One of the guys?

One of the things we'll discuss this week has to do with sexism and feminism within the ranks of the mass media. How are journalists discussed? How is Katie Couric discussed? Some critics saw the rise of Rachel Maddow as kind of a game changer.

Couric (a Kevin post) herself has become, I think, one of really interesting gender stories in this election year.

SNL asks the questions

I happened to watch the Fey/Poehler sketch again, and it struck me that it framed a lot of the issues we'll be talking about tomorrow night.

And then look at this Politico article which examined the Clinton / Palin duality as it unfolded.

Sorry

I had to take a few days off to focus on the Supreme Court Kerrigan case and on some performances I'm doing with the Symphony this week.

But I'd like to get you focused back on the issues of sex and sexism with this look-back.

Press and Gender

Start with Andy here, and then click to the Cohen column. A different set of points about Clinton and Palin.

Hurricane Camille

If we are going to talk sex and gender, we must read the often outrageous Camille Paglia, who kind of gets off on Palin.

This is what she was thinking ten months ago.

Even Starbucks Cups are battlegrounds

Make sure you read all the way to tne end of this. Albright makes a certain kind of gender aregument.

More video stuff

When you jump on McCain's website these days you're greeted by Guess Who?

But I can't find any way to rip and embed his ads. Am I being dense? If not, then it says something about the web cultures, respectively of the two sites.

Meanwhile, today Obama releases this epic Keating 5 video:

Random Ads and videos.

Below is an Obama ad that somehow tries to wreck all the good Palin feelings.



And then there are indy ads ads like this one put out by Brave New Films.



And this one:

How to destroy one of your best memes through overuse

We're on

See some of you tomorrow nigt.

monday

It's starting to look like guys' night, but I'm ready to do something. Maybe a shorter class -- 6:30 to 7:30 or 8? We can meet in the classroom, go over some stuff, and adjourn for a beer at the Firebox, if you feel like it.

Droppin' the G

Kasey has a nice round-up of debate coverage.

Yóu Have Mail

I don't know where this fits in, but Joe rightly warns us about the stuff that spreds by email.

Say Anything

I don't know if I have emphasized this enough, but, in the spreading of a meme, familiarity and recognizability are vital traits. Lauren thought she saw something familiar as Palin debated:

Palin spit out a lot of facts and made a whole lot more sense than ever
before, but as I listened to her answers, I got the distinct impression that
she
was making a mental check-list of things to say and trying to work them
into the
questions. This reminds me of many many college exams I took, where
I would
decide there wasn't enough time to actually learn the information,
but if I
memorized a few BIG facts, I could somehow make them work for any
essay
question. Was anyone out there keeping track of how many times Palin
explained
why she wouldn't be answering the question and then went on to say
whatever she
felt like? This actually really bothered me. While Biden did
some of the same, I
got the feeling that he was explaining information he
understood, even if he got
a little off-topic, while Palin was simply
regurgitating, regardless of whether
or not it was related

.

I happen to be of kind of addicted to The New York Times letters. Guess
what? Lauren's not the only one:

As someone who teaches history, I often give essay exams, and inevitably there
are students who arrive ill prepared to take the exam. These students typically
adopt one of two strategies: they either construct an essay that is a torrent of
words, hoping that by filling up the space I will not notice that they don’t
know anything (Sarah Palin’s performance in the Katie Couric interviews); or
they ignore the question I’ve asked, and answer something else they do know a
little about (Ms. Palin’s performance in the vice-presidential debate).
Both
strategies earn an F, since neither indicates that they can tackle a crucial
issue in the course.
Many of us watching the vice-presidential debate wanted
to know how well Governor Palin could tackle a crucial issue facing the nation.
Mr. Brooks informs us that Republicans were relieved that Sarah Palin adopted
what amounts to Strategy No. 2 in the debate, and therefore avoided seeming as
clueless as she did in the Couric interviews, but let me assure him (and them)
that it was no more helpful in establishing her ability to be an effective vice
president than Strategy No. 1.
Barbara Weinstein

See, when things are very recognizable, they have a better chance of spreading as memes.

Gail and Sarah

As we get ready to talk in terms of gender, Gail Collins sees the whole Palin episode in very conflicted terms.

This is all a terrible shame. For us, mainly. But also for Palin, whose intelligence and toughness may wind up buried under the legend of her verb-deprived ramblings.
Palin is, in many ways, a genuine heir to the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, which tried to make sure that future generations of American women would grow up feeling they had every right to compete with men for all the best rewards and adventures the world had to offer. She never seems to have had a single doubt that she could accomplish whatever she set her mind to. When she got involved in politics, she used the time-honored male route of cultivating powerful mentors, then pushing them out of the way at the first possible opportunity. When she was governor, she did what very few female politicians do, and ignored all the subsidiary issues in order to put all her bets on one big policy payoff in the form of a new state energy policy.
Then, somehow, she concluded that her success in clawing her way to the top of Alaska’s modest political heap meant she was capable of running the United States.
This entire election season has been a long-running saga about the rise of women in American politics. On Thursday, it all went sour. The people boosting Palin’s triumph were not celebrating because she demonstrated that she is qualified to be president if something ever happened to John McCain. They were cheering her success in covering up her lack of knowledge about the things she would have to deal with if she wound up running the country

A question about Monday

At least one of your classmates would like to meet on Trinity Day -- perhaps in abbreviated form -- to talk blogs and blogging. Embedding video. Stuff like that.
My technical expertise will be used up in the first 20 minutes, but even so, I'd be willing to do it if we can get a minyan. Comment or email me if you're game.

Pollster Smackdown!!!

This won't come up for a few weeks, but I wanted to note it.

Keep blogging! Stupid Trinity Days or not!

Do you think Gwen Ifill has a conflict of interest?

Do you think she should withdraw from tomorrow night's debate?

She could use her broken ankle as an excuse. Say it hurts more than she thought.

My instinct

What did I tell you about Katie?

More debate stuff

Oddly enough, the debate audience wasn't THAT huge.

Here, the AP tries to document that whole idea of the pundits not knowing who won. And talks a little more about debate audiene.

And Kurtz takes you through the heart of spin darkness.

Out to Luntz

A little more about Frank -- a homeboy, by the way.

Luntz haas made himself a brand name

Last minute addition

Please read this before tonight if you can.

Debating the Debate, part 4

Mike -- and others -- seem to have noted a disconnect between the initial media debate analysis and what actually turned up in the polls.

Chysey, meanwhile, wondered what would happen if you took the pictures out of it.

Debating the debate, part 3

Sarai notes that the media semeed to want to pick a winner ... but couldn't. (See Mike, above.)

Debating the debate part two

Caroline did a nice round-up of online responses to the debate, checking in with Slate.

She also found this McCain timetable by Greenwald at Salon.

McCain and the Gray Lady

Even though I struggled to slog through the Times piece on McCain and the gambling industry, I like the questions Courtney is raising here. Comments?

Debating the debate

Props to Brent for showing us something he liked about CBS debate coverage (with embedded clip).

There were a few things I liked about this segment. First off, I loved the input from regular people. Not pundits, not the "The View" ladies, not Matt Damon, just regular people with regular concerns. I was really interested in the difference of opinion and priority between the two people who had been involved in Iraq; while they didn't say what capacity they'd been there in, it seemed fairly clear that the guy had been a soldier while the lady did something that wasn't quite in the field (my apologies for the obvious speculation of this). The reason I thought that was interesting was that it reflected that the soldier was more interested in the treatment of returned veterans, whereas the person who might have had something more of a sidelines (albeit still important) role was more interested in strategic elements (aka John McCain's exit strategy of not having an exit strategy).

Frankly

Is Frank Rich just framing the narrative in the most anti-McCan manner possible?
Or are these good points about things the press either did or did not do well this week?

There was no suspension of his campaign. His surrogates
and ads
remained on television. Huffington Post bloggers, working the phones, couldn’t
find a
single McCain campaign office that had gone on hiatus. This “suspension”
ruse was an exact replay of McCain’s self-righteous “suspension” of the G.O.P.
convention as Hurricane Gustav arrived on Labor Day. “We will put aside our
political hats and put on our American hats,” he declared
then, solemnly pledging that conventioneers would help those in need. But as
anyone in the Twin Cities could see, the assembled put on their party hats
instead, piling into the lobbyists’ bacchanals earlier than scheduled, albeit on
the down-low.
Much of the press paid lip service to McCain’s new “suspension”
as it had to its prototype. In truth, the only campaign activity McCain did drop
was a Wednesday evening taping with David Letterman. Don’t mess with Dave.
Picking up where the “The View” left off in speaking truth to power, the
uncharacteristically furious host
hammered the absent McCain on and off for 40 minutes, repeatedly observing
that the cancellation “didn’t smell right.”
In a journalistic coup de grâce
worthy of “60 Minutes,” Letterman went on to unmask his no-show guest as a liar.
McCain had phoned himself that afternoon to say he was “getting on a plane
immediately” to deal with the grave situation in Washington, Letterman told the
audience. Then he
showed video of McCain being touched up by a makeup artist while awaiting an
interview by Couric that same evening at another CBS studio in New York.
It’s not hard to guess why McCain had blown off Letterman for Couric at the
last minute. The McCain campaign’s high anxiety about the disastrous
Couric-Palin sit-down was skyrocketing as advance excerpts flooded the Internet.
By offering his own interview to Couric for the same night, McCain hoped (in
vain) to dilute Palin’s primacy on the “CBS Evening News.”
Letterman’s most
mordant laughs on Wednesday came when he riffed about McCain’s campaign
“suspension”: “Do you suspend your campaign? No, because that makes me think
maybe there will be other things down the road, like if he’s in the White House,
he might just suspend being president. I mean, we’ve got a guy like that
now!”

Why Johnny can't google

Brent got

VERY

INTERESTED

In the Nicholas Carr article.
Anyone happen to catch Carr on Colbert?

WikiKasey

Kasey has enjoyed a flowering of bloggativity this week. Check out this post on Wikipedia, etc.

In 2006, in the other class Joe took, we stirred up Jason Scott, a Wikipedia apostate. Jason came to class and educated us about the pitfalls of Wiki- , many of which are quite germane -- and perhaps even more crucial -- when applied to the political process.

Debateys and Katies

Lauren continues to rock out here.

I was very intrigued by her point about height adjustment -- didn't see anyone in the MSM make that.

I also like this post, but for my own very subjective reason. It's just a gut feeling, backed up by nothing so far, but I just feel as though Couric herself has made strides during this campaign. I think we're eventually going to see signs -- in terms of ratings and colleague esteem -- that suggest that she herself has turned things around.

Ahmadinejad, Schmamadinejad

I don't usually send you over to my blog, but I thought you might be interested in this post, which deals with an aspect of the Iran story that never gets covered by the media. (You may have heard Obama make a little feint toward it during the debate.)

The Debate, part one

Sorry to step away from you, but I had to do some debate coverage for my other jobs.

Please remember -- as yhou cover the campaign for the media journal part of your work -- to mainly pay attention to how the media covers what happens -- specifically the debate.

And then remember that our themed topic is or are the new e-players.

This will give you a chance to ponder both. If you jump on Huffington today, you will see how they frame the debate and the moment.

New to the blogroll

Been slow to get her up on this screen -- but she's doing some pretty cool stuff on her blog.

Especially like this use of Hitwise.

Wikipedia seems to get out in front of the news on a lot of stories. They knew about Palin pretty much first, and they broke this story, and when Rumsfeld resigned, I got a great tip from a source close to the Pentagon, but Wikipedia already had it.

But the more controversial aspect revolves around the constant editing and gaming of Wikipedia entries. Palin's, in particular, became kind of a cause wikipedienne.

But hers was not the only one. And I would argue that there's sort of an early period where wolves circle the campfire of any crticial entry.

Spinewatch

I got here following some links on Mama's sight.
Seems pretty germane to our discussions.

Did the new media invent new forms?

Robert Greenwald launched a site -- kind of unprecedented, I think -- that produced videos intented to "go viral."

Did the new media change the rules of reporting?

Unaccredited and uncredentialed, "reporters" from the new media began to take the campaigns by surprise in the early stages of the 2008 fight.
Pundits such as Frank Rich began to notice that the game was changing, and others even blamed the bloggers for the gotcha mentality of the campaign.

Dave's Not Happy

This is an example of how hard it is to control media perceptions.

Biden His Time

Kevin says Biden was missing, but I'm starting to think low Biden coverage HELPS Obama.

Come and read my vunderful online newspaper, dahlings

Mary is already all over the Huffington Post. And so should you be, this week.

Give Mama Some Props

She fixed those links.

Put a comment on her posts.

Most Viewed

The Times has an article about the degree to which The View seeks to play a significant role in the election. Why?

And there is, emerging, a sense that The View and Chris Rock and the Comedy Central shows are actually doing a BETTER job of getting to the meat of things. What do you think about that?

An assignment about ...something ..I forget

If it's true that our energies, as consumers of news, are switching over to the internet, what does that say about our absorption of info?

Please read Is Google Making Us Stupid? And comment on your blogs.

Forgetting Sarah Palin

There was a media rebellion today -- scroll down until you find that phrase. It was covered extensively in many more places.

UPDATE: Courtney has more.

Posted Without Comment

Kevin thinks the media started to make McCain's unworthiness a story. ABC anyone?

Joe and KC looked at media attacking media and politicians attacking media.

A couple of you thought there might be a where's Biden? meme.

We're still discussing the use of the who-owns-change? meme. Courtney really uses links well to support her arguments.

Caroline wonders when a gaffe really start to matter. Disasters, she implies, push the candidates off script.

Let's remember Brent's question during Wolfberg Week. What's the relationship between an ad and its context --specifically the response to that ad?

Harry caught Rachel M. editing selectively.

We have to talk about the hacking story, right Sarai?

I'm also interested in the concept of media exhaustion.

Race plus age = rage. Let's keep an eye on the age meme.

And the health meme.
Right?

What's the media? A personal question, to Chysey.

Can we talk about the 60 minutes interview?
I'm going to raise a false equivalency question.

Chysey about The View.
Here's : Frank Rich

You know the press is impotent at unmasking this truthiness when the
hardest-hitting interrogation McCain has yet faced on television came on "The
View." Barbara Walters and Joy Behar called him on
several falsehoods, including his endlessly repeated fantasy that Palin
opposed earmarks for Alaska. Behar used the word "lies" to his face. The McCains
are so used to deference from "the filter" that Cindy McCain later complained
that "The View" picked "our bones clean." In our news culture, Behar, a stand-up
comic by profession, looms as the new Edward R. Murrow.
Network news, with
its dwindling handful of investigative reporters, has barely mentioned, let
alone advanced, major new print revelations about Cindy McCain’s drug-addiction
history (in
The Washington Post) and the rampant cronyism and secrecy in Palin’s
governance of Alaska (in last
Sunday’s New York Times). At least the networks repeatedly fact-check the
low-hanging fruit among the countless Palin lies, but John McCain’s past usually
remains off limits.

Balloting closes soon

Who will win?

Papa Bill vs. Eustace Tilley

Not many people have tried to compare Bill O'Reilly to the New Yorker, in terms of audience size and interested. But Rich did.

3rd fact

Of course, I read the radio section with great interest, especially the stuff about public radio, which often is not studied at all by commercial number crunchers [Arbitron].

In radio, there's a VERY important stat called TSL. I was astounded to find out that public radio's TSL is lower.

Addenda on my 2nd interesting fact

One thing I have concluded is: Pew has way too much power. Everybody uses their raw data. But it was interesting to see how some of the marketing people crunched this up. Am I a "knowledge worker?"

Here's more of that kind of thing.

My second interesting fact -- the feeble measurement of online news

I don't even think the Pew study is worded correctly.
For example, the 37 percent of people who got online news regularly/yesterday (and why are those the same thing?) is really -- when you see the chart -- really 37 percent of internet users. Which is not everybody.

How many of these Americans are going online specifically for news?
Nearly three-quarters of those who go online have used the medium at some
point for news in 2007, a percentage that has not changed over the past five
years, although the total the universe of online users has grown during this
time.
But, as was the case for more general use, the number going online
regularly for news is growing.
In late 2007, more than 7 in 10 Americans
(71%) said they went online for news, the same number reported in 2002,
according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. But the number
who
reported going online more regularly has grown considerably. In the
October to
December survey, 37% went online yesterday for news, up from the
30% who did so
at the same time in 2005 and the 26% who did so in 2002. This
is the highest
number recorded by the Pew Internet project.

And then, I start wanting to know what "news" is.

Measuring the Internet has become increasingly complicated. As advertisers have
become frustrated by the lack of a universally accepted metric, a number of
alternatives have emerged.
Marketers are relying increasingly on data from
companies like Hitwise, an online measurement firm, rather than figures from
Nielsen//Net Ratings and comScore.
When we compared data from Nielsen//Net
Ratings and Hitwise for October 2007, there were some similarities, but a number
of important differences.
Yahoo News, CNN.com and MSNBC.com were the most
popular news sites in both lists. The New York Times was the most popular
newspaper Web site. Over all, 10 sites appeared in both sets of rankings.

Does it seem like they really know?

My first interesting fact from this week's homework

This took quite a bit of extra fussing around to nail down, but here it is.
In the Pew study, we read some rather depressing stats about the age of the television news audience. It even popped up kind of steeply in 2007 according to those bar graphs. Median age of 61. Yikes.

This seems like a solid argument against paying much attention to the nets, particularly when you look at the normal census-derived numbers about media voter age -- usually around 45.

But a more subtle analysis looks like this.
And here, you see:

"In 2004 those 18-29 were 21.8% of the population, while those 58-69 were just 13.2%. Add in the 11.5% 70 and up, and you get just 24.7% of "geezers" over 58 vs. 21.8% of "kids". But the sly old geezers know a thing or two about voting. Shift from share of the population to share of the electorate and the advantage shifts to the old: 18-29 year olds were just 16% of the electorate in 2004, while those 58-69 were an almost equal 15.9%. Add in the 70+ group at 13.4% and the geezers win hands down: 29.3% of voters vs 16% for the young. That difference is the power of high turnout. It goes a long way to explaining why Social Security is the third rail of American politics."

It might also explain why nightly news matters.

Reminder!!

A gentle reminder -- one of our duties this week is to ponder the question "What Is/Are The Media?"
Ýou can start here -- which is more from the point of view of who reads what.
And this was a stat from that study that charmed people.
Now -- here's the monster. Chew up as much of this as you can. Pull at least three facts out of it and put them up on your own blogs.
Want more? Want different?
This is a site a lot of journalists use to keep up with the buzz in the business.
Those of you who are more business-minded might like this blog -- mainly about the print biz.

This is an interesting article about the impact of cable on thie campaign.
I have never figured out what this is supposed to be, but you might get more out of it.
And here's a conservative media watchdog worrying about the way the morning shows are covering the campaign.

Closer Now?

This guy has recently emerged as the hot new flavor of poll-synethsizer. We're not doing polls this week, but I wanted to put his post up because of the argument he makes about the press and how some members of it react to a close race. I'm not sure I agree, but it's an interesting argument.

John the Regulator

Watching the networks tonight I noticed that CBS did kind of a review of the two candidates' career perspectives on the economy. I thought it favored Obama a little bit, especially when it reported that Obama had seen at least part of the current crisis coming and had introduced legislation to try to prevent it. But it also stuch up for McCain in certain ways and rule against one of Obama's claims about him.

ABC, by contrast, ran a piece just taking McCain apart on the whole question of having historically opposed regulation and having gotten religion in the last 24 hours. The clips they showed were pretty damning.



Watch CBS Videos Online

Drudgery

I've never seen this argument made before -- that Drudge plays a gigantic role in driving the agenda of cable coverage. What do you think about that? (I DO think that cable is more likely to get into the "silly" or peripheral stuff -- Carly, the Blackberry, Streisand being some of yesterday's fodder.)

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Nice analysis from CSM about the perils of going off script.
Written in conection with the Fiorina mess.

TV Watching

Tonight on CBS, Katie -- who is rumored to have secured the next Palin interview -- had an exclusive with Obama. She asked short questions and allowed him to give long answers. CBS seems to be going for access as its watchword. CBS and NBC both invoked "It's the economy, stupid" from 1992. CBS introduced a new feature in which the two candidates will be compared on a single issue.
ABC has basically the same feature.
NBC tried to make the race seem more heated, more fun. The McCain camp claim about fostering the development of the Blackberry was mentioned on NBC but not, I think, on the other two nets. There were clips of the two candidates zinging each other on NBC. They did a feature on raising money -- more of the horse race aspect -- and they -- as ABC I think did also -- got into the whole question of whether its bad to have Barbra Streisand raise $9 million for you. Is it so bad that, say, $8 million could not fix the damage? So you'd still come out ahead?

Temper!

This is the thing we touched upon last night, as posted by Mike. The under-structure is that it's the work of Brave New Films, a project by Robert Greenwald. I'm not sure whether it's a 527, but it sort of functions that way. It's also utterly original, in that it's a big-name documentary film maker settingup a kind of workshop to make distributable (via YouTube) high-quality message videos. If you get involved with them, they also email you a lot about "new releases."

Barack Obama is not Sarah Silverman but ...

Check out Amanda's post on the role celebrities play in this campaign -- complete with video of Matt Damon, that home-wrecker!!!

Richard Cohen blows a gasket

A little more of what we talked about last night -- the story of the press turning on McCain and using the word "lie."

UPDATE: I thought about this some more -- and read Chey's post --and it seems to me that there's some layering going on. Interesting how Cohen takes what happened on The View -- which is not journalism -- and embraces it, without ever really having to take responsibility for getting the ball rolling, you know. I mean, Joy Behar is a stand-up comedian, more or lress, but she got in and got tougvher with McCain about the fact than many actual journalists dare to. It reminds me a little of the way Bob Costa surprised President Bush with a tough grilling in Beijing. And it also reminds me of the way mainstream journalists like to find a "softer" source to start the dirty work -- whether it's outing a politicians's extra-marital affair or calling somebody a liar.

Wow

The whole meme of McCain having "gone too far " has infected Fox News!

The f-word

Was I the only one who didn't know, in the SNL bit, what a flurge was?

I dream of Cheney in my Maidenform bra

I like David Plotz, and he's always pushing the envelope. Here he seems to have decided that we're reacting to Palin at a much more subconscious level and that maybe that's one story the media is missing. Our post-rational take on Palin as expressed in our dreams.

Shooting Wolves in a Barrel and other memes

So Rich and Sarai don't like it when people shoot wolves from planes, but I also wonder if we are stumbling or bumping into one of those "competing visions of the West" mentioned here. The notion of The West may be an important one in this campaign.

Kevin has a couple of interesting things to watch.
Keep an eye on the things NOT covered, especially in this instance third and fourth party voices. Where did all these people go, and is it a mistake for the media to skip over them?
Also, let's watch the media war over the notion of change. But let's REALLY watch it. Who gets to decide, ultimately, which candidate commands that meme?

Ernie has just achieved lift-off. Let's put him in charge of tracking this whole question -- when did it become Obama vs. Palin? How can Obama get himself off that track?

When the ref is Oprah

I guess Emily makes me wonder WHAT exactly Oprah can and cannot be be made to do. Does she exist somewhere in the "normal" mainstream press continuum or is she outside and above it. If so, how? Should she be? I mean should she held to any particular standard of fairness? What regulates Oprah? (Is self-regulation how she maintains her brand name?)

Illegal use of the jaw

I like the concept of "working the refs" -- Joe's blog. What does that mean? How's it going?

Ladies' Night

Courtney and Kasey were among the bloggers who went after the question of what it means to market a woman candidate to women who may not have the same policy-values as said candidate.

I guess my issue is: how did the media handle that question. How will it?

So he has never met Clippy?

Caroline flagged this story about McCain and his use of computers and email. Some of the subsequent coverage looked at how McCain had explained that in the past. It seeems like a complicated question. McCain's war wounds probably inhibit his movements, but, as some writers to Goldberg noted, Stephen Hawking can use a computer.

Jack and Jill

Brent's locked onto a couple of interesting issues here.

a. the Greenberg photos. I don't think I've ever seen a photograhper do this particular kind of high-profile shit-disturbing in a campaign like this. But what else is this about -- the current vogue for (and there for acceptance of) photo-shopping malleability?
b. the health records petition. I wonder if people now start these petititons when they feel the media are not covering an issue they think is important.

Scooped again

I can't beat you guys on nothin'!!!!
Harry already had the fact check video up.

Fact Check also does its own video podcasts

A gentle reminder

You''re getting your blogs up, and they look great. You all have a lot of opinions, but don't forget that your real job in this course is not to become bloggers who have opinions about the campaign itself but to analyze how the rest of the media views and frames the campaign.

For instance, this week, one of the memes that popped up again and again was that McCain was crossing some kind of line, especially in his commercials, that divides carefully slanted information from out-and-out lies. It's unusual to see the Associated Press taking that tack, and perhaps even more unusual to see Karl Rove saying it about a fellow Republican. I'm not sure how often the Army Times gets involved in something like this, but somehow, all over the place, "Is McCain going too far?" became a valid question for the press to ask. How was that handled? Where did it come from? What effect will it have on the campaign?

I should have mentioned this fact-checking site, which usually seems pretty nonpartisn to me. This week, they spent a lot of time fact-checking that meme.

Scooped!

Actually, I was feeling pretty good about getting that video up, and then it turned out Kasey beat me to it.

Just for the heck of it

Blogless in Arizona

This is an interesting meme, and -- as you read the coverage -- the back and forth includes discussion of McCain's POW injuries and discussions of whether McCain ever cited those injuries as the reason he stayed off computers.

You guys are rolling

Brent is ahead of me in getting you guys blogrolled.

Commercial break

This describes the main site we use when we dissect ads, later in the term.

The ABCs of Palin

A lot of analysis of the Gibson-Palin encounter, ranging from his role -- were they more careful selecting him than they were in selecting her? -- to its actual content.

Conservatives tended not to like Gibson.
I found myself wondering if Gibson got pushed a little, beforehand, by bloggers more to the left, who thought he would be a patsy.
The Times looks at it two ways today, in addition to its main story.
Here.
And here.

And also wonders what happens when SNL gets going again.

Two more

At the moment, I'm not doing much more than posting your urls.

Say hello to Emily.

And Courtney.

Eventually, you will all be up on the blogroll here.

Sarah and Charlie

We will be discussing the many aspects of this interview.

Mad media, silly campaign

Howard Kurtz also thinks the campaign is getting silly. Is THAT a meme?

Another classmate heard from

I am Joe's blog.

A Meme Tale

This has little to do with the campaign, but it's an interesting look at a meme.

The unbearable lightness of Sept. 2008

Not unreasonably, the WaPost thinks the campaign is getting bogged down in silly issues.

But who is doing the bogging?

Welcome Interstate Bloggers

Three new blogs here:

Kevin.

Caroline.

Kasey.

Your classmates

Got some new blogs popping up!!

And here.

Sticky Wicket

Hey, there, Rhetoric majors!!!
What do you think of Lipstickgate?
Ooops! Meghan says Dad uses that expression. (When kids have blogs!!!)
And Obama unleashes an older loaded phrase.

Interesting

Greenwald at Salon has been doing some very interersting press criticism. Make sure you read this. And check the links.

My Dirty Little Secret

Last night, after class, I took off for a few days of much needed R&R in Truro. But I won't be billing the state for it.
I am, however, interested in the way Josh Marshall seems to be trying to track a Palin meme.
He even seems to feel he can shape it, by finding a familiar analogy.

ALSO -- Some of you may have hit an overestuffed mailbox when emailing me your urls. If so, try again. I did some cleaning here.

The flow of themed sessions may change, especially depending on the availability of some of our guests from the outside. You'll meet, over the course of this semester, peoplewho work inside campaigns, people who cover campaigns, people who fashion advertising.

Assigments related to these sesions will be posted on this blog every week.

For now, the sessions go like this.

Sept. 15. What is a campaign? (See separate posting.) How campaigns have speeded up.
Sept. 22 What is/are the media? Who reads and watches what? What kind of shape are some of these media institutions in? How are some of the older media -- including cable TV --changing their missions?
Sept. 29 Who are the new players and how do they change the game? Politico and Huffington Post and some of other big web presences didn't even exist four years ago. But we'll also look at Wikipedia.
Oct. 6 Sex (roles) and the campaign. Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama and how they get covered.
Oct. 13 Humor. This was the year SNL, The Daily Show and the Colbert Report not only shaped coverage but attracted serious scruitny about the way they do that.
Oct. 20 Polls. How do they work? How do they get covered? What kind of coverage do they deserve?
Oct. 27 Advertising and fact checking of ads. Guest star: Ad guru Steve Wolfberg.
Nov. 3 Media Bias. We'll be talking about it all year long, but let's look hard at the specific charges.
Nov. 10. Election Recap.
Nov. 17 Race in the race. How did they cover it? And did it matter? Did anyone ever talk about ageism too?
Nov. 24 Talk radio, Fox news and the explicitly conservative media .
Dec. 1 What will 2012 be like, based on what we've seen this time? What will become more important? The information cloud?
Dec. 8. Final class. Heavy weeping.

Sept 15 -- What Is a Campaign?

For the themes half of the class, we'll discuss possibly the most basic question. What is it we're talking about when we talk about how the media covers a campaign. Whqat's supposed to happen in a presidential race?

There will be some spcial reading for that.
Is Roger Ailes right? Are there only three things that get covered?
There's an argument made here that what it takes to win is not what it should take to win.
Maybe a campaign is basically a meme war. To better under stand the term, read the first chapter of this terrific book on memes.

Workload and What You Need to Do Right Away

One nice thing about this course is that you don't have to buy any books, and you don't have to do a final paper.

The emphasis, instead, is what you do every week. Please understand that, because of that, I have very high expectations for your weekly output. It is impossible to coast along for most of the term and then put on a big charge in the last few weeks and still get a decent grade.

The first thing you need to do is either start a blog or adapt an existing blog so that you can do your homework on it. If you're on some other platform like livejournal and want to use its blogging function, that's fine, as long as there is a specificl url that takes us directly to a blog or page that is all about the course and not about your bffs or how many beers you pounded down last Friday.

I say "us" because that is one of the other unusual aspects of this course. You will all have access to each other's blogs. Commenting on each other's entries is good, provided said comments are constructive and not snarky. {If you're a total Luddite or if this concept scares you, talk to me. I bet we can get you going on a blog pretty darn quick. Your classmates will help. And you'll be surprised at how much fun it is. At first. Exceptions will be made, but only with great resistance from me.}

Try to blog every day . If I see posts for four or five days per week, I will be happy. If I see two posts for the whole week, I will be happy only if they are longer and chunkier and noteworthy for the way they synthesize themes and use links to support various ideas. If I see an output that is thin and sketchy, I will not be so happy.

Try to blog intelligibly and thoughtfully. But if you want to use informal, not-so-academic language in your posts, that's fine with me, provided it is done in order to support your insights and observations with zippy, entertaining prose. Remember, this IS the written portion of this seminar, so make it sing, dudes.

Another thing you need to do right away is make sure you have registration access to at least one major newspaper. It's probably a good idea to make cure you can get on the sites of the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times with relative ease. The Wall Street Journal is trickier, but if it turns out we have at least one or two regular WSJ readers in the class, that will be great.

Every week the class will have two halves, although they will not always go in the same order.

One half will be a discussion pulling together all of what we have seen and gleaned from our media monitoring all week. The other half will focus on the theme we are exploring that week.

So let's talk about you media monitoring.
Each of you will be responsible for reading ALL of the political coverage in one major newspaper EVERY DAY. Not all of you will read the same newspapers. I will try to work as much as possible with whatever preerences you already have, but I will also divide you up into teams, so we make sure a diversity of newspapers is voered.

You must also, every day, look at Slate's Today's Papers feature. That will take you 30 seconds. While you are at Slate, you might as well poke around in their other coverage, which is very good. It tends to be read by a lot of other people in the business. One of the relatively new trends is that kind of "layering."
The big fish are often reading the smaller fish. In fact, that would be a cool thing to note in your blogs from time to time -- the way relatively minor players seem to be influencing coverage by (or even going into partnership with) better established players.

But I digress. If you get really obsessed with how newspapers are covering any one thing, I invite you to use this AMAZING tool, which allows you to look at all the front pages for any one day.

You must also spend 30 minutes day with some kind of television news. Again, the more diverse we are the better, and I will divide you up into teams based on what you already do. A network evening news or a cable show. THE DAILY SHOW DOES NOT COUNT. You should probably watch it anyway, as much as you can. And we will spend one week studying it and Colbert very closely.

You must also spend a few minutes every day with internet only content.
I would like you to stop in -- without necessarily becoming mired -- at one of the big ones like Daily Kos or Town Hall or Instapundit or peek at all the bloggers at the Atlantic site. But pick your poisons. You probably all have political blogs you like. I will ask you to commit to monitoring at least one of them.

So that's your bedrock monitoring commitment. Some newspaper, television and internet. And a daily or near-daily blog post sifting through your perceptions.

On top of that we will pile some content associated with each week's theme.

If that seems like a lot, all I can say is -- no books, no final paper, no exam. Work your ass off for me on a daily/weekly basis and we can all wave bye-bye on the last day of classes. What I'm really trying to do is build a weekly media hive in the classroom, where the bees teach each other. If we all do our work, we will be collectively as sharp about the topic of this class as anybody in America.

EXTRAS:
I could list 100 extra, but I will only list two.
If you look at this Pew site every day, you will get a good overview of our topic. Follow the links to learn more.
I look at Memeorandum about ten times day, five days a week. It in turn will lead you to some of the other biggies like Drudge and HuffPo and Politico. We will study them in depth one week, but feel free to look at them all the time.

It's not funny

This is the campaign where the serious people decided to study comedy.

Who reads and watches what

Some interesting new data on media use trends.
And everybody loves the thing about Stewart/Colbert.

New media questions

Undernews?
If you click on the Slate links in this post, you will see Mickey Kaus mention the "under-news." I think we know, in a general way, what he means, but exactly what is -- and isn't -- the under-news. On the day of this writing, the Google NEWS serach engine does not seem to pull up Politico-com articles. You have to get them, I think, from a general web search. But that, in a mechanistic way, is an interesting statement. And it may not matter, because Politico articles are headed into the MSM anyway. But then there will be another Politico, outside the campfire.


Do the Dems rule the 'net?
This Politico article raises relevant questions about whether the GOP trails in new media. But how much of an impact do, for instance, TPM and HuffPo really make?

Tim the Enchanter

We're going to have to discuss the death of Tim Russert. He was a far more controversial figure than the hagiography that followed his death could possibly convey. Read the comment threads on this article. But his death -- and the DAYS of coverage that followed -- seemed to be a funeral for more than just the man himself. We celebrate a thing when it's dying. More was dying than just Russert. But what? NPR's Tom Ashbrook devoted his show to the idea that Russert may have repreented the tail end of sober-sided grown-up journalism now being crowded out by the histrionics of Keith Olbermann. (And Chris Matthews.) Ashbrook and his guests rejected the idea that Russert's clubby D.C. centrism -- embodied in the idea that Carville and Matalin are legitimate sources of political perspective as opposed to cynical hired guns -- is itself a "point of view" imposed on fact-patterns.
Others detected in the Russert coverage a kind of self-loving within the media which seemed more energetic than the actual coverage of, you know, news.
Russert had, in the blogosphere, often stood for exactly the kind journalism that bloggers dislike. But most of them had to stay pretty quiet for a while.

Another thing that changed

Citizen journalists who do not declare themselves.