Liberal Talk Radio

I’m having a hard time understanding this: In two separate segments yesterday, Fox News attacked CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric for reporting from the ground in Iraq, calling it “a desperate move” and asking if it was a “ratings ploy or legitimate journalism.” On Your World With Neil Cavuto, guest host Dagen McDowell featured [...]

I know it’s August and everyone’s on vacation, but yesterday’s Meet the Press was a disgrace, one that should make NBC News bow its head in shame. David Gregory, who thinks he’s hot shit for his tough questioning of the President in the briefing room, had Karl Rove on for a half hour. But on [...]

It’s amazing how Meet the Press can suddenly turn into good television when you have a Senator like Jim Webb who’s actually willing to call out the Republican party for their B.S. about “supporting the troops.” Typically the politicians’ segment of the show is far less interesting than the journalists’. But today was the exception: [...]

I know we damn dirty blogs can’t afford editors, but surely a big news org like the Associated Press can, right? Senate Majority Harry Reid, D-Nev., who had made no secret of his distaste for parts of the bill, said earlier he would move on to other matters if the immigration measure’s supporters didn’t get [...]

Don’t get me wrong, I like David Gregory and his pompous self as much as the next guy, but his conversion into a White House troublemaker a was a couple of years too late. Gregory was hardly posing searching questions during [the post-9/11] period. But he could only suppress his inner Sam Donaldson for so [...]

Andrew Sullivan flags what I can only assume is a commencement speech delivered by Barack Obama. It’s really moving. But I think it’s worth quibbling with this line, spoken in the context of railing against the “smallness” or “pettiness” of American life: We see it in a media culture that sensationalizes the trivial and trivializes [...]

After reading the first few paragraphs of Al Gore’s book excerpt in Time, I became convinced that Gore had not, in fact, invented the internet. This is because his discussion of the destruction of democracy seems so… 1990s. All this stuff about TV as a “one-way” medium, consolidation of ownership, etc. But, of course, by [...]

I’m sure I’ve ranted about this before, but I get really annoyed by the way the media refers to “Moderate Republicans,” as opposed to “Conservative Democrats.” Why can’t they be liberal Republicans? I mean, that’s what they are, right? It would go a long way towards removing the stigma of the word “liberal” from our [...]

Dexter Filkins has a great appreciation of David Halberstam, who Tom posted about on Monday. In some ways, Filkins has inheritied Halberstam’s role, being one of the few unembedded reporters during the Iraq War. (If you haven’t read Filkins’ much-lauded reporting from the Battle of Fallujah in 2004, do yourself a favor…) Filkins notes that [...]

Many bloggers have been saying this, but if, for some reason, you get your news exclusively from BATP (shudder!!), definitely find some time to watch Bill Moyers’ show on the selling of the Iraq war. It’s a comprehensive, start-to-finish case on how the media completely fell down on the job covering the Iraq war. Overall, [...]