Media

Yesterday was the first of what will be several firsts for the soon-to-be First Daughters: Malia and Sasha Obama’s First Day at Their New School. The Obama camp, seeking to both satiate and control the inevitable hunger for First Day of School images released three still photos of the girls (and mom and dad) preparing for school yesterday...

If 2008 felt like The Year You Couldn't Escape Andrea Mitchell, that's in part because she was the year's "most used" network reporter (excluding the anchors), clocking 355 minutes of air time for NBC, according to Andrew Tyndall's "Year in Review 2008" report. And Tyndall studies just ABC, CBS, and NBC, so imagine what this number would look like...

Kudos to Nate Silver at Fivethirtyeight for pointing out the flaws in The Wall Street Journal’s editorial about the Al Franken-Norm Coleman vote recount in Minnesota. The WSJ argues that partisan forces are steering the recount to Franken’s advantage: Thanks to the machinations of Democratic Secretary of State Mark Ritchie and a meek state Canvassing...

Winners: Benoit Denizet-Lewis and Jeffrey Toobin. The second best political news for America after Barack Obama’s election as president is that Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank is now one of the most powerful men in Washington. Last fall, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made Frank the point man on the $700 billion bailout plan, and as chairman of the House Financial...

Yesterday, I posted about Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski's negative insta-reaction on Morning Joe to their colleague's report about the Obama girls' first day of school. This morning, those hosts rowed back what Brzezinski called their "organic," disapproving reaction to Tom Costello's school-side report. Said Brezezinski: We kind of screwed up. We totally screwed up. And NBC's Tom Costello...

Over at the Instaputz blog, TS raises the potential conflict-of-interest factor in Michael Lewis's op-ed collaboration with hedge fundie/author David Einhorn—something I ignored when I praised the piece yesterday (hat tip Romenesko). Upon further reflection, I still just don't have any problem with Lewis writing the piece with Einhorn. It's not like the piece was a news...

My colleague Katia was no fan of CNN's debate night "perception analyzers." Perhaps she'd prefer the adaptation of the doodad unveiled last night on The Daily Show as Anderson Cooper moderated a 2008 Puppendential Debate between the furry contenders for First Dog as the insta-reactions of "dog people" and "cat people" streamed across the bottom of the screen? <style...

ASPEN, Colo. — The hottest item in the frigid early morning hours of New Year’s Day in this fashionable ski resort town was the free street edition of The Aspen Times, featuring this stark double-deck headline: “Bomb Threats Paralyze Aspen.” The front page featured an exclusive hand-written note delivered to the paper the night before by an embittered...

The press has pretty much ignored Medicare over the past year, largely because the politicians have ignored it too. Media advisers told their candidates to stay clear of Medicare, even though more than 40 million Americans rely on it for their medical care and the program faces long-term financial problems that are solvable but likely to be demagogued to death...

Matthew Yglesias recently argued at The American Prospect: The Somali situation was, in many ways, improving as of two years ago. At which point the Bush administration initiated a new adventure that, like most Bush administration deeds, was ill-conceived and worked out poorly. In this case, it destroyed the country, has been responsible for the deaths of untold...

When you tell your friends that you took a swim yesterday, did you say you “swam” yesterday or that you “swum” yesterday? Oh, come on. Everyone knows that the past tense of “swim” is “swam.” You’d use “swum” only as a past participle, usually in the sense of taking another step farther back in time: “I had swum only once...

Just wanted to make sure you saw this great A1 story in the Journal on Saturday. Reporter Michael M. Phillips tells the tale of the subprime mortgages crisis through a single ramshackle homestead in Arizona. It's just about note-perfect. There are a lot of things to like about the story, including the superbly written lede: The little blue...

It's a pattern familiar to the point of cliché: an international crisis—or, to be slightly more precise, a crisis that takes place in a foreign country—occurs, and in its aftermath, American media outlets produce think pieces considering how the media performed in covering said crisis. These articles will almost always find that the mainstream coverage was somehow wanting. They will...

Twitter accounts at CNN and Fox News were apparently hacked earlier today resulting in a couple of especially candid faux-Tweets (one "from" CNN's Rick Sanchez and one "about" Fox News's Bill O'Reilly.) Could be part of a phishing scheme, per Twitter's blog.

Behold yet another casualty of the digital age: the printed photograph. And, with it, the little ritual of memory previously so familiar to those of us born before 1995: popping the full roll of film into that little black-plastic canister, taking it to the photo shop, waiting--and waiting, and waiting--for it to be developed...and then, once handed the bright-papered envelope,...

As one of the most secretive presidential administrations in history gets ready to close up shop, it’s closing a few more things—records. Over the past few months, some federal agencies have issued rules that would eliminate public disclosure of information—or, in some cases, make it more difficult for requestors to get information. While the federal Freedom of Information Act regulates...

Dion Nissenbaum, Jerusalem bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers, reports that "the Israeli military has once again barred the first small group of international reporters from getting into Gaza" even as "more and more journalists continue to arrive every day in hopes of" doing just that. "For the moment," Nissenbaum writes, "the only comprehensive coverage coming out of Gaza is...

Early this morning MSNBC's Tom Costello filed a report from outside the Sidwell Friends School, awaiting the Obamas. It was, as far as these things go, a fairly standard report --almost sensitive, even, in that Costello twice conceded that this must be a "scary experience" for the Obama girls. Here is how Costello's MSNBC colleagues reacted to the report: JOE...

From the AP's report on Sasha Obama's first day at Sidwell Friends school: Sasha carried a Trans by JanSport pink, magenta and gray backpack and wore bluejeans and a brown jacket with a hood and her hair was pulled into two braided ponytails. From Politico: A French journalist yelled, "hoo-hoo, Malia," – presumably trying to get their attention...