At the Democratic National Convention on Monday night, it was family night. The featured families challenged stereotypes of what family is and is not in America. It was no surprise to me. When Barack Obama’s family took the stage, it was the United Nations. It was all-American. Attacks on Obama’s politics don’t bother me. If [...]

DENVER — Covering a political convention is a little like covering a Super Bowl. Thousands of people gather in one place, and not all of them are there for the main event. Each day of the week builds excitement, with receptions and parties. Celebrities and protestors collide, using the ready-made televised stage. At the Democratic [...]

I may have been the only person watching NBC network news the night Tim Russert misspelled Iraq. At least I never saw any mention of it in the press at the time, nor in the obituaries and tributes that were published after his death on June 13. The misspelling was months before Russert’s death. On [...]

In his Sunday New York Times column, Frank Rich noted that “the real story” about John McCain “has yet to be fully told.” A ninety-minute biography on CNN Wednesday night filled in some of the blanks. Since McCain isn’t shy about mentioning what he did and didn’t do when he was a POW in Vietnam [...]

Has anyone among our mainstream political pundits noticed that however this presidential election turns out, the bankers can’t lose? The bankers I speak of are a strange pair of allies: former Sen. Phil Gramm, a right-wing Texas Republican, who remains an economic adviser for Sen. John McCain, and Robert Rubin, Treasury Secretary for Bill Clinton [...]

Any cop or lawyer can tell you that when two or more people witness the same event they are likely to come away with quite different versions of what they saw. So it is with a pastor’s interviews with the Presidential candidates at Saddleback church Saturday night.. The New York Times’ conservative columnist William Kristol [...]

Here we go again. In a mindless display of he-said, she-said journalism, the Washington Post gave its readers a front-page ad last week for books about Barack Obama, the most prominent being a hatchet job by the notoriously inaccurate “author” who maligned John Kerry in 2004. The New York Times had the day before published [...]

NBC’s David Shuster offered a fine example of exemplary journalism on the night of August 14th, and I think it should be duly noted. Sitting in for Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball, Shuster opened the program by relating the news that Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign supporters would have their chance to vote for their candidate [...]

Could television journalists please banish to the dustbin the mindless words and phrases that are poisoning public discussion of politics? For example, “flip-flop” is used to disparage candidates for having changed their positions on particular issues. But do we really want to elect candidates with fixed ideas who decline to change when the situation and [...]

Nearly 35 years ago, the Washington Post front-paged an exposé of systematic and shabby — but then-legal — election-campaign financing by Leon Hess, chief executive officer of Amerada Hess Corp., the East Coast gasoline retailer. Just the other day, his son John, who succeeded him as CEO, loomed large in a new exposé of the [...]