Crossposted with the Center for American Progress. With Danielle Ivory

For a conversation so self-evidently silly, last weekend's food-fight between The Washington Post's Dana Milbank and The Huffington Post's Nico Pitney on CNN's Reliable Source sure has excited quite a few people.

Maybe it's because according to Pitney,...

Crossposted with the Center for American Progress. With Danielle Ivory

One of the more dramatic stories of the week--buried beneath an avalanche of twittered news from Iran--was the brave escape by the New York Times' David Rohde from his Talibani kidnappers following seven months of captivity. Ironically, almost nobody...

Crossposted with the Center for American Progress


With Danielle Ivory

A heated debate broke out last week over the degree to which incendiary talk by right-wing cable and radio hosts might be fueling a recent spate of murderous violence by disturbed individuals.

We'd like...

Crossposted with the Center for American Progress

Eric Alterman, Danielle Ivory

Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings are not scheduled to begin until mid-July, but her punditocracy hearings are already well underway. This week they're all about her now infamous (and almost always decontextualized) "wise Latina" comment.

Pat Buchanan...

Crossposted with the Center for American Progress

For once, Foxnation.com got it right. "Dems Now Get Taste of Being Called 'Racist,'" said a screaming headline, and there's no denying it was true. How else to characterize a story in which ex-Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo and radio...

Crossposted with the Center for American Progress

Eric Alterman, Danielle Ivory

Former President George W. Bush recently mused with the press about scooping up his dog's droppings. Meanwhile, former Vice President Dick Cheney has taken on the role of attack dog. Some conservatives have suggested that President...

Crossposted with the Center for American Progress

When word got out that the New York Times' Maureen Dowd accidentally published part of Josh Marshall's blog under her own name in a column in the New York Times, more than one blogger reacted with unconcealed glee. It...

This story is really interesting. We read, "When Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt negotiated with People and other celebrity magazines this summer for photos of their newborn twins and an interview, the stars were seeking more than the estimated $14 million they received from the deal. They also wanted...

A long time ago in what feels like a far-off place, I wrote a column in The Nation warning that it was inevitable that Rupert Murdoch would feel compelled to ruin the news pages of The Wall Street Journal once he got a hold of them in order to...

This weekend, Jim Rutenberg wrote in the New York Times that "in the last couple of years ... MSNBC, long struggling for an identity and lagging, established itself as a liberal alternative to Fox News Channel in prime time."

This seems to be a point of wide agreement, but...

When you need your right-wing talking points accepted wholesale, who you gonna call? I'd call ABC's Charlie Gibson. From an interview with Barack Obama yesterday:

OBAMA: Well, look, there is no doubt that the amount of money that we've raised in this campaign has been extraordinary and surprised me as...

Last week we flagged CNN's Drew Griffin's interview with Sarah Palin, in which he offered questions like "You seemed to be very much on your game. You get huge crowds. Even bigger crowds than John McCain. Why is that?" and "Governor, is Barack Obama a socialist?" before getting around...

So every year, I close my house for the weekend of the Hamptons Film Festival, and this year I managed to catch eight films, of which I stayed for all of six, which is a much higher percentage than usual, given that movies seen over a single day tend to...

What this country needs is more reporting -- or so right-wingers keep insisting, sort of. First, Rep. Michele Bachmann on Hardball:

What I would say is that the news media should do a penetrating expose and take a look -- I wish they would. I wish the American media...

CNN has been running a package about James T. Harris, a black supporter of John McCain who spoke strongly against Obama at a recent rally, and even exchanged hugs with McCain. It's called "McCain Supporter Under Fire" -- but the story never makes clear who is putting Harris under...

I hesitate to call myself a friend of Paul Newman's, but he was certainly a friend to me. I can't say we hung out together, but we talked on those occasions we found ourselves in the same place thanks either to good friends or good occasions, owing primarily to...

Rick Klein, the crazy Neocon promoter who also writes ABCNews.com's The Note, insists this morning that John McCain "has the most at stake in how he handles the bailout bill nobody loves but everybody seems to realize you cannot in good faith hate."

First, let's note the use of...

There's an old rule in journalism: simplify. If there's a shorter, simpler version of a word, use it. Instead of saying "at this point in time," just say "now." This is doubly true in headline writing, where space is limited.

Jonathan Weisman breaks this rule on the front page...

Last spring, I wrote a column about The New York Sun called "Potemkin Paper?" For those of you outside the New York City area (or for the many of you in it that still likely don't read the paper), it's something like what you'd expect if Marty Peretz ran...

Yesterday, Mike Baker of the Associated Press wrote a story titled "Edwards' wife criticized for silence on affair." It ran in outlets all across the United States and as far away as South Africa. The story began: "Two weeks after a devastating revelation sent her husband into political exile,...