"Let McCain be McCain," is the campaign mantra. His greatest appeal is when people get a sense of how authentic he is, says Senior advisor Mark Salter. Sounds right. We value authentic individuality. It's part of our national DNA -- which is why Sen. McCain has been so front-and-center all...

AUTHOR David Rosenfelt (1sth in the Andy Carpenter Series)
GENRE: Courtroom Based Who-Did-It.
LENGTH: 6 hours, 50 minutes
PUBLISHER: Listen & Live Audio
NARRATOR: Grover Gardner

LOG LINE
Wisecracking, millionaire lawyer takes on impossible murder case and uncovers his dead...

Media trainers are those people who help prepare executives, authors, celebrities and politicians when talking with the media. They look at the two presidential candidates with a trained eye on the little things that matter, not just the ten-point plans to save the world, or the soundbite-of-the-day. It's things like...

AUTHOR Steve Martini (9th in the Paul Madriani Series)
GENRE: Legal drama
LENGTH: 13.5 hours
PUBLISHER: Harper Audio
NARRATOR: George Guidall, "Everyman," "The Foreign Correspondent," "The Dark Tower," the Vince Flynn Series, plus 650 other book narrations.

LOG LINE
Who...

The whole off-shore outsourcing thing is very baffling. It helps the economy, it hurts the economy. Steve Jobs likes it, Lou Dobbs is apoplectic. Don't we have enough conflicting information to sort through without trying to decide about outsourcing? We're still trying to figure out chocolate: It creates zits and...

Paper-and-ink books are in mortal peril. Book publisher's sales are down. Book readers are declining. These are the cheerless quotes coming out of the recent BookExpo America held at the Los Angeles Convention Center this past weekend. But over at the Biltmore Hotel, a short hop away, folks attending the...

AUTHOR: Jeffrey Archer (Kane & Abel, A Matter of Honor, Honor Amongst Thieves, The Prodigal Daughter)
GENRE: Contemporary Suspense
LENGTH: 16.5 hours
PUBLISHER: MacMillan Audio
NARRATOR: Roger Allam (Royal Shakespeare & Olivier Award winning actor)

LOG LINE
Unjustly imprisoned working-class guy...

It's very confusing trying to figure out what an elitist is these days. Who qualifies to be an elitist? Are there standards? Certain physical characteristics? Is it catching? If you somehow become one, are you better off? Worse off? Very confusing.

Like everything else, the meaning depends on who uses...

"Child 44" - Audio Book
by Tom Rob Smith; Narrator: Dennia Boutsikaris

While there are flashes of a compelling police mystery in this first novel by Tom Rob Smith, the primary problem is the plot and characters come off as plodding, bleak and brutal as the oppressive...

"'Citizen Journalist' Broke Obama Story," reads the headline in the Los Angeles Times. The 'citizen' is HuffPo blogger, Mayhill Fowler. The story is the exclusive recording and article about Obama's 'bitter' bite from his speech about small towns - which became as ubiquitous on TV screens as "Law and Order."...

The AP runs a story announcing to the world that Mariah Carey has surpassed Elvis for the most sold No. 1 singles on the Billboard Chart, and is now second only to the Beatles in single sales. Big. And statistically correct. But statistics, like everything, should be viewed in context....

Every solid reporter and editor knows the key to journalistic success: assume nothing and question everything. For successful business executives, it's a survival mantra. Educators call it critical thinking, the ability to see an advertisement, hear a presentation, read a news story with a questioning eye on what's behind the...

A lot is being made in the current presidential campaign-a-thon about meaningful words versus action. Let's stipulate: words do have actionable meanings -- UNLESS they are so over-used they become meaningless as in "Your call is important to us," endlessly repeated while you're on hold for 20 minutes, then disconnected....

Thanks goodness for SpitzerFest. Yes, it's a tragedy on so many personal and societal levels -- but isn't it one of life's ironies that there are always folks who benefit from misfortune? Electronic news, like cable TV and the Internet, were certainly looking at a viewer slow-down with the Pennsylvania's...

Email is the workhorse of modern communications at work and at home. Yes, we still use letters -- mostly for bills and other unrelenting official forms. Office memos are morphing into CYA missives for the files. At home, we no longer write personal letters except the warm greetings in our...

If a truth gun were put to our collective TV heads asking why we watch American Idol, and The Apprentice, the answer might be: we like watching people being humiliated. If that's true -- then how come? There is a sub-set of Reality TV that can only be described...

Wolf Blitzer was the big loser in CNN's recent Democratic debate twixt Clinton & Obama in Hollywood. It was clear that the two candidates decided not to replay their South Carolina squabble or duplicate the cross-talking Romney-McCain slap-back from the previous night's GOP debate. But Blitzer was having no part...

The Reality-TV mini-series we call the Presidential Debates is running out of juice. Same questions, same answers endlessly re-looped as the media-candidate interview process grinds on from state to state. Yes, the candidates are trying to goose things up with oppo- research gotcha barbs. But the TV newsies are...

Folks who work media and politics understand the notion that perception trumps reality -- most of the time. In Hillary's New Hampshire upset, it was her three Oprah moments that changed women's perceptions and derailed the speeding Obama bandwagon. Three? Uhhuh. The first one came during the New Hampshire debate...

CNN's Iowa Caucus coverage was so visually hyper, so jammed with conflicting graphics and people that the only thing missing was a flashing disclaimer that 'sustained viewing may cause discomfort and nausea.' The whole evening looked self-consciously high-tech as if the producers believe that content alone will not sustain viewer...