One of the strange impulses of modern life is the irresistible–to me, anyway–urge to turn on the TV and the laptop and spend all day watching coverage of a weather disaster that you are already in the middle of experiencing.
News Media
Debate Watch: Bringing a Bayonet to a Knife Fight
In the final debate, nominally on foreign policy, Barack Obama came ready for a cavalry charge, while Mitt Romney seemed content to watch from the trenches.
Debate Watch: The Fact-Check Heard Round the World
We don’t yet have pop-up fact-checks at Presidential debates. But for one crucial moment, we did have Candy Crowley.
Debate Preview: TV Doesn’t Matter Anymore, Except When It Totally Does
It turns out the debates are among those few exceptions every year—the Oscars, the Super Bowl, the Olympics—when TV awakens as a big medium, now amplified and hyped by social media.
Debate Watch: Pointed Questions and a Hot Cuppa Joe
There was another election 2012 debate last night, with a moderator and two candidates, and this time all three showed up.
Friday Night Lights and the Politicians Who Love It
Capping off what had already been a strong week in the debate and the polls, yesterday Mitt Romney secured the coveted Bissinger endorsement. Sports journalist Buzz Bissinger wrote a piece for The Daily Beast saying that he …
Debate Watch: Obama Eats Up the Clock, But Romney Sets the Agenda
During the first Presidential debate last night, CNN ran a clock on screen showing how long each candidate had spoken in total. It reminded me of a time-of-possession clock in a football game. In a game, if one team burns more of the clock, it can mean that they’re controlling the ball, defending their lead, denying their opponents the …
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Former New York Times Publisher, Dies at Age 86
It’s only fitting that I got news of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger‘s death through a news alert from the New York Times on my iPhone, just as I had brought the Saturday half of the Times’ Sunday edition in from my stoop. (Long-serving …
Fox News Apologizes After Airing Live Footage of Suicide
Fox News anchor Shepard Smith apologized to his audience this afternoon after his program inadvertently aired live video of a man killing himself.
“The Pollsters Are Biased” Is the New “The Reporters Are Biased”
You’re entitled to your own opinion but not to your own facts; that political dictum was coined by the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, because he was no fun. Well, good news, folks! Now you can have your own facts! Even …
You Got Served: A Waiter’s-Eye View of Mitt Romney
There are plenty of people out there–too many, maybe–analyzing what Mitt Romney said in the secretly taped fundraiser video posted in full at the Mother Jones website: what his comments about “the 47%” say about his campaign, about his character, about his attitude toward the working class, about his base of voters and Barack Obama’s. …
Dead Tree Alert: Check, Please
My column (subscription required) is back in the print TIME magazine this week, and it catches up on what’s been one of the major distinguishing media features of the 2012 campaign: the rise, and limitations, of fact-checking in …
The Anti-Muhammad Video: Ridiculous, and Now Deadly Serious
In a saner world, the trailer for Innocence of Muslims would get no response other than as an example of terrible filmmaking. The 14-minute video, purporting to be excerpted from a larger movie propagandizing present-day Muslims …