Watching the candidates for the Democratic nomination at their debate the other night, I caught myself lapsing into the old adversarial journalistic habit of mind. When the ABC interlocutors jabbed at Obama and Senator Clinton then unsheathed her shiv, I wanted Obama to return the favor. He mentioned Clinton’s much-criticized 1992 remark that she preferred [...]

Dear Senator Clinton, I guess it’s natural for you to expect that women will support you out of loyalty to our gender and because we have long harbored the dream of seeing a woman president. If so, I assure you that you’re mistaken. Like other voters, we are inclined to choose a candidate we perceive [...]

Bill Clinton and some others seem to think that because he gave Bill Richardson a couple of jobs in his administration, the New Mexico governor now owes lifetime fealty to the Clintons. Clinton supporter James Carville labeled Richardson “Judas” when the governor announced his endorsement of Barack Obama. It’s as though, once attached in some [...]

I imagine there are a lot of television viewers who feel as I do – weary of the mindless nitpicking that masquerades as political analysis. Set against the hard reality of a nation in deep trouble. it’s impossible to justify the endless attention to trivia. Sure, people in public liife can now and then say [...]

Take a piece of news just arrived on the Associated Press wire and combine it with a television pundit of large ego and you have a combustible piece of journalism. So it was on the evening of March 20 on MSNBC. That night, in prime time, Keth Olbermann was so aroused by a report that [...]

A few days before the Ohio primary, a plainly dispirited unemployed man who was participating in a “60 Minutes” voter panel [click here for transcript], said that early on he was leaning toward Barack Obama, but since he heard that Obama was a Muslim and didn’t salute the flag, he decided against him. I sat [...]

Since the economy is the number one issue on everybody’s mind, I thought I’d take a look at an hour-long program called “Your Money” that CNN runs on Saturdays and repeats on Sundays. I was wondering how helpful the program might be to viewers plagued by mundane financial troubles like the threat of mortgage foreclosures, [...]

If you want to take an accurate temperature of the state of journalism, it might be helpful to focus not on the major national publications, but rather on some smaller papers that serve local communities. Here you can find bald examples of what generally ails the news business. First, illiteracy. “The Delaware Wave” is one [...]

Carolyn Lewis joins the Watchdog Bloggers today. I love it when conventional wisdom flies out the window, don’t you? I love it when the experts are confounded, especially when it’s ordinary folks like voters who are doing the confounding. What I have been searching for in the wake of Super Tuesday is a sign that [...]