Bob Franken has been doing history’s play-by-play for decades. Through Bob, millions of viewers around the planet have been brought to the front row at just about all the world’s major news events…war, political, legal, you name it, he’s been right there.

Bob has specialized in live coverage, with a knack for taking the story, tempestuous, or complex, and making it understandable. He is famous for a sardonic style that looks for irony, and finds it.

An Emmy-award winning reporter, recently inducted into the Society for Professional Journalists Washington Hall of Fame, he covered combat in both Iraq wars, the White House during the George W. Bush administration, the Clinton scandals, the Supreme Court, Congress for ten years. He forced world attention on the Guantanamo Bay prison camp with his extensive reporting from there.

He’s been there live through dramas like the Terri Schiavo tragedy and countless natural disasters.

Bob Franken can share a unique perspective on the news of our time…how every story is different, how each is the same, what’s the first thing he looks for when he arrives to go “Live From the Parking Lot.”

Blog Entries by Bob Franken

Congress Thrown for Another Loss

Posted December 10, 2009 | 08:25 AM (EST)


Those who are not sports fans will probably not know the term "BCS", or that it means Bowl Championship Series, or that it is highly controversial because it chooses a national football champion without the kind of playoff elimination games one finds in other major sports. Now you know.

Even...

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Tiger Woods and Other Sub Par Heroes

4 Comments | Posted December 8, 2009 | 10:08 AM (EST)


You know we laugh when somebody says "Show Business Is My Life"? It's a joke. Right?

Perhaps it is, but it's not funny. That's because we live in an age of image making and media manipulation where much of Life is truly show biz. Reality is what the PR people...

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Salahi and Rogers No-Show Business: Fearing and Jeering the Hearing

Posted December 4, 2009 | 09:57 AM (EST)



When I was off chasing some grueling or even dangerous story, like say, a shooting war, I had a standard response for anyone who complained: "It sure as hell beats covering some Congressional committee". That was a heartfelt as could be.

After sitting through hundreds upon hundreds of...

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Unemployment: Platitudes at the White House

1 Comments | Posted December 3, 2009 | 08:37 AM (EST)



Let's dispense with the cheap shot first: The Salahis were not invited to the White House Summit on jobs.

Unfortunately, neither were the unemployed, not in any meaningful way. True, there is no shortage of concerned speeches, including one by the Concerned-Speechmaker-in-Chief, addressing a collection of economists and...

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The Broken Belief System

3 Comments | Posted December 1, 2009 | 10:17 AM (EST)



An apparently uninvited couple waltzes past what we have always been told is an impenetrable human wall against danger to the President.

We may have already forgotten forget the failures a few months ago in what we had grown up believing were the fail-safe procedures to prevent cataclysmic...

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The Next First Republican Presidential Debate

Posted November 30, 2009 | 10:08 AM (EST)


"WHAT AN INCREDIBLE NIGHT THIS WILL BE!!!"

Rush Limbaugh is beside himself. He's the moderator of the first GOP presidential debate of 2012, carried exclusively on Fox News Channel. What a highly charged confrontation we can expect! Who would have known four years ago that the candidates would include Sarah...

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Social Climbing the White House Gates

7 Comments | Posted November 27, 2009 | 10:00 AM (EST)


I'm sorry. I can't contain myself. I have to write about this:

It is probably not true that when President Obama announces Tuesday he'll be ordering thousands more Americans to Afghanistan, the first two to go will be the couple that crashed the White House State Dinner. But there are...

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Thanksgiving: When There Is Humane Treatment for All

3 Comments | Posted November 26, 2009 | 09:55 AM (EST)


Those Humane Society commercials on behalf of neglected, abused and hungry dogs and cats are heart wrenching to me. No one loves animals more than me, dotes more on his own pets.

HOWEVER: Don't we need a similar campaign for human children? Given the new study that shows one fourth...

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The State Dinner and Afghanistan: Stepping Up to the Plate

Posted November 25, 2009 | 11:10 AM (EST)


Unlike the wide coverage given to the tedious sessions President Obama has held about Afghanistan, the planning for the White House State Dinner for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was conducted in complete secrecy. No leaks whatsoever.

It's a pity. First of all, the President himself also convened these...

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Insincerity Hall of Fame?: Just Asking

Posted November 24, 2009 | 11:44 AM (EST)



"Thank you for asking".

If I am ever able to realize my dream to establish an Insincerity Hall of Fame that phrase will have a prominent place.

It's the usually dismissive response from someone who has just been asked "How ya doin'?". I always want to fire back...

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The SAD Study

1 Comments | Posted November 20, 2009 | 04:26 PM (EST)


With all the reports coming out that recommend we scale back on life saving medical exams there is one we might soon see from still another group of experts.

This one concerns depression. It concludes that diagnosis, medication and counseling won't work anyway, so why bother trying. After all,...

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Dan Snyder, The Redskins and Other Failures

Posted October 30, 2009 | 09:08 AM (EST)



Chances are you've been following the Washington Redskins epic lately. You don't have to be a football fan to be fascinated by the story of a team owner who has managed in 10 short years to squander generations of goodwill from an area that came together on little...

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The Washington Wrongman

2 Comments | Posted October 21, 2009 | 12:15 PM (EST)


You've heard this before. It doesn't matter whether those of us who fancy ourselves politically informed are right or wrong when we pontificate. No one really pays close enough attention to remember, and certainly we don't. It's a great gig.

Well, I hope you're sitting down, because this pundit-wanna bee...

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Mr.President: Outfox Fox on Fox

11 Comments | Posted September 17, 2009 | 09:46 AM (EST)


President Barack Obama: You are about to set the world record for presenting the same show on the most channels in the same day. The record is currently held, of course, by "Law and Order". The only network where you will not be seen is Fox. And that Mr. President,...

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The Real Meaning of the Email

Posted September 15, 2009 | 09:42 AM (EST)


Even though we've moved way beyond emails with texting, instant messages, Twitter, Facebook and what have you, emails are still in play. But we have never understood what they really say.

So as another in my series of vital public services, I am interpreting the language of electronic mail... what...

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Fill In the Blank Stories

Posted July 10, 2009 | 04:09 PM (EST)


It's easy to get jaundiced covering politics and government after awhile. So much of what happens in Washngtonworld is so predictable it's like the old joke about old jokes. They're so familiar someone assigns numbers to them.

Even after the historic election of Barack Obama, the collapse of the economy,...

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Supremes Fanning the Firefighter Flames

6 Comments | Posted June 29, 2009 | 04:27 PM (EST)


It may be one of the dumber Supreme Court rationales in quite some time. Writing for the 5-4 majority which ruled in favor of New Haven's white firefighters and effectively against anti-discrimination in employment, Justice Anthony Kennedy said

"Fear of litigation alone cannot justify an employer's reliance on race...

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The Meanings of MSM

1 Comments | Posted June 24, 2009 | 11:32 AM (EST)


It's easy to get confused. Until bloggers started disparaging "Mainstream Media," I always thought "MSM" was a gay guy thing in the personals.

One can only imagine the quandary for a gay guy blogger. Does he place his "MSM" ad in the "MSM"?

This is not LGBT-bashing, by the way....

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Better Fetters

1 Comments | Posted June 18, 2009 | 10:15 AM (EST)


Let's assume we recover from our near collapse. If we do, or even if we pretend to, we need to ponder the overarching lesson we should learn from all this: UNFETTERED CAPITALISM DOES NOT WORK.

We inevitably get sucked into what President Obama calls a "culture of irresponsibility." Truth be...

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Tweety 3-P

3 Comments | Posted June 11, 2009 | 10:11 AM (EST)


Sometimes they have all the right ingredients: By that I mean news stories which combine Twitter's vacuousness, with parochial political pandering (known as a "3-P") and media desperate for news on a slow day.

I refer, of course, to the short outbursts from Sen. Charles Grassley who used Twitter to...

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