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.