Newspapers

My pal Mike Crowley’s (good!) New Republic piece on Hillary’s tough press operation is drawing lots of attention from the blogosphere. It’s a reminder that the subject hacks and bloggers like best is, well, stories about hacks and bloggers. I daresay it’s doing wonders for TNR’s web traffic today. Which reminds me that this ability to see and measure what people are reading in real time is going to have an enormous impact on journalism in the future. I’m not sure people – readers and hacks alike – necessarily fully appreciate that yet. In the past newspaper management have relied upon focus groups and reader surveys to find out what

Ah, the tabloids… Bless them. Just when you think no newspaper can keep a healthier stable of high horses than the New York Times, Fleet Street reminds one that humbug and sanctimony are both alive and well in London. Gordon Brown just made his life more difficult. If he does renege upon Labour’s promise to hold a referendum upon the EU constitution treaty – even in its revised “non-treaty” form- he’s made an enemy of Britain’s best-selling paper, The Sun. Good. Here’s what The Sun says today: GORDON Brown last night took the fatal step of breaking his word to Sun readers. Over dinner with 26 other EU leaders, he

It’s the baseball play-offs. Hurrah. Let’s Go Yankees! But that also means it’s time for America’s sportswriters to be even dumber than is customarily the case. For the sake of your sanity as well as for proper hilarity, trot on over to the lads at Fire Joe Morgan. Recent highlights include: how your mother probably has a better understanding of the value of “wins” than the average Hall of Fame voter, why yes of course you’d be better off packing your team with people who aren’t very good at baseball come the play-offs because, hey, they’re plucky! And gusty! and, today, yet another welcome takedown of America’s worst gasbag, Mr

Paul Krugman complains that the scale of Democratic triumphs is deliberately under-played by the American media. Conspiracy! In fact, it’s quite strange how the magnitude of the Democratic victory has been downplayed. After the 1994 election, the cover of Time showed a charging elephant, and the headline read “GOP stampede.” Indeed, the GOP had won an impressive victory: in House races, Republicans had a 7 percentage point lead in the two-party vote. In 2006, Time’s cover was much more subdued; two overlapping circles, and the headline “The center is the new place to be.” You might assume that this was because the Democrats barely eked out a victory. In fact,

Memo to New York Times/Guardian* columnists: it would be a public service were you to follow the great Myles na Gopaleen’s example: Not the least of my duties is keeping an eye on the Editor of this newspaper and rebutting, for the benefit of our simpler readers, the various heresies propounded in his leading articles. Saturday’s article was agreat shock to me… And again: Today, undismayed by many a reverse, I take up the cudgels on behalf of the Irish nation against the historic enemy of the Irish nation – the Editor of The Irish Times… *Actually all papers could benefit from a dose of mutiny in the ranks. It

Via Samizdata, this from Barry Goldwater: I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is ‘needed” before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be

Sigh. I know we don’t expect much from Polly Toynbee. But perhaps she should read some Irving Kristol before she starts referring to John Redwood as a neocon throwback to the Thatcher era. If she added some other books to her reading list she might remember that the Thatcherites were, to some extent at least, inspired by FA Hayek – a man not generally considered a neoconservative luminary. It’s too delicious, of course, that in terms of policy towards work and families and other social matters La Toynbee deeply cares about, she has rather more in common with neoconservatives than she seems to understand. They, after all, are the proponents