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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Ordinarily, the obituary of a former United States Senator is unlikely to merit more than passing attention, but when it happens to be written by the chief political strategist of an existing Presidential campaign, that’s different. The obituary in the July 11 issue of Time is written by Charlie Black, and the candidate he now [...]

The election may depend upon it: How to instruct the average American voter to discern the difference between a poisonous lie and a truth based on evidence. A fine June 30 Washington Post story written by Eli Saslow vividly and painfully illustrates the point. The writer tells the tale of Jim Peterman, a 74-year-old retiree [...]

Out of a decent respect for the memory of Tim Russert, I have held back from commenting on how most of the leading television organizations – CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC – handled the news of his untimely death. Certainly it was appropriate to announce his passing and to add brief encomiums about a fellow [...]

It’s amazing how easy it is to manipulate the television pontificators. On the day after Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination for president, you would think CNN and MSNBC and their ilk would be awash in information that newly-attentive voters need to know in order to make sense of this remarkable historic event. Information such [...]

Of course Hillary Clinton won big in West Virginia. She was the only one who campaigned there. I waited and waited for somebody in television-land to take note of that fact, to put it in context, but waited in vain. The victory was reported as a triumph, although it was also indicated that according to [...]

Considering that he was widely lambasted for his performance as a moderator at the most recent Democratic candidates debate, George Stephanopoulos might have expected to be taken to task at his Sunday talk show. Instead his three colleagues—George Will, Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts—closed the circle around him and let him off the hook. As [...]