Tweeting Mumbai

I watched this happen. It said a lot about providing information rapidly to the already-focused. I'm not sure what else it said.

Huh?

If you don't know what's going on right now, scroll down to the Think, Think, Think post.
And read everything else in the context of that.

This week, in class discussion, all of you will be expected to participate in each side:
1. Helping the Atlantic take the next step, move up to the next level, become a bigger player in political coverage.
2. Positioning Bobby Jindal so that, in 2010, he's right about where Obama was in 2006.

But on Monday, all of you will receive specific assignments that will place you on one side or the other.

Bobby Obey You

It's no surprise to me that, since hiring Levenson and DeCrescenzo, Jindal is getting these kinds of kissy face profiles in the dead tree media.

But is that the right place to launch him?
And is "the new Obama" the right meme?
Should they start working the bloggers who aren't buying it? (Cesca is all HuffPo-connected.)
The TownHall crowd seems intrigued. Give them access?
What are the risks of being the hot new flavor too soon?

Doctor My Songs!

Now John McCain is suing Jackson Browne.

"The MCain people never really got their minds around this whole question," says Kevin Simpson, an expert in music copyright issues in political campaigns. "They had problems right down the line about use of copyrighted material.""

Simpson cited Van Halen, Heart and Foo Fighters among the bands that bumped heads with McCain staffers over use of their music.

Antonioli Announces Grant, Names Controversial Raciti ME

New publisher of the Atlantic Online Courtney Antonioli announced that her company has won a $1 million Knight News Challenge grant to develop news operations in two mid-sized American markets -- Hartford, CT and Columbus, Ohio.

"We're changing the mission of the Atlantic, while preserving its very special brand name," Antonioli explained. "We already have the best stable of racehorse bloggers in our Voices line-up. Our next step is to enlarge the platform and make room for more daily, deadline reporting and analysis. As experiments, we're going to apply some of our new thinking to these two test markets, but that's part of a much bigger set of ideas."

Antonioli announced several key new appointments. Unknown Michael Raciti will will become managing editor Jan. 1. "I have to go through some psychological testing first," he explained. TV veteran Cheyenne Seymour will undertake the job of making Atlantic Online competititve with other outlets in its use of news video.
Kasey Shoemaker will head up a special team that begins brainstorming political coverage for 2010 and 2012 immediately.

Spotted on the wires

Jindal makes his move.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) is in Iowa today, according to CNN."Jindal's considered by many in the Republican party to be a rising star and his trip to Iowa, the state that kicks off the presidential primary season, is raising speculation that he might be interested in making a bid for the Republican Presidential Nomination in 2012. But Jindal says such talk is misplaced and that he has no plans to make a run for the White House."

Jindal has, however, placed on retainer the Connecticut political media consulting firm of Levenson and DeCrescenzo Strategies, LLP. One of the firm's two principals Harry Levenson offered no specific comment on Jindal

"I will say that the game is changing," said Levenson. "This time, the formula is: the lessons from Obama's success + the observable changing slopes of the media + the X factor = a 2012 win. Now, if you'll excuse me, Richard and I have paying clients to talk to."

Baffled? Don't know where to turn?

There are some terrific sites on this week's subject. Most of them, unfortunately, explore the problem more than they do the solution.
Scroll down the main page of the Nieman lab. (You'll even see your friend Nate Silver cited.)
This is another place -- Knight -- that's trying to get mainstrea media ready for the future. You really have to explore around to find what's meaningful to you.
Explore Poynter.
I got sucked into this part of Poynter, and was struck in particular by this:

Target and customize. Participants were taken by my colleague Kelly McBride's presentation on "millennials" -- the huge MySpace/Facebook generation that lives to share good times, photos and sometimes information with their friends. It is an open question how news products might be tailored to their distinctive communication style, but the answer sure is not a "voice of God," one-way declaration of what's news, as Josh Benton of Nieman Journalism Lab put it.

Diane McFarlin, publisher of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and a past president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, expressed the hope that "the millennial generation may, in fact, take user-generated or user-influenced content to a level that will work for the community-at-large. (So far it hasn't.)"

CJs

There's a lot being said about citizen journalists these days.
PressThink tries to define it. Poynter tries to peel the onion. Seattle tried to do it.

Think, think, think

We'll be doing two exercises for the next class, and I want you to get read for them.

In one, we'll be the leadership of a news organization -- something with a digital platform that links to a print product -- getting ready to cover the 2012 campaign. Courtney will be our Publisher, and she''ll be taking our suggestions and plans for keeping up with changing technology.

In the other. Harry will be the campaign manager for Jindal 2012. He'll be asking the rest of his, his staff, for ideas on how to best exploit new media.

You're really going to have to reach out your dendrites and think about all this.

To impress Courtney, read this and incorporate it into your thinking.

Fim and figor

This site -- very Twitter-friendly -- is worth exploring. The Media-tagged tuff is right up our alley.

But so is the overall idea of everytihng being short and punchy and hip.

The wired reporter

This article describes new style of campaign reporting.
What are its inherent risks and advantages?

The New York Times is trying to exist on Facebook.

Meawhile, the LA Times, trying to figure out the future, talked to the founder of Craigslist.

This is what one journalist thinks the others need to do.

I hear America Twittering

OK, you must start by reading this.

And then read this.

One way to think about Twitter. Substitute Obama for the Pope in the example there, you know?

And note this description of Maddow.

Maddow seems to have genuinely charmed younger viewers, a Twitter-savvy, podcasting generation that has hankered for someone more like them and delights in her use of "duh," her obvious intelligence and authenticity, and her ability to be both idealistic and skeptical about politics. She eschews vanity and insists she won't stop dressing "like a 13-year-old boy" when she can.

Wolf Boy, etc.

I've decided it's a nice tradition to watch an amusing (if not terribly relevant) clip right after the break. So here is something from Mike.

The code of Limbaugh

Rush is, of course, almost a separate story. Kasey takes a stab near the end of this post, at getting at Rush's code.

Meanwhile, Mike, like Kasey, has parent issues around this stuff.

And Rich wonders about the relationship between Rush (and similar hosts) and their listeners.

Rich also gives us this very weird video which, nonetheless, strips itself down to one of the most stark arguments of certain kinds of media -- that they allow ths listener to join a club of select smart people.

Zieglerama -- And the Eff you Universe

I'm hoping to use the Ziegler story as kind of a jumping off place tonight, so make sure you read the wonderful DFW Atlantic artile. Harry has the link here.

When you read that, then remarks like the one Courtney flagged make more sense because they kind of fit with the way people talk in that environment.

Joe's own personal story kind of confirms Nate Silver's basic point -- that people get tired of being stimulated in a certain way. Here's some more analysis by Kevin.

Ziegler currently makes little documentaries, including this one.

Here's a WSJ article about the poll that touched off this whole imbroglio. And some analysis by Mike.

Crazy like Fox

What did Fox News ultimately win up pushing as news during the home stretch of the election?

Lauren, back from the dead, has a video we MUST watch. And a poll that makes no sense.

Will Fox simply invert its role now, as Kevin suggests?

Cheyenne found a study of of Fox.
And she did her own analysis of how they handled today's news.

Conservatives, Humor, Irony, Sincerity

Harry, as usual, has a lot for us to think about. We can start with this video and related Caucus item. Which made me think of this article. (I confess, I think the article somewhat conflates irony with all humor.) I mean, irony has been kind of the province of the left, but Obama -- who draws out sincerity from us -- kind of invites a newly non-ironic stance.
Meanwhile, as Harry has rightly detected, it isn't really true that the conservative media is not funny. Some of hem have to be funny, but differently funny.

Kathleen Parker and other stories

In considering the functioning of specifically conservative media, please incorporate the Washington Times, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, the Weekley Standard, the National Review and anyone lese who seems relevant to you.

Matt Drudge?

It's illustrative to look at this in terms of what another country thinks of it.

And interesting dispute broke out in the conservative press this week, again triggered by Kathleen Parker. You can start here with an extreme right blacklash against Parker. Or here with the column that provoked it. Or here with her friend getting mad at her. Weirdly, Parker wrote a column earlier this year which freaked out even people who are pretty used to red-meat, nativist rhetoric.

Become an expert on conservative talk radio and the Fairness Doctrine

Browse these articles to get a (very negatively tinged) look at the state of conservative talk radio today.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson is, in general, a good (but non-approving) source of information about the rise of talk.

"One of the things that conservative talk radio does for Republicans is creates a coherent, conservative ideology that is reinforced hour after hour, to fairly large audiences every day. The problem for the Democrats is figuring out what that coherent ideology would be if it were offering the alternative point of view.
The talk radio host is trying to instruct an audience, in lines of argument, that can be marshaled in defense of the ideology expressed by the host. And under that is a coherent set of arguments that the person who's listening hears again and again. And as a result when the person confronts a person who ordinarily he wouldn't engage, he's now prepared to engage in the argument and make the conservative point of view salient to that individual.
What political talk radio hosts do is pick the facts that advantage their case and then make those facts the most salient facts for their audience. They fall within the range of omission that characterizes contemporary politics. When you look at political debates, for example, Republicans, Democrats, both do it. The biggest sin is a sin of omission. They don't tell you what would hurt their case.
Well, that's what political talk radio does. It selectively moves to feature the facts that best make the case for the ideology that advances the candidate in the moment that supports the agenda of the conservative talk radio host. So, the notion that talk radio hosts are just up there polluting the political process by egregiously lying is simply not true."

This gives you a sense of that "perfect storm."

The raw numbers.

In 2007, the people saying conservative talk radio had too much power were ... conservatives.

There's a new wave of paranoia sweeping through that industry about the reinstitution of the Fairness Doctrine.

Kasey has some pretty cool video about "a virulent proponent of fairness."
And Cheyenne tells us what Bill O'Reilly thinks.

But if you read Courtney's mega-post and click through the the Media Matters stuff, you can see why Schumer and others have some real qurestions about what's being said on the airwaves.

Gobble

Palin is still sort of a silver lining for everybody. (Kasey post.)

Maybe we're all losing our minds because many of us, like Joe!, seem to think this clip actualy warrants semi-serious analysis.

I like this post from an NRO columnist about the Palin turkey mess because it raises a lot of interesting questions about media skills. fairness, etc.

Here's the (modified) clip, via Courtney.

Must read!

Everybody has to read not only Silver's post, but all the links, including the Atlantic article by DFW about Ziegler.

No Ordinary Time

I'm making an effort to watch more Fox News this week, to see which stories they promote.
Last night, Brit Hume led off with stories that

-- questioned the validity of Barack Obama's claim that he would get Osama bin Laden and
-- highlighted the reemergence of Bill Ayers.

Meanwhile, I found the Ayers interview on NPR's Fresh Air riveting. It highlighted what was impossible to talk about during the campaign: that the Vietnam era was one in which violent dissent seemed like a semi-rational response to illegal bombing campaigns, etc. I was struck by how utterly sane Ayers seemed, how much perepctive he had on his past and how little reflection there really was, during the campaign, about what it meant to be talking about the Weather Underground.

Working the refs, part LXVII

Lookit how people actually prepare for an assault from conservative media.

This sets the stage

Long-ish account from inside talk radio.
Must read. Blog about. Talk about.

Change you can believe in?

Fox dumps terrorist fist jab lady.

OK, you were right; I was wrong

You can go very wrong publishing hate coverage.

Cortney takes Palin studies to the next level

I was going to add this to one of the other Palin items, but, no, it really deserves its own airing.

I wish I had written this line.

I have concluded that the problem that so many people have in understand what Palin is saying is that we make the mistake of assuming that all of the words have some reason for being there.

Anderson's Window

This was Courtney's. It's a little bit of the cat chasing its tail, but Cooper does manage to sum up a lot of things in a funny way.

Joe Say It's So

Do things like this happen for a reason?
Julia wondered about that, and I think she's right to wonder.

I'd Rather Not

OK, so this is interesting. Read this if you possibly can before class tonight.
And also click through Harry's post to the related 538 posting.
And whoa, Caroline weighs in.
I think Silver's argument that the media have to get even better at slicing through bullshit to the truth is, at least, an interesting argument. (I happened to have watched a chunk of that Atwater thing too and interviewed its producer.)
I kept skating past Ran Rather trial coverage, but the truth is, it's really interesting, especially the degree to which CBS sought to make "the right" a player. It wasn't enough the appease them. This might also tell you -- in reverse image -- what a network like Fox is thinking about the Obama years.

Some of the documents unearthed by his investigation include notes taken at the time by Linda Mason, a vice president of CBS News. According to her notes, one potential panel member, Warren Rudman, a former Republican senator from New Hampshire, was deemed a less-than-ideal candidate over fears by some that he would not “mollify the right.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Thornburgh, who served as attorney general for both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, was named a panelist by CBS, but only after a CBS lobbyist “did some other testing,” in which she was told, according to Ms. Mason’s notes, “T comes back with high marks from G.O.P.”
Another memorandum turned over to Mr. Rather’s lawyers by CBS was a long typed list of conservative commentators apparently receiving some preliminary consideration as panel members, including Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan. At the bottom of that list, someone had scribbled “Roger Ailes,” the founder of Fox News.

Sarah Forever

Kaysey caught this nice Olbermann sum-up of the""exclusive interview" meme.

Change you maybe can't believe in

Mike changed the appearance of his blog to usher in the new era. I think that's a pretty basic instinct and something towatch for in general. I notivced in Sunday on MTP, where the roundtable condsisted of Tavis Smiley, Katty Kay, Andrea Mitchell and Tom Friedman. Russert had a fondness for hacks and plagiarists.
Watch for the press to change itself or at least look like it's changing, as a way of linking to Obama and the notion of an altered universe.
Newspapers don't count because they have to change or die.

The List Worthess Evening*

Amanda has a list of stories toward which the media have recently gravitated. And one of the (kinds of) stories is lists. I like that. We should talk about lists. Ooops. Mama made a list too.
Kasey sort of had a list that mentioned lists, but not quite in list form.
List, of course, are the first and most primtive resort of anybody trying to make the appearance of order out of chaos. Lists don't really do anything. But they make us feel better.


*An Eagles joke.

The ick factor

The tabloids never have to ask themselves what they're gonna do in order to prosper in a new era, because they ALWAYS do the same stuff. Rich noticed the latest target. I saw it last week and read the story. Even though they got John Edwards right, this one looked like it could easily blow up. Also, during the Edwards flap, there were several weeks where critics and callers and commenters on the right complained bitterly that Edwards was getting protection from the MSM. The complain always began, "If this were happening to a Republican.."
Well, now it is.

UPDATE: As we discovered last week, Palin reaches down into a very evil place inside Courtney. So she feasted on these icky pictures. But it does seem like a Darwinian process, cutting a week member of the (caribou) herd out and killing her.

The new oohing

Howard Kurtz is really documenting two different phenomena. The first is the crass merchandising of Obamaphoria by theoretically otherwise neutral media. Big surprise. But as I said last week, all these companies already made a lot of money off an election that people loved to love.

UPDATE: Amanda found lots of other people trying to make money. Especially amusing are the pseudo Cabbage Patch dolls, but more significant in the inauguration as rock concert meme.

The second issue is the oohing and aahing; and I confess that, watching the Os last night on 60 Minutes, it was difficult to know what to do about that. Because some of it seems warranted. I mean, they really are smart and personable and attractive and admorable. How do you not say tha.t?

Live-blogging Barack Obama on 60 Minutes

He evoked FDR with a version of "I see one third of a nation ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed"

"We go from shock to trance," about gas. That's a nice turn of phrase.

"America doesn't torture. And I'm going to make sure we don't torture." Somewhere Andrew Sullivan is smiling.

At a media studies level he's sort of interesting in the way he can hold a close-up. He's really interesting with NO ornamentation.

In (correctly) rejecting specific New Deal parallels, he's also rejecting the Time magazine cover that makes him look like FDR.

Michelle Obama ... has anybody EVER been so ready for this crazy, impossible job? And the aspirations for normality and domesticity -- they really are the Huxtables. Except that the Huxtables were always at home, right? These people are so good at this!! A First Family that might take some interest in the D.C. schools? And the problems of that city?

He can't go to the barbershop. A slice of African-American life we understand. We've seen the movie.

UPDATE: Here is Rich's take on 60 Min. I agree that Kroft seems like a comfortable match for the Os, which is interesting, given the fact that he was an unsatisfactory interviewer of the Eagles.
Maybe that's part of Kroft's style -- he's a mirrorer, rather than a digger.
Rich is right -- the choice of 60 Minutes kind of reaffirms its status. The media revolution of 2008 turns out -- like many other revolutions -- to be somewhat conservative in nature. Huffington Post is NOT more important. Yet. The code of 60 Minutes? Grown-ups!
He's also right that Obama has marketed himself, yet again, as the guy who puts the pin back in every grenade. That's part of the code, the brand. If he can figure out how to do it, he'll give an exclusive interview, by June of 2009, to Limbaugh or Hanity or O'Reilly or the Weekly Standard or the National Review.

UPDATE: I think Courtney gets at something really interesting, really McLuhanesque, right here. He really is somebody that people wanna look at. He's not only ready for his close up. He's ready for his HD close-up. In all the way Bill Clinton was ready for 1992 but not for 2008, Obama seems almost designed right into this moment.

Jurkowitz is doing our job for us

This is also from Pew.

I think the most important part is near the end, where Mark talks about "narratives."

Harry points out that most transitions are, in themselves, narratives -- or are framed that way.

Who likes what

This Pew study has maybe a couple of surprises.
Scroll down to the chart that contrast coverage with actual interest, and you'll see the public cares less about the insider stuff and more about economy and jobs.

Is the hate story being covered?

One question I have concerns the way the press is handled the question of negative reaction to the election of Barack Obama. Here Jack Shafer takes the press to task for inflating the importance ot the gun sales story.
UPDATE: Rich flagged this story early on. I tthink it sort of demonstrates the push and pull facing Fox: go a little more mainstream and emphasize its role in documenting the new era from slightly conservative perspective? Or play toward fear and opposition?

But I actually think the media may be erring in the other direction -- underplaying the scary people.
If you look around, there are stories like this backlash roundup in the Indianapolis Star.
Here's the AP version of the story about hate bubbling up.
In general, though, the press seems a little shy about the story -- notwithstanding Shafer.
I'm not sure how I would prove this.
UPDATE: Kasey seems to be wondering the same thing. So we need to talk about whether there's a reluctance and, if so, where it comes from.

UPDATE: Check out Lauren's post on the priest who won't give communion.
UPDATE: And Sarai caught the NPR story on racist reactions abroad.

Right as rain

Here's a piece about the challenges -- and benefits -- of being the loyal political opposition media right now.

There is, as this linked piece suggests, at the very least the problem of access. Maybe. What do you think Obama will do, should do, about the media that never liked him.

Cherchez la femme

So one of the questions we're asking ourselves this week is: How will the media go about extending the excitement and interest generated by the election. What are the story lines they're attracted to and what makes them attractive?

For example, the Hillary-as-SOS story is attractive and interesting. But why? What are the elements that make it spreadable?

UPDATE: Julia thinks the media does need a woman.

Make a list of four other stories the media are pushing right now.

One to watch

This move by NPR will be significant. Project this kind of thinking four years forward, and I think you can imagine -- if it's done right -- the transformation of NPR into an even bigger player. They have a lot of the elements in place already.

UPDATE: Kasey pondered the question in terms of the technology used by the campaigns. I would agree that the campaigns tend to be a microdot or two ahed of the media -- because they're smaller and can react faster.

Strange bedfellows

One thing you might see next time are former-rival media outlets collaborating.

What's black and white and maybe all over?

This item chronicles a little feud that erupted this week about the future of newspapers. Definitely click on all the links. And then ask yourself what newspapers will be doing four years from now.

Actually, as I think about it, the very fact that Rosenbaum's article is tagged for buzzing and digging near the bottom should tell us something.

UPDATE: Mike noticed that Andy Rooney talked about this. Which makes Andy Rooney seem like a weathered totem, a stone gargoyle standing watch iover a loost civilization (newspapers).

Impostor.com

Sorry to have neglected you all week.

Please read this and think about it. Does it have implications for how the press should operate in the next election cycle? What does it say about the state of things right now?

UPDATE: Mary's take on the story.

They told me to go to political rehab. I said no, no, no

Mary found this article. We're all junkies.

The other flag pin

I had forgotten McCain's complex relationship with this issue.

Among the many after-memes

Sarai detects the can he do it meme.

Lizza on Fresh Air

Ryan Lizza, interviewed today on Terry Gross's show, said there was a disconnect between the press's admiration for McCain as a rfefromer and the public's.

He also claims the "celebrity" ad scared the Obama campaign.

The World According to Harry

You gotta read Harry's posts from this week. He's got an interesting post on the Wright Stuff.
He's got the 60 Minutes Obama staff interview.
He's got a brief reflection on the "post-Imus" era. I never thought of it that way, but maybe that was an important turning point.

I don't really know what to say about this ...

...and it's not EXACTLY within the ourview of our seminar topic.
But's it's interesting.
h/t Cheyenne

Good question

Kasey has a good post on voter turnout.

After-the-newsweek

Here's a sum-up of Newsweek's sum-up of things they didn't tell us while the campaign was happening.

Actually, while we're looking at round-ups, this PEJ/PEW thing is pretty interesting.

Cheat Sheet

Howard Kurtz has a pretty good summation of where we are at the moment on race, Palin, Rahm, etc.

BTW

Those of you who occasionally look at the syllabus will boservethat I kind of combined two nights, pushing race up to this week. (It seemed to make sense.)

That means the 17th is wide open. Think about what you'd like to explore on that night. I'm open to suggestions.

Post Post Post

The ombudsman for the Wash Post says the paper leaned way, way toward Obama.

Not surprisingly, conservative pundits wonder why this came out AFTER the election.

Mutt in Chief

The first press conference (Friday) represented a lot of different things, but I agree that this little throwaway line was significant in terms of this week's discussion.

I also toss in this article from earlier in the campaign about the thorny issue of Obama's own obvious self-confidence. Most successful politicians are self confident. Is this another subtle way Obama was squeezed, because of his race?

Are those same attitudes somehow evident in this much-discussed post-election dialogue among Newsweek editors?

Stewart fizzles

The humor industry may face an early struggle in getting its audiences to laugh at Obama.

Sarah Gorgon

Courtney has a whole Palin section in her E. Night coverage, but what I noticed today was Fox News airing the Palin-is-a-diva-bitch-Medusa story. Interesting. Also the part about Africa.

Strictly for my anchors

So tonight I was watching all of the networks try to cover issues of race. At one point ABC, I think, pointed out how much the electorate had changed since 1976 when 90 percent of the voters were white. Now it's down to like 74 percent.
And suddenly it struck me that Katie was talking to Jeff Greenfield, Brian to Chuck Todd and Charlie to George Stephanopoulos. You know? There was this very keyed-up discussion of race being conducted entirely by white people

I have never liked the "well, why aren't more(or any) of you black?" question ... at least not in certain contexts. I faced it recently in a public setting and it irritated me.

But we have an African-American president, and still the face of network television DOES seem to lag behind. On cable...well, there are experts like Juan Williams and Eugene Robinson, but since the departure of Bernard Shaw, it's not THAT much better. It's one of the ways, I think, in which TV is pretty conservative. In fact, they were all sitting around talking aout how the Republican party has failed to show an inclusive picture of itself, and I kept thinking: you guys are just as far behind as they are.

What do you think about that?
Have the mass media failed, in certain ways, "to look like America?"

Hey!

It's Katie!

Oh, never mind.

Please listen

to this very interesting interview on race in the election.

And read this in Slate too.

OK, back to work

Slate reviews election night coverage.

And here's an insider tick-tock on Fox News.

PEJ's cable bias study

Nothing you didn't know.

E. Night -- what you trained for

A few last thoughts about E. Night!

To do so, the networks now follow strict rules that govern projections,
examining not only exit poll data but actual vote tabulation and turnout
information. NBC -- which keeps its decision desk isolated from the calls made
by competing networks -- will only call a winner once its statisticians conclude
that the chance of an error is less than 1 in 200. And no calls will be made
until all the polls have closed in a state.Extreme measures are taken to ensure
that early data from the exit poll does not leak out, as it did in 2004, when
the first wave of surveys showing John Kerry in the lead rocketed through
cyberspace.For much of the day, only a small group will have access to the exit
poll, which is being conducted by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky
International for the National Election
Pool, a consortium of the networks and the Associated Press. Three members
from each outlet will be sequestered in an undisclosed location in New York,
where they will analyze the results of questionnaires filled out by 100,000
voters nationwide. Their cellphones and BlackBerries will be taken away until 5
p.m. ET, when they will be allowed to share the data with their newsrooms.It's
the same procedure that was used in the 2006 midterm elections and effectively
prevented the release of incomplete data, much to the relief of network
executives."Exit poll information in the hands of trained professionals is
perfectly fine," said Sam Feist, CNN's political director. "Exit poll
information in the hand of the general public, who may not understand what it
means or stands for, can be dangerous."That's because exit polls are designed to
provide a demographic portrait of voters, not to predict the winner of a close
race. The early waves of data can be especially misleading because they do not
necessarily reflect an accurate sample of the electorate

And a plea to the networks.
Why the exit polls get used.

I was told there would be no math

We need to make Rich explain this more.
Could be the week's most intriguing post!

Hope you had a nice weekend, Megan

I have all kinds of questions on this clip from Rich. But I'll let the class discuss it. We won't watch the whole seven minutes of bickering.

McComedy

I totally agree with Cheyenne that McCain seems more comfortable doing this kind of comedy than ...being a candidate. It sort of inspires recollections of Teddy in 1980.

Teddy got better when the pressure was off.

Sudden Death Overtime

Joe D. had an interesting week. (You should also check out his amusing post on the way Obama disrupted football priorities.) But I'm flagging this post not just because it mentions a developing story about Pslin, but also because it reminds us to talk specifically about the nightly newcasts. I've watched A LOT of them since September and -- setting aside my occasional, warm feeling that Katie is talking directly to me -- I can't realy see any obvious tilt in the three network 'casts. Am I wrong? I mean, Katie was kind of the undoing of Palin, but not in a way that seemed like bad journalism.

Jabba's Straight Talk Hovercraft

Providently, Kasey has framed one of the OTHER pressing questions: which is more important to reporters -- ideology or access/success?

I guess one of my problems here is the fallacy of treating all the reporters the same way. Age and pecking order come into play. Joe Klein can afford to develop biases. The struggling, relatively new beat reporter may want access a lot more.

When I was starting out in the business, I would have written up Jabba the Hutt's views if he gave me access.

Cheyenne looked at the question of McCain and reporter access here with CLIP.

Caveat Harry

Harry has a nice way of framing one the big questions in the bias debate.
I'm sticking his part of it up here because last week his plug-ins didn't work on the TC system.

We give up

Julia has a bunch of interesting posts on bias, but I was most drawn to this bizarre decision by a Colorado newspaper chain.

Welcome back Lauren

Here she delves into a kind of chicken and egg argument about media bias. In other words, do McCain problems engender bad coverage, or is it the other way around?

The clip is also from Lauren and, coming on the heels of devastating impersonation of Olbermann on SNL and coming in the context of our bias conversation, it kind of bears talking about.

Caroline on bias

She blogs about it here.

MSNBCFOXCNN

Seemingly aware of us and our mission, the Times tackled the subject of bias.

Yes we have no bias

This week we will consider, over-archingly, the question of media bias.
The accusations in this area have a way of canceling each other out.
Here is a left-leaning watchdog.
Here is a right-leaning one.
See what I mean? It's like off-setting penalties in football.

But please do click around on these watchdogs and consider the kinds of cases they make.

The Aunt Who Was a November Surprise

Here is how it was handled by a right-leaning blogger.

And by a left-leaning one.

Neal Conan's Rules of Debate

National Public Radio takes such pains, at times, to live down its reputation as a basically left-of-center forum that it chokes off reasonable debate.
I think that happened several times, on Thursday, in this program about white supremacist activity during the campaign season.
If you don't have time to listen to the whole thing, at least drag the cursor over to about 12:30, when a guy named Tom from Smithfield, R.I. phones in. Tom has a pretty reasonable question which has been asked many ways in recent weeks: is there anything about some of the recent Republican rallies that might give encouragement to hate groups? Note that host Conan treats the question almost as if it is out of bounds. He first insists that the caller can not possibly be suggesting that either McCain or Palin have ever said anything of this nature. He then insists that the only relevance of the question would be in the case of hate groups hearing something that's not really there in the rhetoric of these rallies.

The effect is one of intellectual cowardice. Tom's question is not at all exotic. A lot of us have wondered whther some of the rhetoric, especially Palin's, has implicitly invited the audiences to indulge their darkest and most sinister fantasies about who Barack Obama is and who he isn't. The talk about "real America" doesn't even seem that subtle at times. I don't mind saying that, watching some of those clips, I have found myself thinking: if some idiot shoots Obama some day, we're going to look back at these rallies and wonder whether if they gave encouragement and nourishment to the American monster of virulent racism. I think McCain has had the same thought, which is why he went through that stretch where he at least made an effort to cool down some of the hottest heads at his speeches (only to find himself getting booed by those hotheads).

Conan is clearly afraid of the whole topic. Seconds later, his guest from the Southern Poverty Law Center talks about nasty racist imagery including nooses around Obama's neck. "To be fair," Conan jumps in, there have been Sarah Palin nooses. Well, one, says the guest. But Conan's desire is pretty clear. We must at least pretend that these problems are roughly equivalent. One campaign can not possibly be more appealing to noose-sketchers than the other.

It seems to me that one of the most important questions in this whole story is the one Conan is determined to avoid. What's the overlap between the crazy, dangerous people and the people showing up and yelling back at these rallies? Do the crazy and vicious people feel emboldened when mainstream political figures say things that don't sound all that different from what the fringe groups say? Does the McCain campaign have some responsibility to worry about this? Does Palin, specifically, seem indifferent to the problem or is she now acknowledging that she might have to be a little more careful? (Even though Palin has apologized for any misunderstanding she might have created, I think we know the answer to that. Palin said last week that any criticism of her campaigning style infringes on her First Amendment rights.)

Anyway, we're apparently not going to find out on Talk of the Nation.