Fact checking the presidential candidates is so 20 minutes ago. The fact is, facts don’t seem to matter anymore. Certain political apparatchiks have learned over the years that the effectiveness of a given statement has remarkably little to do with whether it’s true or not. How much it gets repeated by others is a much [...]

As a grandfather of eight inquisitive kids, 14 and under, I’ve had my share of squirmy moments. “Pop, what’s Viagra?” I hope now that none of my grandkids quiz me about Levi Johnston and what exactly he did that led to his warm greeting by John McCain at the Republican convention. Some in the media [...]

A staple of so-called “gotcha” journalism — in which news reporters seem to celebrate the missteps of politicians — is the gaffe, the wrong words spoken at the wrong time, the off-base comment, the politically insensitive offhand remark. So it is that talkative people like Sen. Joe Biden are called gaffe-prone by the news media, [...]

Boy, that was a close call wasn’t it? What with Democratic candidate Sen. Barack Obama selecting Sen. Joe Biden as a running mate, and Mitt Romney and Sen. Joe Lieberman in the wings — awaiting a nod from Republican nominee Sen. John McCain — it looked like the news media might have to knuckle down [...]

A couple of months ago, in the seniors column I write on my day job for Newsday, I rejected age as an issue in the presidential campaign. But I added, “if age is to be a factor in the coming race… perhaps the most important issue may be whom Sen. John McCain, 72, chooses as [...]

Politics and government nowadays are as much about stagecraft as statecraft. The “hurricane-disrupted” Republican national convention is a recent example. Gustav was more than a thousand miles away and no threat to St. Paul. The threat was to the possibility of Republicans coming across as doing politics as usual while Americans were being battered. Irony [...]

It took six years but Steven Hatfill now has an apology from New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof for the distress caused by his columns, beginning in 2002, that tied Hatfill to the 2001 anthrax attacks that caused five deaths. Hatfill sued Kristof and the Times for defamation, but had nothing to show for his [...]

Forty-five years ago, when the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his `I Have a Dream` speech at the March on Washington, four members of my family witnessed history. On August, 28, 1963, my mother boarded a bus with other members of our Catholic Church, dressed as though she were headed to Sunday Mass instead [...]

I happen to like my Scotch straight up, unadulterated by ice or water. And I like my Convention coverage the same way. That’s why on the first two nights of the Democratic Convention I turned to C-Span, which offered without interruption what was going on at the stage level and also down on the floor. [...]

GOOD NBC COVERAGE: NBC-TV commentators and analysts did their homework. The informed commentary, particularly in track and field and gymnastics, was reminiscent of how the late Jim Duncan prepared for his stints as the “voice of the Drake Relays.” He knew what was supposed to happen in a race, what might happen and what might [...]