A veteran journalist and Washington insider has completed an empirical study of the elite press’s performance in the run-up to and early days of the Iraq war and – big surprise – has found it badly wanting. Leslie H. Gelb, writing in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, concludes that American’s finest journalists failed to even [...]

What would you do if you — and your 32 camera crews — were granted unparalleled access to the White House for a day? And then you had two full hours of prime-time TV to fill? There are many mysteries you might try to explore. How does President Obama actually make decisions? What if anything [...]

The White House Correspondents Association annual dinner, which takes place tomorrow night, is an orgy of self-congratulation, the ultimate black-tied manifestation of the dangerous coziness between Washington’s journalistic elites and the people they cover. Its defining moment came in 2006, when attendees responded with stunned, sullen incomprehension as comedian Stephen Colbert delivered a magnificently brutal [...]

President Obama holds a prime-time press conference tomorrow night to mark his 100th day in office, and if the major news organizations really want to make it interesting, they won’t send their White House corrrespondents. No, I’m not suggesting a boycott. What I’m proposing is that, depending on what they want to probe, news organizations [...]

Some reporters covering President Obama’s first high-tech town hall yesterday apparently found it boring. Which raises the question: What excites the press corps? Well, top of the list would be itself, of course. We’ll start with Frank James, who liveblogged the town hall for Tribune’s Washington bureau. Ten minutes in, he wrote: “The second question [...]

Chas Freeman’s selection to be chairman of the National Intelligence Council (first reported by Laura Rozen of Foreignpolicy.com) is notable not just for his surprising (and, to some, disturbing) even-handedness about the Middle East. The man is one of a rare breed: He is a Washington insider, and yet he is also a ferociously independent [...]

Via Romenesko, I see Google CEO Eric Schmidt telling Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky that he wants to help newspapers survive – he just doesn’t know how. “What if the newspaper industry does go down?” Lashinsky asks. Schmidt replies: “To me this presents a real tragedy in the sense that journalism is a central part of democracy. [...]

Campaign reporters are watching the McCain-Palin campaign implode in an unseemly orgy of fearmongering. But many of these reporters appear to be holding back their honest assessments, restrained by their sense of fairness and objectivity (not to mention their deep-seated need for a close election to make them feel consequential). What to do? When fact-checking, [...]

Washington-based editors have apparently found an exit strategy for Iraq, but it couldn’t be more short-sighted: They’ve decided to pull their reporters out of the country. This morning’s Washington Post features a front-page story by Ernesto Londoño and Amit R. Paley describing how the number of foreign journalists in Baghdad is “declining sharply, a media [...]

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 [...]