David Mamet: Why I am no longer a 'Brain Dead Liberal'. "The right is mooing about faith, the left is mooing about change, and many are incensed about the fools on the other side—but, at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler. Happy election season."
posted by The Card Cheat on Mar 12, 2008 - 109 comments

The End of News? From the New York Review of Books. Michael Massing, a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, discusses the decline of the mainstream media and the ideal of objectivity: Accuracy in Media (1969), the Center for Media and Public Affairs (1985), the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine (1987), Rush Limbaugh (1988), Fox News (1996), weblogs, cost-cutting at newspapers. Of course, the newspaper business has always been a difficult one, as Walter Lippmann noted in his book Public Opinion (1921): [more inside]
posted by russilwvong on Nov 14, 2005 - 43 comments

Red State/Blue state France. Les résultats département par département. Remarkable that the U.S. isn't the only country that's split down the geographic middle. No translation, but the picture speaks for itself.
posted by jfuller on May 30, 2005 - 22 comments

What's So Absurd About Partisanship? The Lying in Ponds* website is a clever attempt to measure partisanship in the daily columns of the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. Although - or perhaps because - its methodology is simple and straightforward, its conclusions, though necessarily unsurprising, are quite interesting, often amusing and seem fairer than er, more partisan "media watch" thingies [Don't miss their 2002 Top Ten.]. But why is being openly partisan seen as such a terrible thing in America? Why is so much time and effort expended to hide it or deny it? Or, put another way, why is bipartisanship such a desirable thing, often presented as being somehow above politics? Is it American exceptionalism again?
*[Echoing what Dennis said in Monty Python And The Holy Grail: "Listen!Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government!"]
posted by MiguelCardoso on Sep 27, 2002 - 20 comments

Another threat to the separation of church and state? "[S]ome members of Congress want to turn churches into political action committees. A bill in Congress would amend the tax code to allow churches, synagogues, mosques and other houses of worship to get involved in partisan political campaigns."
posted by Bootcut on Aug 28, 2002 - 41 comments

Harris' Partisan Fixers How Bush got the help needed to "win" in Florida. No. Not the NY Times piece on absentee votes but how Harris rigged things.
posted by Postroad on Jul 17, 2001 - 52 comments