Below The Beltway

An interesting exchange from last night’s Anderson Cooper 360:

This much is true; during the lead-up to the war, there were several segments of the media that were, quite obviously, in the tank for the war. Judith Miller at The New York Times was one. The entire Editorial Board of the Washington Post was another. The [...]

What is the problem with these two stories from today’s Washington Post ?
First, the Post reports that home prices posted their steepest year-to-year drop between 2007 and 2008 than at any time in the past 20 years:
NEW YORK — U.S. home prices dropped at the sharpest rate in two decades during the first quarter, a [...]

The WaPo’s Howard Kurtz has sour grapes over the fact that the newspaper industry is being forced to change:
Let’s not bury the lead: This is a rough time for the newspaper business, a rough time for The Washington Post and a rough time for me.
No one need shed any tears for the people leaving this [...]

On Sunday night, Antonin Scalia will be interviewed on 60 Minutes, which is unusual enough for a Supreme Court Justice, even more so considering that he comments on one of the most controversial Supreme Court decisions of the past ten years:
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia denies that partisan politics played a role in the [...]

Mary McNamara, the television critic for the Los Angeles Times, has apologized for reducing George Washington’s tenure in the Presidency by an entire term:
If you want to know if anyone is reading your stories, make sure you insert a mistake about George Washington.
Oh, if only I could claim it was all a ploy by [...]

When you hire reporters, perhaps you should make sure that passed American history.
Consider this from television critic Mary McNamara’s review of HBO’s John Adams:
In his portrayal of our second president, Paul Giamatti creates a man perpetually dissatisfied, disgusted by the preening ambition of politics even as he is infected by it. If his relentless crankiness [...]

At least so far, it doesn’t look like the firestorm has gotten to him:
At some point amid the hailstorm of criticism that greeted ABC’s handling of yesterday’s Dem debate, moderator George Stephanopoulos received an email — one of the many, many missives about the debate he’s received — from an Obama adviser.
“Feel like a candidate [...]

This one has got to be a new low:
For only the second time in 85 years, Time magazine abandoned the traditional red border it uses on its cover. The occasion – to push more global warming alarmism.
The cover of the April 21 issue of Time took the famous Iwo Jima photograph [...]

The blogosphere, especially the left side of the blogosphere, is all over the idea that last night’s debate was ruined by ABC News.
Within minutes after the debate ended, Greg Mitchell had a piece up at The Huffington Post calling the performance by Charles Gibson shameful:
In perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a [...]

It looks like Katie Couric will be leaving the CBS Evening News long before her contract expires:
After two years of record-low ratings, both CBS News executives and people close to Katie Couric say that the “CBS Evening News” anchor is likely to leave the network well before her contract expires in 2011 — possibly soon [...]