Barack Obama has a reputation as a brilliant speaker, but not, on his own behalf, an effective talker. He has delivered passages of soaring rhetoric and inspired crowds, but as President, he has faltered at simply talking to citizens: laying out, convincingly, plainly, point by point, why and how he believes his policies will work and …
News Media
What We’re Learning from the Convention Ratings (Or Lack Thereof)
The ratings for the first night of the Democratic National Convention are in, and they’re not tremendously more impressive than those for the first night of the RNC: about 22 million viewers in the 10 pm hour, compared with about 20.5 million.*
*Update: The above figures are for the three broadcast and three cable networks (ABC, CBS, …
PolitiFact, Harry Reid’s Pants, and the Limits of Fact-Checking
Fact: I do not know whether Mitt Romney paid federal income taxes, when, or how much, in any year before 2010, for which he publicly released his tax returns. Fact: You probably do not either, unless you are among the small army …
When Twitter Becomes the Tweet Police
It was — to paraphrase Twitter’s own terminology for when it crashes — a whale of a fail. The social-media service, and NBC, apologized for the suspension of a British reporter, critical of NBC’s Olympics coverage, who tweeted the e-mail of an NBC executive to his followers.
NBC’s Olympic Livestreaming Is a Step Forward. But Is It a Permanent One?
Let me say upfront that complaining about the quality and immediacy of one’s video options for watching the Olympics in the comfort of my home is, more literally than usual, a First World problem. It’s what we do every two years, …
CNN’s President to Step Down, Calls for “New Thinking.” But Does CNN Want That?
Big events like the Olympics’ debut are notorious for “news dumps”–less-than-flattering announcements that might be overshadowed by a bigger story. That may not have been CNN‘s intent, but it was perhaps not a bad day for the …
TCA 2012: ABC’s Tea Party Screw-Up Overshadows a Ratings Win
When ABC News scheduled a panel to open the Disney/ABC session of the Television Critics Association press tour, it was probably expecting to take a victory bow. It’s been a good several months in particular for the Good Morning …
Get Me Rewrite: Why Are Political Journalists Letting Sources Change Their Quotes?
The next time you read a campaign story that includes the phrase “a senior adviser said,” you might want to think of it as “a senior adviser said, after giving a talking to a reporter, getting the quote emailed back, and revising it to what he or she wishes he or she actually said.”
The Morning After: Follow-Up Story
Brief spoilers for last night’s The Newsroom below:
Because I have already been very critical of The Newsroom, last night’s episode was the last of which I saw before writing my original review, let me kick this post off by …
The SCOTUS-Reporting Screwup, Second By Second
A lot happened in the media while I was away the last week and a half: Anderson Cooper came out, Ann Curry went out and, when the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act was released, a couple of news organizations flamed out. Fox News and—longer and more spectacularly—CNN made the hurried mistake of reporting, on an …
The Morning After: The Newsroom’s First Draft of History
My review of The Newsroom is in this week’s TIME (here’s my blog post elaborating on it), and it was not a positive one. But there’s been so much ink and bandwidth used up on the show in advance that I’m more interested now in …
Why Didn’t Morning TV Love Ann Curry?
Maybe Ann Curry and Conan O’Brien should get together for a drink sometime. For a long while, she was second banana on NBC’s Today show, where she had read the news since the late ’90s. After Katie Couric left the program, her …
Dead Tree Alert: Blowhardball: The Not-So-Special Comment of HBO’s The Newsroom
Sunday night, HBO premieres The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin’s attempt to do for cable news what The West Wing did for politics: present a romanticized version of a beleaguered institution, with a cast of hard-working idealists, long …