TopicsOn The Media is produced by:
At the Republican National Convention this week, politicians and their spokespeople levied harsh criticisms at the elitist, " left-wing" media. The main complaint seemed to be reporters' insistence on asking questions about vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Will the media fall for it? Brooke and Bob weigh in.
During the presidential campaign, media hang on the results of nearly every poll. But David Moore, former senior editor for the Gallup Poll, says polls inaccurately portray a consensus on issues the public often knows little or nothing about.
Nate Silver created a remarkably accurate computer system that projects stats for baseball players and teams. Now he's turned his attention to polling data for the presidential election with his website Five Thirty Eight. Silver explains how his site can out-perform the polling firms, whose data he relies on.
Jerome Corsi's bestseller "The Obama Nation," published by an imprint of Simon&Shuster, leaves much to be desired when it comes to fact checking. Radar Online's Charles Kaiser says the lack of facts in the book says something worrying about the publishing industry.
"The Obama Nation" contains incendiary charges against Barack Obama. But unlike Corsi’s 2004 bestseller "Unfit for Command" about John Kerry, his claims don’t seem to be sticking to the candidate this time around. Media Matters' Eric Boehlert says that's partly because liberals have learned from the past.
All three network anchors and dozens of other reporters followed Barack Obama on his whirlwind tour through the Mideast and Europe this week, sparking humor-infused complaints from the John McCain campaign. Project for Excellence in Journalism Director Tom Rosenstiel says there's nothing new about hating on the media, but that Obama has in fact enjoyed a disproportionate amount of coverage.
John McCain and Barack Obama say they favor a series of town hall debates, but both campaigns turned down ABC News's invitation this week, saying that no single network should be in control. Ezra Klein of The American Prospect says this might not be such a bad thing.
This isn’t the first time the presidential candidates and the TV networks have disagreed on the debates. Presidential debate historian Alan Schroeder describes a long and contentious history.
