I was reading this post at Brenden Loy’s Irish Trojan in Tennessee blog entitled You Got Enchilada In My Kung Pao Chicken about illegal immigration from Mexico and marveling at the variety and vehemence of feelings that Americans have on the subject. What caught my attention was this sentence at the end of a particularly [...]

For those of us following the reporting of the Iraq war in the American press Michael O’Halloran and Kenneth Pollack’s article in the NY Times earlier this month entitled A War We Just Might Win represented a major change in the reporting of the war in the MSM. I believe it was a watershed event [...]

Another debate on the value of blogging versus the press has broken out. Michael Skube of Elon University in the LA Times makes a fairly standard journalist’s attack on blogging called Blogs: All the Noise That Fits. NYU Journalism professor Jay Rosen, on his blog Press Think, responds with examples challenging Skube’s thesis here. In [...]

Rich Lowry, NRO (National Review Online) editor, criticizes the Bush administration’s democratizing policy in Iraq in telling fashion in this piece entitled The Revenge of the Tribes. It is short and well written so – by all means – read the whole thing. Note: The article contains an unusual statement requireing permision to even excerpt [...]

Note: I’ll be cross posting articles about media on my more theory oriented blog newmediatheory.net. For those primarily concerned with media issues that is the place to go for these more topical posts as well as the broader theoretical ideas underpinning my observations about the media. I have been watching with increasing amusement the MSM [...]

I know Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe reasonably well – Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela not at all. For that reason I have hesitated to make comparisons between the two, even privately. Then I read this piece entitled Bono del Sur 3 postponed on the Salon blog The Devil’s Excrement (a reference to oil and the debilitating effect its [...]

Blogger Cobb says: “The latest on Obama is that there is a significant difference between his acceptability as a political candidate for President and his electability.” Cobb is referring to a GQ article entitled Above the Fray by Ryan Lizza that points to a gap between “the percentage of Democrats who said they strongly approved [...]

I don’t usually react quickly to breaking stories, but I first ran across news of the suicide bombing of the Yezidi in Northern Iraq that killed at least 200 on the web page of WCCO – a local Minneapolis TV station I’ve held open to keep up with the latest on the bridge collapse. The [...]

The new ‘narrative’ on Iraq led by The NY Times, which I discussed here, has certainly caught on. This piece by Ullrich Fichtner in the reliably anti-war Der Spiegel, is more than an overseas echo – it has independent importance. Before discussing it, I have to say that as a someone intensely interested in the [...]

David Warren in this succinct column expresses something I have long felt about President Bush’s attitude toward the Iraq war, but been unable to articulate. President Bush’s hopeful idea from the beginning, was that democracy would spread through the Arab and Muslim world, in the same way it had spread through central and eastern Europe [...]