Palin Africa/Continent Statements Prove to be a Hoax
The New York Times has investigated Fox News's report that McCain staffers claimed that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent. As I had suspected, the story was a complete hoax. It was among the juicier post-election recriminations: Fox News Channel quoted an unnamed McCain campaign figure as saying that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on November 13, 2008 12:27
Mainstream Media Obsessed with Sex, Sex, Sex!
Cernig is outraged at the sex-obsessed American press. I am now officially disgusted with America's insular and navel-gazing punditry. En masse and on a bipartisan basis the media, commentators and bloggers have decided that the Edwards Affair story is more important than events in South Ossetia. What happened, folks, did your minds cloud over at contemplation of events beyond these hallowed ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on August 9, 2008 18:50
Does Religious Outreach Equal Evangelical Outreach?
Both Mark Hemingway and Ross Douthat have linked to these recent Pew polling numbers, which indicate that Obama has one point less white evangelical support than Kerry did at this point in the 2004 election. Douthat notes that this isn't actually good news for McCain:Or you could read them as good news for Obama, since McCain is currently running ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 21, 2008 11:46
Blog Polarization and Self-Segregation
Henry Farrell, Eric Lawrence, and John Sides have collaborated on a paper, still in late draft stages, entitled "Self-Segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation, and Polarization in American Politics." A PDF of the working copy is available here. Henry reports that, [B]log readers seem to exhibit strong homophily. That is to say, they overwhelmingly choose blogs that are written by people ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 1, 2008 15:29
Not With a Bang But a Whimper (In the Press)
Writing for Slate, Tim Noah nails exactly why the possible destruction of the Earth later this year when the Large Hadron Collider is switched on isn't getting much attention in the press: I can well understand why the Times doesn't want to give sustained big play to the possibility that the world will end on or around Labor Day. In addition ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 1, 2008 10:56
Bloggers as Opinion Leaders
When I first started the blog, a little over five years ago, most of us wrote constant posts about blogging. Mostly, I suspect, this was just a function of the novelty of the medium, as evidenced by the plethora of mainstream media stories on blogging during the same period. Both trends have settled down to a trickle in recent ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on May 6, 2008 11:54
Press Not Doing Its Job?
Elizabeth Edwards, who despite no public policy credentials other than having been married to a one-term senator and yet oddly seems to get op-ed space in the major papers whenever she requests it, has a rather strange editorial in today's NYT whining about how the mainstream media is failing in its duty to inform the public. The first several paragraphs make ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on April 27, 2008 08:27
McCain Takes 1st Class Train
Ben Armbruster, a Think Progress research associate, reports that the press is giving John McCain soft treatment because he invited some of them over for a barbecue recently. His evidence? The Associated Press published an article this afternoon that focused solely on the fact that, even though he has access to a charter plane, McCain took a train from ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on March 15, 2008 07:24
1in 5 Read Blogs Regularly, Find More Accurate and Valuable than Mainstream Press
A stunning 22 percent of Americans read blogs several times a week, according to a new survey. Reuters reports on a glass 3/4 empty: A majority of Americans do not read political blogs, the online commentaries that have proliferated in the race for the U.S. presidency, according to a poll released on Monday. Only 22 percent of people responding to the ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on March 11, 2008 07:28
Sex Scandals and Journalistic Standards
Howie Kurtz has an interesting piece on how mainstream media coverage of allegations of sexual misconduct have changed in recent years. It begins: When Gennifer Flowers held a news conference in 1992 to announce that she had carried on an affair with Bill Clinton, the New York Times devoted one paragraph of a news story to her charges. "I am ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on February 25, 2008 15:22
