With Smaller Newsrooms, Conservatives Have Most To Lose

Because of longstanding feelings that newspapers have a liberal bias, conservatives do a happy dance every time a new round of newsroom layoffs are announced.
It’s an awfully short-sighted happy dance.
Newspaper reporters do more to hold government accountable than any group in America. Sometimes they hold government accountable by pointing and wagging [...]

Skewed Rude Feud

Just how divided are Americans in the health care debate? According to a Pew Research Center survey, most Americans, Democrats and Independents overwhelmingly feel that health reform opponents own most of the blame for rudeness and disrespect in the health reform debate. But Republicans not only have a polar opposite view on this [...]

The Death of American Rx-ceptionalism

“Why would we want to desroy the best health care system in the world?” Starting with the 1993 Hillarycare debate, this has been the opposition’s most consistent and effective key message.
And sixteen years later, opponents continue to cling to that security blanket. For instance, Alabama Senator Richard Shelby recently told [...]

Might As Well Jump

To survive the Republican primaries, Senator John McCain morphed from a moderate to a conservative. He adopted the central pillars of the Bush era – tax cuts for the wealthy, socially conservative Supreme Court justices and a long-term commitment to the Iraq War. As if that weren’t enough, McCain moved further to the right [...]

Election Affection

Americans love to gripe about elections: “I had to choose the lesser of two evils.” “I don’t know what the candidates stand for, because they never discuss the issues.”
But even without the 349 town hall meetings McCain proposed, it turns out the collective verdict about this election was the sunniest in [...]

Who’s Voting and Who’s Lying?

Note: This long, long, long post started out to make a simple point about the AP/Yahoo poll released this weekend and – like a number of things I’ve done to the readers of this blog – turned into one of those items that will no doubt be used as evidence in my commitment hearings. I [...]

New Wave Update

Not unlike the Buggles’ chirping of the 1980s post-mortem “Video Killed the Radio Star” at the dawn of the MTV age, a new Pew Research study reminds us that youtube video is killing the newspaper star. And stomping a little harder on the corpse of the radio star. And threatening the relevance of [...]

“Liberal Media Coverage” Update

Today the Pew Research Center released a survey in which an overwhelming number of Americans said the news coverage of conservative Republican Senator John McCain has been mostly positive. Three times more Americans said McCain’s news coverage had been “mostly positive” (36%) than those who said the coverage had been “mostly negative” (11%).” The [...]