Conservative Media Scoops Mainstream Media
A series of scandals uncovered by conservative outlets and ignored by the mainstream press are starting to raise some uncomfortable questions. The right-wing media’s single-minded focus on a handful of targets over the past months and its success in pushing those stories into the mainstream have underscored the sharp divide between traditional news organizations and the bloggers and talk show hosts ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 16, 2009 08:30
Palin Divorce Rumors
As if more evidence was needed that Sarah Palin is a pop culture celebrity as much as a political figure, she's now fending off rumors from tabloids and blogs that she's getting a divorce and moving to Montana. I take her at her word that these are completely made up but, as David Adesnik notes, "This is one of those stories ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 2, 2009 06:57
Mark Sanford’s Excellent Adventure [Make That 'Affair']
When news broke Monday afternoon that South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford went off the grid the previous Thursday and that neither his wife nor his staff knew where they were, I was interested but not particularly motivated to write about it. It was essentially a gossip story that would have been purely speculative and there was the chance that something ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 24, 2009 13:36
Covering the Unrest in Iran
Like many others I've been following the events unfolding in Iran with great albeit not obsessive interest. I haven't been following the tweets for a number of reasons not the least of which is that I can't distinguish among rumors, reports of actual events, and disinformation. So I've been using more conventional news sources and have found the ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 24, 2009 10:32
Republicans on HuffPo
Politico's Mike Calderone has noticed quite a few Republicans blogging at the left-leaning Huffington Post lately. While its namesake founder posits that" is a reflection of our traffic, our brand, and the fact that we are increasingly seen ... as an Internet newspaper, not positioned ideologically in terms of how we cover the news,” a more practical explanation is more ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on May 23, 2009 09:06
Obama ‘Working the Refs’
Barack Obama is taking great pains to reach out to opinion journalists, Michael Calderone reports for The Politico, and it's paying off. After some anecdotes about Obama personally calling pundits who wrote negative things with respectful explanations of why they were wrong, Calderone observes, The communications team for President George W. Bush would have been much more likely to let the ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 9, 2009 07:59
The End of Hard News?
Via Taegan Goddard, I see that Harry Jaffe is proclaiming an age of fluff in the newspaper business. Today’s news is there is no news on the front page of today’s Washington Post. Not one of the six articles on page A1 begins with a hard news lead that imparts real news to readers. Welcome to the new age of daily newspapering, ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 7, 2009 08:57
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 on March 15, 2008 07:24
