Outside the Beltway

Is the current media environment a problem for proper political discourse?

US News & World Report is going to stop printing magazines, except for a handful of niche issues like the annual college and graduate school ranking guides.

A longish NYT postmortem titled “Democrats Outrun by a 2-Year G.O.P. Comeback Plan” attributes Tuesday’s Republican victories to a January 2009 PowerPoint presentation. But structural factors were more important.

After three months, Rupert Murdoch’s strategy of walling off the Times websites isn’t looking so smart.

She didn’t gain national prominence until late August, and she’s going to most likely lost by a wide margin tonight, but Christine O’Donnell received more coverage from the media than any other candidate running in 2010.

The Delaware Senate race took a trip into the gutter yesterday.

Craig Newmark thinks NPR’s membership model will overtake advertising-supported news over the next decade.

The man best known for staging the “Acorn Pimp” videos is back in the news with an even more bizarre story.

A third of the Forbes 50 were born billionaires. Does that mean the game is fixed?

An amusing parody of the typical press report on a new scientific finding.

It’s getting harder and harder to tell blogs from newspapers.

OTB’s James Joyner and Salon’s Glenn Greenwald discuss WikiLeaks and its implications for journalism on Al Jazeera’s “Inside Story.”

Political campaigns are engaging in a new form of “new media outreach” — paying bloggers for favorable coverage.

Blogs are all grown up now and indistinguishable from other online media.

The Washington Post Company, which famously accepted Dave Weigel’s resignation from its namesake newspaper last month, has hired him back in essentially the same job for its online magazine Slate.

Contrasting the treatment of two DOJ stories is a case study in media bias.

Daniel Schorr’s journalism career ended far too early, lasting a mere eighty-one years.

A rare case of a headline underhyping the story: “Survey: Half of Journalists Think Their Offline Publications Will Eventually Fold.”

JournoList’s archives have been making headlines at The Daily Caller, but there doesn’t seem to be any substance to the allegations of scandal.

Conservatives have long complained about liberal media bias. But conservative media seems to be much worse.

Some principles transcend political borders.

Journalism and the New Media combined in a feeding frenzy yesterday and a woman lost her job. She probably shouldn’t have.

Andrew Sullivan is back from vacation and back obsessing over the birth of a two-year old kid in Alaska.

Journalists have been following Maxwell Scott’s advice since long before “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” was made.

Why I didn’t talk to Dave Weigel before writing about him.

It’s going to be much harder for reporters to get access to the military thanks to new rules announced last night by the Pentagon.

Did the American media cover up torture by the Bush Administration?

If one wants to be a US Senator, one is going to have to learn to talk to the press.

Magazines routinely run great pieces by highly biased writers. Why can’t newspapers do the same?

A roundup of some of the more intelligent commentary on the Big Picture issues in the brouhaha of the day.