Well, today marks the five-year anniversary of our glorious victory, the day that "splendid little war" came to a close. Among those honoring the day, and the remarkable achievement of our Commander-in-Chief:

"I feel that those citizens who say that have never heard my sermons, nor do they know me. They are unfair accusations taken from sound bites...I served six years in the military. Does that make me patriotic? How many years did Cheney serve?" I haven't watched the Sunday shows yet, but, if today's press is any indication, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is the big story in the news, after he delivered remarks in several venues aimed at defending himself against the recent media throng, as well as horrifying attempts by the like of George Stephanopoulos to McCarthify him on national television. (As I said here, we seem to have entirely skipped the rails when kindly ole Mike Huckabee is the biggest voice for tolerance and historical understanding in the conversation.)

At any rate, the return of Obama's Angry Black Preacher-Man prompted tut-tuts of electoral worry from Clinton-leaning concern trolls like like Salon's Joan Walsh, and the usual waiting for the other-shoe-to-drop from breathless political blogs like War Room and Ben Smith. What I haven't seen yet today, amid all the puttering from the press on the subject of Wright, is any attempt to put the Reverend's remarks in context of this weekend's highly dubious acquittal in the Sean Bell case. To wit, New York City cops shoot an unarmed black man and his friends 50 times and end up getting off for it, and, outside of Harlem, there's barely a shrug, including in the news media. Meanwhile, when it comes to anything and everything involving the fates of Natalee Holloway, Laci Peterson, and any other white damsel in distress, the press drone on about it endlessly, funnelling info to us months or even years after the cases have gone cold. But, as they say, this ain't Aruba, b**ch.

Is Rev. Wright angry? At this point, and as this weekend's fiasco makes clear, he has every right to be. Perhaps the press and the punditocracy could investigate more thoroughly why black America may be less inclined to think well of our nation at times, rather than working themselves into yet another holier-than-thou froth about occasional intemperate remarks, and/or endlessly fretting about their potential impact on the electoral whims of the white working class. God forbid these media asshats break out of their echo chamber bubble once in awhile and do some honest-to-goodness reporting. Heck, I'd be happy just to see a few of 'em think for themselves.

First we had Senator Clinton adopting various Hail Mary Rovianisms, which have been well recorded here, including but not nearly limited to an ad featuring Osama Bin Laden just this past week. Then Bill went on the Rush Limbaugh show. Then Sen. Clinton played nice with Richard Mellon Scaife, architect of the "vast right-wing conspiracy," for his endorsement. And now we have this:

"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

"In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access. A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis."

Another holdover from the weekend: The NYT exposes the Pentagon's platoon of professional pro-war pundits (or puppets, as the case may be.) "'It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,' Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said...Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as 'message force multipliers' or 'surrogates' who could be counted on to deliver administration 'themes and messages' to millions of Americans 'in the form of their own opinions."

'Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood, when blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud." Well, actually, it was only six weeks ago, just after Mississippi. (It only seems like a lifetime.) Still, I posted then, following Al Giordano at Rural Votes, to beware Pennsylvania tunnel vision, as it's a state tailor-made for Clinton's demographic strengths. Six long, miserable weeks later, after Jeremiah Wright and The Speech and Tuzla snipers and the Bitter pill, we've finally made it to PA Day, and what I wrote then still holds true. Given the polls and the probable Limbaugh shenanigans in Pennsyltucky, Clinton will almost assuredly win the Keystone State by double digits tonight, and yet still won't amass enough delegates to make a bit of difference in the final decision. And, because the media still won't call the race (and, indeed, resent even the slightest implication that they're lazy and f**king pathetic at their line of work), we will grimly slog on to May 6th, watching enviously as McCain and the GOP dance their happy jig of Dem self-immolation. (Don't get me wrong: I still think Obama will trounce McCain thoroughly in November. But it's going to be much harder than it ever needed to be.)

Was that magical night in Iowa really less than four months ago? It seems since then that we Obama-leaning political junkies are being punished by the Clinton campaign for the sin of putting too much faith in the process, and have been consigned to a neverending Purgatory of endless lowballs and trifling media idiocies. In a different world, I might have been flabbergasted by Clinton shoehorning Pearl Harbor and Bin Laden into a political ad against a fellow Democrat. But, at this late date, did anyone really expect anything less? Give it a few more weeks and the Clinton campaign will likely be regaling us with D.W. Griffith and guys in blackface. And it will still be over. Update: By way of Dangerous Meta, Sen. Clinton also attempted to recertify her cajones this morning by threatening to "obliterate" Iran. Dubya much, Senator?

At any rate, if you are of the Pennsylvanian persuasion, please consider voting for Barack Obama today. Let's get focused on our real opponent, already.

You don't need The Weathermen to know which way the wind blows: This thing is over, and has been for weeks and weeks now. But, ABC held a debate tonight in Philadelphia anyway, and, man, it was a tough slog. [Transcript.] Moderators Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos endlessly trafficked in inanities. (The Weather Underground? Really?) Sen. Clinton found no level she couldn't passive-aggressively sink beneath: Cringeworthy throughout, she name-dropped Farrakhan and channeled 9iu11iani whenever possible (see, for example, her answers on Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, and she got in Ahmadinejad's recent remarks as well.) And Sen. Obama seemed tired, a bit rusty, and, after 45 shallow minutes of idiotic gotcha, (justifiably) ticked. (But I thought he still came through in the clutch anyway.)

The only news made tonight? ABC is rather terrible at this whole debate thing. Tonight was basically a fiasco. From Stephanopoulos questioning Obama on flag pins to the tut-tutting about affirmative action to George getting questions from Sean Hannity to Gibson trying to wrest a "no new taxes" pledge from the candidates, virtually every minute tonight was occupied with trite Republican nonsense. Oh, and Gibson's dim remark at the Manchester debate that two-professor families make $200,000 a year was not a fluke. Apparently, the guy knows less about the economy than John McCain. Tonight he informed us that there "are a heck of a lot of people" making between $97,000 and $200,000 these days. If by "heck of a lot" you mean 14% of the US, well, ok. But some might consider 1 in 7 a rather small minority of the total population, and thus argue that our tax policy should keep the other, more-likely-to-be-struggling 6 out of 7 in mind. Sheesh...less than a week and our friends in the pundit world have already abandoned their newfound blue-collar bitterness.

At any rate, no news or game-changers to speak of. Sen. Obama is still our nominee, Sen. Clinton is still grappling with that fact. If you didn't watch this tonight, you chose wisely. Update: Having run ABC's gauntlet of idiocy, Obama brushes his shoulders off, puts distractions on notice, and says no to more debates.

Hey all. As promised, I've been working on other things over the past few days, and thus haven't really been following the election news as closely as in recent months. I'd heard that Sen. Obama had basically restated the thesis of What's the Matter with Kansas? at a fundraiser in San Francisco, and thought that, lordy, it was a slow news week. So, imagine my surprise when I settled in for the Sunday shows to discover that I was supposed to be outraged -- outraged, I tell you! -- at the import and tenor of Sen. Obama's remarks. Across the board, the Washington punditariat had ratcheted up the pique to 11, lambasting Obama for being elitist and out-of-touch because he argued a case for the appeal of cultural conservatism in economic bad times that's been made all over the place, not the least by the Clintons themselves. (By the way, this televised uprising of the pundit proletariat included several people I dealt with personally during my previous sojourn in DC and, well...let's just say I wasn't buying their newly-discovered blue-collar bona fides. Not. One. Bit. (and I'm not talking about Carville & Matalin, although they were in the mix on Sunday too.))

Enter Sen. Clinton, shameless as ever. Apparently seeing "Bitter-gate" as her last, best hope for the nomination, she's plumbed new depths of self-parody this week, not only calling Obama an elitist but trying to recast herself as some kind of working-class hero. (I guess she assumed we'd all just forget that she made $109 million over the past seven years, has been running around with a Secret Service detail for nearly two decades, and has had people otherwise waiting on her since 1978. Springsteen, she's not.) Nope, now she's banging back boilermakers, attacking Obama like he's the Second Coming of John Kerry (to the point of getting booed for it) and conjuring up this ridiculous ad of small-town folk aghast by Obama's words.

Well, I guess I'm an out-of-touch elitist too, because, frankly, I'm just not seeing it. Not only does this entire brouhaha seems like a completely media-manufactured (and Clinton-prolonged) event to me, but I'd be highly surprised if the vast majority of people Obama was referring to take any offense whatsoever. In fact, if anything, I'd bet the people who are supposed to feel so put upon here may well end up feeling more condescended to by Clinton and the mass media for trying to tell them they should be ticked off. Just a hunch...I could be very wrong. With fifteen years and counting in BosWash, it's been awhile since I've had my finger on the pulse of the Heartland. Still, I'm willing to bet that the white working-class Americans who are theoretically insulted by Obama's words are smarter, and made of sterner stuff, than Clinton et al would give them credit for. And this too shall pass.

Update: Speaking of Springsteen, the Boss endorses Obama, in part due to Bitter-gate. "At the moment, critics have tried to diminish Senator Obama through the exaggeration of certain of his comments and relationships. While these matters are worthy of some discussion, they have been ripped out of the context and fabric of the man's life and vision, so well described in his excellent book, Dreams of My Father, often in order to distract us from discussing the real issues: war and peace, the fight for economic and racial justice, reaffirming our Constitution, and the protection and enhancement of our environment."

They may have lost some luster due to Scott Templeton garnering one for the Whiting/Klebanow regime. Nevertheless, the 2008 Pulitzers were announced yesterday, and they included 6 for the WP, Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought in the history category and a special citation to the freewheeling Bob Dylan "for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power." Well, ok then.

"One big fact has largely been lost in the recent coverage of the Democratic presidential race: Hillary Rodham Clinton has virtually no chance of winning." Following the lead of Chuck Todd and the NYT, Politico's Jim Vanderhei and Mike Allen make the staggering realization that the Democratic primary is over. "[S]he has only one scenario for victory. An African-American opponent and his backers would be told that, even though he won the contest with voters, the prize is going to someone else. People who think that scenario is even remotely likely are living on another planet...In other words: The notion of the Democratic contest being a dramatic cliffhanger is a game of make-believe."

This is all true, of course, and it's good to see MSM outlets -- Jon Alter notwithstanding -- finally say as much. Still, it's more than a little irritating that, [a] not only is the press getting wise to this fact almost three weeks after it became patently obvious, but [b] when they finally do, the story isn't "the race is over" but "look, the press is covering the race like it's not over." Please, quit the collective navel-gazing and do your jobs, people.

Update: TPM's Josh Marshall has his own moment of clarity...sort of. "The obstacles in the way of Hillary Clinton are virtually insurmountable...Everyone in the press, probably including us, should be much more candid about that." "Probably"? Oh, good grief.

"No one went near the theme; everyone stayed dead-center and literal, oblivious to the big-ass elephant in our mythical newsroom...Here's what happened in season five of The Wire when almost no one -- among the working press, at least -- was looking: Our newspaper missed every major story." With the finale come and gone, David Simon has to explain to the press the theme of the season, which they -- ironically -- missed. (See also: the next post.)

"The irony to all of this, of course, is that while the mechanics of the Democratic nomination fight overwhelmingly favor Obama, the media is giving Clinton a huge lift. And this comes after a year of Clinton complaints that the media was doing them more harm than good." MSNBC's Chuck Todd argues that the press may be the only thing keeping Clinton in it (and that the supers may not much like Clinton anyway.) Gee, you think?

In related news, the NYT's Adam Nagourney argues Clinton's path to the nomination has gotten harder, now that Michigan and Florida don't appear to be revoting. "If there is a road to victory for Mrs. Clinton, it is a fairly narrow one." Emphasis there on "If." But, hey, at least they're starting to figure it out. Update: CNN also gropes toward the math.

I'm not going to cover all the sordid details of the Spitzer case here -- he's gone, so, politically speaking, there's not much else to say about it (and -- for the moment anyway -- the search for a possible campaign funds connection sounds likes a fishing expedition.) Nevertheless, regarding the news coverage here in the Apple, it -- to no one's surprise, I guess -- has already pushed past prurient to wallow in the tacky. When the feeding frenzy first locked on to "Kristen's" MySpace page (5 million hits in a day), I actually felt sorta bad for the poor girl. (Ok, I know, she's not poor -- she makes $5500/hr. Still.) Prostitution is illegal, true, but she's still basically a troubled kid engaged in a seedy enterprise, and I think it'd be pretty hard for any personal site -- this one included -- to withstand that level of withering, snark-heavy scrutiny from the entire world at large. That being said, from front-page, come-hither portfolios all over NY today to 200 large made on music downloads overnight, I have a feeling the last thing Ms. Dupre needs right now is anyone's pity. Oh well. Milk it, I guess.

Just be clear, I'm not saying the coverage is anywhere near as repellent as the media aftermath to the Virginia Tech killings, and I know sex has sold newspapers since the dawn of the printing press. (I mean, the tabloids caught my attention this morning.) But, c'mon now. In any case, I'm guessing Silla Wall Spitzer is having a truly terrible day.

(By the way, if anyone cares about my own editorial decision to post a pic of Ashley Dupre here, I did so to be fair to Ms. Iseman, of McCain fame. The lesson here seems to be: If you must get caught in a sex scandal (or what the NYT thinks might be a sex scandal), try to keep the seamier-type pics off of the Internets.) Update: Client 9 radio? Um, yeah.

"'I am trying to make sure that his statements by him are answered. Don't you think that's important?' Obama shot back, while walking away. When Zeleny yelled a follow up question suggesting the Illinois senator had not answered the question, Obama fired back angrily, 'Don't try cheap stunts like that.'" Read this ABC News story of Obama apparently getting "testy" about questions involving the Clintons. ("Is Bill Clinton getting in Obama's head?") Then watch the video of this overblown encounter. What was that about the Obama-loving media?

"For Simon, this dispute basically comes down to the complexity of urban problems. As he sees it, the 'Philly model,' imported to the Sun by Carroll and Marimow [re: Klebanow and Whiting], ignored the decades of economic, racial, political, and social disconnects underlying that complexity. When it spurred reform, it was reform that could not match the intransigence of the underlying patterns. The reporting itself was formidable, Simon says, but to him, homelessness, addiction, and violence aren’t the central problems. 'Those are all the symptoms of the problem,' he says. 'You can carve off a symptom and talk about how bad drugs are, and you can blame the police department for fucking up the drug war, but that’s kind of like coming up to a house hit by a hurricane and making a lot of voluminous notes about the fact that some roof tiles are off.'"

As The Wire 53 premieres on On Demand, some links on the journalistic controversies driving show creator David Simon's animus this season. The CJR offered a long and interesting overview of the Simon v. Marimow/Carroll feud, and its partial roots in differing conceptions of urban journalism. An old 2000 City Paper piece suggests who Simon may have in mind in cub reporter Scott Templeton. And Simon himself recently discussed his old newsroom for Esquire, and got involved with Mark Bowden and Matt Yglesias over at The Atlantic. (Most links here via THND.)

"I do find the timing of this whole issue very interesting. And we're not going to stand for what happened to us in 2000. We're getting close to the primary." Matt Drudge's recent attempts to foist a December Surprise into the Democratic primaries seems to have whiffed. Will he draw more blood in the GOP? John McCain decides to respond forcefully to an unpublished Times story -- held up by editor Bill Keller and leaked to Drudge -- involving some sort of unspecified lobbyist malfeasance. Hmmm. I'm torn on this. Since the NYT story hasn't actually gone live, there may well be nothing to it. As such, this looks a bit like the Choose Your Own Scandal shenanigans that Clinton operatives attempted to unleash on Obama last month. But, then again, the NYT powers-that-be were idiotic enough to hold the NSA wiretap story through the 2004 election, so maybe their judgment about what constitutes newsworthiness around voting time should be in question.

Late to the party on this, but some endorsements of note. The The Des Moines Register backs Hillary Clinton, as does former Senator and Bradley supporter Bob Kerrey (although Kerrey has some nice words for Obama as well.) Says the Register: "Obama, her chief rival, inspired our imaginations. But it was Clinton who inspired our confidence." And, of course, former President Bill Clinton has been touting his wife more loudly than usual of late, including going so far as to disparage Obama on television.

Meanwhile, calling Clinton's campaign "needlessly defensive" and "a backward glance at the bruising political battles of the 1990s," the Boston Globe backs Barack Obama, citing his international experience, judgment, and -- most happily -- his progressive bona fides: "The first major bill to Obama's name in the Illinois Legislature was on campaign ethics reform. In Washington, he coauthored this year's sweeping congressional lobbying reform law...exposure [to government] has tended to give [Obama's opponents] a sense of government's constraints. Obama is more animated by its possibilities."

Finally, while Mike Huckabee may have locked up the home-school crowd, both the Des Moines Register and Boston Globe back John McCain...as does -- continuing his fall from Democratic grace -- formerly Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman. "The problems that confront us are too great, the threats we face too real, and the opportunities we have too exciting for us to play partisan politics with the presidency," said Lieberman. Sigh...And he and Clinton seemed so close in their aghast GOP-lite moralism when they were blaming Grand Theft Auto for all America's ills.

"'I was panicked a bit because I really don't know about...the Cuban Missile Crisis,' said Perino, who at 35 was born about a decade after the 1962 U.S.-Soviet nuclear showdown. 'It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I'm pretty sure.'" Wait, wait, wait...what? By way of Ben of The Oak, it seems Dubya press secretary Dana Perino has never heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis. "So she consulted her best source. 'I came home and I asked my husband,' she recalled. 'I said, "Wasn't that like the Bay of Pigs thing?" And he said, "Oh, Dana."'" Ladies and Gentlemen, the spokesperson for our current president. Have we fallen so far? And if that sounds like a pedantic thing to say, well, consider me pedantic. I know nobody wants to work for this misfit administration anymore, but, we've a lot of people in this country, and many of 'em are still even Republicans. Perhaps we can find someone to fill the position of the president's mouthpiece who knows a thing or two about major events in American history over the past fifty years? That'd be great.

"In The Atlantic's very first issue, in 1857, the magazine's founders -- an illustrious group that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell -- declared that they would dedicate their new publication to monitoring the development, and advancing the cause, of what they called 'the American idea.' And for the last century and a half, the magazine has been preoccupied with the fundamental subjects of the American experience: war and peace, science and religion, the conundrum of race, the role of women, the plight of the cities, the struggle to preserve the environment, the strengths and failings of our politics, and especially, America's proper place in the world." To commemorate the magazine's 150th anniversary, The Atlantic Monthly publishes The American Idea, an anthology of articles which includes republished writings by TR, W.E.B. DuBois, Albert Einstein, John Muir, Helen Keller, and Vannevar Bush. (Alas, only ten of the included articles are online.)

"This final season of the show, Simon told me, will be about 'perception versus reality' -- in particular, what kind of reality newspapers can capture and what they can’t. Newspapers across the country are shrinking, laying off beat reporters who understood their turf. More important, Simon believes, newspapers are fundamentally not equipped to convey certain kinds of complex truths. Instead, they focus on scandals -- stories that have a clean moral. 'It’s like, Find the eight-hundred-dollar toilet seat, find the contractor who’s double-billing,' Simon said at one point. 'That’s their bread and butter. Systemic societal failure that has multiple problems -- newspapers are not designed to understand it."

A huge find by way of Chris at Do You Feel Loved?: Margaret Talbot offers a long-form New Yorker profile on David Simon and The Wire. (If you haven't yet seen Season 4, I recommend bookmarking this for now -- it gives away many of S4's major beats.) There's also a good deal of spoilerish information on what to expect from Season 5, what David Simon wants to do next, and who's singing this season's version of "Way Down in the Hole." (I'll give that one away...Bubbles' sponsor, Steve Earle -- listen here.) "Simon makes it clear that the show’s ambitions were grand. '"The Wire" is dissent,' he says. 'It is perhaps the only storytelling on television that overtly suggests that our political and economic and social constructs are no longer viable, that our leadership has failed us relentlessly, and that no, we are not going to be all right.'"

Right around the midpoint of Steve Buscemi's uneven, ultimately disappointing Interview, the first of three American remakes of films by the slain Dutch director Theo Van Gogh (the other two will be directed by Stanley Tucci and John Turturro), Buscemi's beleaguered, world-weary, and increasingly drunk journalist bemoans the state of his notes for his article on Sienna Miller's catty, self-entitled celebrity-of-the-moment: "This tape is just ten minutes of us bickering at each other!" Uh, Steve, it's more like 85 minutes. A very brief scene at the opening notwithstanding, the entire movie consists of this eponymous interview, meaning that Buscemi and Miller are bickering, cajoling, pleading, seducing, and threatening each other for the entire film's run. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing -- I came in to the movie expecting a theaterish two-person character study (with possible archetypal overtones about the overlapping worlds of media and entertainment): Add one pompous reporter, one self-infatuated actress, and simmer. But, while the beginning is engaging, the ending is decent, and the film is well-made and well-acted throughout, Interview lost me in the middle going. These two characters turn on a dime too quickly too often: They go from at each other's throats to in each other's arms and back over and over again, and it just doesn't feel plausible. This is mainly a fault of the writing, which -- while clever -- also feels stilted and unnatural. Buscemi the actor and director comes up aces here, but Buscemi the writer (along with David Schecter) frankly could've used a later deadline.

The plot, in a nutshell, has already been described: Pierre (Steve Buscemi) is a hard-drinking, pill-popping political journalist who, as the result of being on the outs with his editor, has been assigned a celebrity puff piece in New York on the same day Very Important Indictments are being handed down in DC. (As we discover in the film's opening moments, he also has a shell of a brother wasting away at a mental hospital. Based on later revelations, this inclusion may be important, or it may just be a red herring -- I chalked it up to a need to humanize Pierre before we watch him rant and rave his way through the rest of the evening.) The celebrity in question is Katya (Sienna Miller), the It Girl of the hour for her sexual escapades and breast reduction surgery as much as for her horror film and soapy TV drama (neither of which Pierre took the trouble to screen beforehand. He considers the subject matter -- and the subject -- beneath him.) The official interview, at a trendy downtown restaurant, starts and ends badly. But, on the way home, an accidental bump on the head, perhaps precipitated by Katya's winning smile, gets our two antagonists bottled up in her spacious Tribeca loft, where the "real" interview begins to unfurl...

The remainder of this epic interview consists of seventy or so minutes of intensive, convulsive, verbal wrestling within this deluxe apartment in the sky: Buscemi's snake to Miller's mongoose (or is it Buscemi's mongoose to Miller's snake? Either way it's bad -- I don't know animals.) Their sparring is intermittently entertaining, to be sure, but it zigs and zags too often to feel anything close to real. And, while Buscemi and Miller both do excellent work in the roles as written, other parts of the story just don't hold up. At one point, Buscemi becomes fascinated with some morbid paragraphs he finds (surreptitiously) in Katya's diary. But, frankly, it's the type of gloomy woe-is-me fluff everybody had written at some point in a journal, and it doesn't really make sense that it'd pique his interest so. And to help explain away the reason why neither Pierre or Katya disengage from this disastrous conversation much earlier, they're given an unwieldy, simplistic Freudian connection -- he looks like her wayward dad (her dad is John Waters?), she reminds him of his deceased daughter -- that comes off as groan-inducing more than anything else. The last few beats of the movie help bring the story into focus, but by then the damage is done -- I'd stop thinking of either character as real people, or as anything other than writerly conceits. For all intent and purposes by then, the Interview was over.

"To me, the 12 formats serve equally well as a weapon of defense for the consumer under assault from endless advertising messages. It's like learning how a magic trick works: Once the secret's revealed, the trick loses all its power." Old friend Seth Stevenson explains the twelve different types of advertising for Slate, with example ads for your perusal.

"'Here...comes...that famous General Taguba -- of the Taguba report!' Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice." Well, the agency and the time may have changed, but it's increasingly clear we still have a lot to answer for, thanks to the actions of those who would claim to protect our way of life. The inimitable Sy Hersh of The New Yorker (who also played a role in 1974 in getting the CIA docs released -- take that, Woodward) reports in with the tale of General Antonio Taguba, the head of the Army's original investigation into Abu Ghraib who, like so many other truth-tellers in the administration, was eventually hung out to dry for his candor. Hersh's frightening and sadly plausible piece not only makes clear that Rumsfeld, Dubya, et al had more knowledge of the nightmare of Abu Ghraib than they've publicly let on, but also suggests that those repellent images we've all seen from the prison may only be the tip of the iceberg of the horrors that occurred in our country's name. "Taguba said that he saw 'a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.' The video was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it."

"I am going to say something that few people in public life will say, but most know is absolutely true: a vast aspect of our jobs today - outside of the really major decisions, as big as anything else - is coping with the media, its sheer scale, weight and constant hyperactivity. At points, it literally overwhelms." In his final weeks as prime minister, Tony Blair addresses the problem of the media, calling it "like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits." (Full text of remarks.) "The result is a media that increasingly and to a dangerous degree is driven by 'impact'. Impact is what matters. It is all that can distinguish, can rise above the clamour, can get noticed. Impact gives competitive edge. Of course the accuracy of a story counts. But it is secondary to impact. It is this necessary devotion to impact that is unravelling standards, driving them down, making the diversity of the media not the strength it should be but an impulsion towards sensation above all else."

I wouldn't say the feral beast metaphor gets right at it -- until last year, most of the major news media, in this country at least, was rather well domesticated: It let Dubya lie his way through just about anything, including building a case for war in Iraq on false pretenses, with impunity. But, clearly something is broken with "this relationship between public life and media," as Blair put it. In the midst of a conflict that's been dragging on longer than World War II, you're still likely to hear more about Paris Hilton's jail travails (Prison sucks? Our criminal justice system tends to favor the wealthy? Who knew?), Don Imus's racist bromides (A bile-spewing racist on talk radio? Wherever did they find him?), or the winner of American Idol, to take only three recent examples, than anything of use about the status of the conflict, or our actions, there. And even coverage of the horrifying tragedy at Virginia Tech, obviously a legitimate news story, descended into exploitation almost immediately (and provoked very little understanding that this level of tragedy has become virtually a daily occurrence in Iraq.) They're just giving us what they want, I suspect the comeback is, and that's almost assuredly true. But, still, it'd be nice to see a little more daily recognition from our major journalistic outlets that the mass media in our society performs a crucial -- if not the crucial -- function in informing the electorate on current events and providing the information indispensable to maintaining an active, responsive citizenry, and that other factors should come into play in their coverage than just the corporate bottom line. Update: From the press box, Slate's Jack Shafer cries foul.

I'll grant I have as much morbid curiosity as the next man, probably more, and I'll admit to have found it interesting that -- judging from his ubiquitous Youtube-suicide dump (I'm sure y'all can find it) -- the Virginia Tech killer, Cho Seung Hui, also seems to have recently seen Oldboy (and The Killer.) That being said, I'm with the families of the deceased: It was ridiculously offensive on the part of the press scorps to give this murderous chump his much-desired fifteen minutes, even after death, and to plaster his visage all over every media outlet for 18 hours like a two-bit Travis Bickel. CNN's clearly been trying to rectify by putting the victims on their front page at the moment, but too little, too late. I'm reminded of Sirhan Sirhan's famous quote: "They can gas me, but I am famous. I have achieved in one day what it took Robert Kennedy all his life to do." Please, let's not play into these sick bastards' games anymore. I'm sorry Cho's life turned out to be a sad and pathetic one, but let him just be consigned to the ignominious dustbin of psycho killer history, where he belongs. He was a lonely, depressed, raging, and homicidal young man, who lost any claim to sympathy when he started randomly firing at people -- We're not going to understand him any better by throwing up his obscene posthumous vanity portraits in every nook and cranny of the national culture.

That being said, using Cho less as a poster-child for his own sick revenge fantasies and more as one for sensible gun control laws makes a little more sense to me. Now I understand that real gun control is sadly something of a non-starter in this country, and that mandatory gun safety training, for example, is the type of thing that might pay more dividends over time so long as the second amendment remains interpreted as it is. And naturally, the NRA is already ready to push back on any attempt to tie this awful incident to easy access to weaponry. But it seems abundantly clear: Whether we need a new law or just need to enforce the old ones, people who've already been declared certifiable by a federal judge should have a little harder time procuring two firearms than did Cho. Can we at least agree on that?

The 2007 Pulitzers are announced: Cormac McCarthy wins the fiction prize for