Category Archives: The Media

If your newspaper, like mine, decided not to run today's Doonesbury, here's a link to today's strip. Many papers failed to carry the strip because it predicted an Obama victory in a part of the paper that went to bed before the results could be known.

I don't mind so much the Miami Herald being a coward and making the fundamentally silly choice of substituting a re-run or an old strip instead — it's failing to acknowledge what they were doing by, say, tacking on a little note that I think is pretty bad…

Then again, this sort of gutlessness (managed to make it to the end of a Myriam Marquez column yet? Don't you miss Jim DeFede and Ana Menendez?) is one more reason why the Herald seems less and less necessary.

Daily Kos has some of the best front pages from around the nation.

I especially like this one:

I'm going to be on BBC Five Live this evening at 9:30pm US time talking about the US election. Five Live is the UK's answer to talk radio

The interviewer will be Rhod Sharp, and the program will be broadcast in the UK and live online too.

I made my (very brief) debut on French radio, in French, yesterday, via a tiny snippet from a long taped interview with a reporter from RTL, the big French radio network.

Although we talked a lot about the impact of the internet on the election, the excerpt they used, which appears near the end of the segment, is about the role of racism in the election, a subject on which I likely know no more than next guy. RTL.fr – “L'autre Amérique” (3) : les USA, pays raciste?

Judging from the interview requests I'm getting from foreign media, a lot of reporters based in Europe think that nice warm Miami — near the epicenter of the last two elections — is the perfect place from which to do their election-week coverage. And they seem to have persuaded their editors to authorize the trips…

It seems that I'll probably be interviewed on ABC TV's “ABC Now” program, at about 5:45pm today.

The topic is this case. Before you jump to too many conclusions, you might want to read this letter from the prosecutor.

Ok, now jump.

Update: Was on for all of several seconds, and in due course they promise to send a URL.

One positive side-effect of the crisis: real journalism in my morning paper. In today's NYT there's the long-missed taste of some straight talk.

Look at the “News Analysis” article entitled In Bailout Vote, a Leadership Breakdown . No pussyfooting here from Jackie Calmes (with assists from several others):

The leaders of both parties failed, many analysts agreed, in bringing the measure to the House floor without knowing whether it had the votes to pass — a bad move at any time, but especially so in this case given the risk of the markets and the badly weakened financial system reacting badly.

…

As a study in his prospective leadership, the role of Mr. McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, has done him no political good. After suspending his campaign last week and vowing to work with Republicans until a resolution was in hand, Mr. McCain was campaigning in Ohio on Monday with his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, as the House vote commenced. There he implicitly took credit for the compromise bailout that Congressional leaders had negotiated over the weekend, even as it was going down to defeat.

On his plane before takeoff to Iowa, Mr. McCain spoke by phone with Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke. With no credit to claim in the bill’s defeat, he flew to Iowa without making a statement to reporters on board. In Iowa, he criticized Mr. Obama, his Democratic rival, before adding, “Now is not the time to fix blame.”

Even before the vote, House Republicans had trouble pointing to any contributions from Mr. McCain to their deliberations since late last week, when he and they forced the administration officials and Congressional leaders to reopen negotiations and alter the package to impose some safeguards for taxpayers’ billions.