Crossposted with the Center for American Progress. With Mickey Ehrlich
On November 19, emails stolen from scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England were leaked onto the web. Conservatives immediately claimed that these proved global warming to be a hoax and...

Crossposted with the Center for American Progress.

Last week, Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei at Politico reported that the White House planned on making deficit reduction a centerpiece of the next State of the Union address. Allen and Vandehei called the decision "practical" saying that "Obama has spent...

Crossposted with the Center for American Progress.

Back in mid-September, I received an e-mail from The Washington Post Ombudsman Andrew Alexander asking me to give him a call about some of the issues I've been raising here and elsewhere about Howard Kurtz's myriad conflicts of interest for a column...

Crossposted with the Center for American Progress.

Republican Representative Michelle Bachmann issued a call last week for a "house call" and a big party out on the National Mall next week, saying, "we're going to tell Congress what they can do with their health care bill." She went on...

Crossposted with the Center for American Progress with Mickey Ehrlich.

Rush Limbaugh felt certain he had the next big Obama story in his lap. He--or somebody on his staff--thought they had discovered a portion of Obama's Columbia undergraduate thesis on the conservative blog Pajamas Media. The post by Michael...

Not long ago, cable news cameras turned their focus skyward to an almost celestial body hurling itself across the sky. Broadcasters watched breathlessly as it landed. They were agog at the image, godlike in its apparent significance. Was it a bird? Was it a plane? No, it was a hoax.

Crossposted with the Center for American Progress. With Mickey Ehrlich

What do conservatives fight about? Judging by the recent on-air spat between Joe Scarborough and Rush Limbaugh, the answer is both plenty and nothing at all. This was a debate characterized by a remarkable lack of depth, even by...

Crossposted with the Center for American Progress. With Mickey Ehrlich.

Last week, a New York appeals court dismissed Dan Rather's lawsuit against CBS. Rather contends that the network violated his contract by giving him insufficient airtime on "60 Minutes" after forcing him to step down as anchor of...

Crossposted with the Center for American Progress with Mickey Ehrlich

In recent weeks, the ombudsmen (or "public editor") of both The New York Times and The Washington Post have chastised their respective papers for paying too little attention to right-wing agitation on talk radio, cable news,...

Crossposted with the Center for American Progress. With Mickey Ehrlich

One night last week, Jon Stewart asked his audience, "Where were the real reporters on this story?" He meant the exposure of several ACORN employees giving tax advice to a young man and woman pretending to be a pimp...

Crossposted with the Center for American Progress. With Mickey Ehrlich

The Van Jones contretemps is over and Mr. Jones is now a private citizen. On his way out the White House door he was defended by The Nation and Arianna Huffington. However, the facts relating to his past statement,...

Pity poor Ben Stein, fired by The New York Times for an egregious conflict of interest. Although he was trusted by Times readers to offer unbiased economic commentary, Stein could also be found in advertisements hawking a company that soaks suckers for $30 a month for access to a "free...

Crossposted at the Center for American Progress.

Last week we looked at the manner in which the underlying racial issues raised by the arrest of Henry Louis Gates inspired a rash of racist fear and loathing on the far-right. A previous column on the Sotomayor hearings demonstrated much the...

The United States is fighting two wars, has nearly 50 million people uninsured, and has unemployment that is approaching double digits. Yet the media world remains focused on the bizarre events that took place inside the home of a Harvard professor on July 16 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I am too,...

Crossposted with the Center for American Progress.

President Barack Obama made the argument at his Wednesday night press conference this week that our current health care system is unsustainable, saying:

"This is not just about the 47 million Americans who have no health insurance ... Reform is about...

Much of the world of journalism has quite properly been focusing on the trials and tribulations of our great national newspapers -- with the Washington Post's self-inflicted wounds leading the pack. And it is easy to forget amid this obsession the importance of Tip O'Neill's old adage: "All politics is...

Crossposted with the Center for American Progress. With Danielle Ivory

The most recent controversy to embroil media bigwigs has been the proposed but now canceled salons planned by Washington Post publisher Katherine Weymouth. The problem was not with the notion of salons themselves--journalists, like anyone else, are allowed to...

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...