[originally published on CJR.org, the Web site of the Columbia Journalism Review.]

Once again, ABC This Week’s roundtable tilted off-center, even without semi-regulars Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts to do the honors. (Perhaps Ms. Roberts, having sneered last week that Obama was making a big mistake in taking his...

(Originally published on CJR.org, the Web site of the Columbia Journalism Review.)

On Meet the Press Sunday, David Gregory told his political round table:

The big question ... on the campaign trail is readiness to lead, to handle a crisis like this [Russia-Georgia]. And the readiness issue...

(Originally published on CJR.org, the Web site of the Columbia Journalism Review.)

ABC’s This Week began with the same montage that every other broadcast has featured this week: the clips of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton coupled—or is it tripled?—with Barack Obama in McCain’s spot seen ‘round the...

[originally published on CJR.org, the Web site of the Columbia Journalism Review]

Several of McCain’s utterances in his first interview with George Stephanopoulos since April deserve, as they say, to “make news”—to be emblazoned all week on front pages and reprised in TV clips—though, being substantial utterances, almost surely...

[originally published on CJR.org, the Web site of the Columbia Journalism Review]

Imagine! Almost an entire installment of Meet the Press devoted to an interview with a private citizen who is not running for office—who receives the attention not only because he is famous but because he…knows...

[originally published on CJR.org, the Web site of the Columbia Journalism Review]

Last week, I tasked George Stephanopoulos to ask McCain a serious question about his acumen in the matter of Iraq, and, if I may abuse the privilege of this space (and my readers’ toleration), this week I...

[originally published on CJR.org, the Web site of the Columbia Journalism Review]

Todd Gitlin watches Sunday morning talk shows so that you don't have to, and, every Monday morning, offers his take on selected programs. Goodbye, Russert Watch; hello, Sunday Watch!

George Stephanopoulos rounded up New England Senate surrogates...

[originally published on CJR.org, the Web site of the Columbia Journalism Review]

Tim Russert, dead at fifty-eight, was more than just a showman. He had gifts galore for friendship and gusto, and stamped the life around him with excitement. His Sunday ritual must have benefited from his schmoozing capacities....

Originally published by the Columbia Journalism Review.

Tim Russert's round table of square minds marked the end of Hillary Clinton's campaign with a summary parsefest, but the NBC correspondents' knowing chat was curiously distant from the primary tenor and content of her concession speech.

The money quote Russert...

[originally published on CJR.org, the Web site of the Columbia Journalism Review]

It shouldn’t be news that the Bush White House is a nest of intellectual bankruptcy—and if Meet the Press and equivalent shows had been doing their jobs for the last seven-and-a-half years, Scott McClellan’s “scathing new book”...

[originally published in the Columbia Journalism Review]

Tim Russert led his round table with Hillary Clinton's much-excoriated and certainly maladroit mention of the RFK assassination, a gaffe that was reasonably attributed by the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus to "exhaustion and a very heavy dose of self-pity." But...

[originally published on CJR.org, the Web site of the Columbia Journalism Review]

Tim Russert, as is his wont, went to politics before policy with Democratic Senator Jim Webb of Virginia. He began with what he called the "political questions" of 1) his neutrality, so far, between Obama and Clinton,...

[From the Columbia Journalism Review]

What’s a Sunday morning show to do when it specializes in political prophecy and the expectation is a foregone conclusion? Bring some players on, ask them routine questions, register their spin, try to trip them up when the spin is ridiculous, and move on.

[From the Columbia Journalism Review]

Some viewers are probably disappointed that Tim Russert devoted only the first fifteen minutes or so of Meet the Press to l’affaire Jeremiah Wright. (That’s by my count; Patrick Healy and Jeff Zeleny in The New York Times came up with eighteen minutes.)...

[From the Columbia Journalism Review]

This week, Tim Russert, the national handicapper-in-chief, brought Howard Dean onto Meet the Press and tried to coax him to “focus on this unity question”—to prognosticate about the outlook for an end to the Democratic race. Dean crisply repeated what he’d already said many...

Rahm Emanuel has introduced a bill to delete spending for Cheney's office on the ground that Cheney claims, when convenient, that the vice-president's office is not "an entity within the executive branch." Rep. Emanuel, who's taken a beating from the liberal wing of the Democrats for refusing to...

On page A21 of this morning's The New York Times (though mysteriously missing online) appears a tantalizing tidbit by Benedict Carey under the headline, "Handicapping With Optimism." It seems that, according to a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, Martin Seligman, and co-researchers Andrew Rosenthal and Prateek Sharma, the presidential candidate who...

Conventional wisdom is gearing up to tut-tut again (and again) that the Democrats' Congressional Iraq resolutions put the party in danger of crossing a "fine line" and hence banishing the party to its post-Vietnam wilderness. Once again, Washington journalism projects its own servility and timidity onto the public. Toward that...

Killers like Seung-Hui Cho are damaged, hugely resentful men who set out to punish the world because they consider it so stupid, or unjust, or negligent, or otherwise damnable as to have failed to recognize their true worth and strength. Thus do diminished men puff themselves up as avenging crusaders....