Robert Parry on the economy's dolt factor and the "stomach-turning awareness that the leader of the most important economy in the world doesn¹t have the skills or wisdom to point a way out."

Facing its own economic slowdown, Aspen promotes sex over snow.

The Guardian reports on the University of Alabama's shadowy network of all-white fraternities and sororities known as "the Machine."

A Face for Radio What do the people on NPR really look like?

It's loony bin time, as loopy Larry King faces off with aliens.

In an excerpt from "The Accidental President," Supreme Court Justice David Souter is quoted as saying that if he'd had "one more day" he could have convinced Justice Anthony Kennedy to change his vote in Bush v. Gore.

Hell's Kitchen As part of his research for a study on "vendor response to consumer complaints," a Columbia University professor sent a fabricated letter to 240 New York City restaurants, claiming that his wedding anniversary dinner had resulted in food poisoning.

Readers respond to the gastronomic false alarm.

AOL Time Warner cooks the books, by selling ads to itself!

Book publishers are targeting their version of Napster -- the public library.

Teflon II? With few exceptions, the mainstream media continues to give President Bush a free pass.

Read an interview with John Stauber, whose PR Watch monitors the behind-the-scenes manipulation of the news.

Imploring Al Gore to step aside, David Corn writes that "Gore, alas, will still be Gore in 2004."

Truth Goes Missing More interested in selling the story than in getting it right, the media has ignored the growing list of whoppers and flip-flops by the attorney representing Chandra Levy's family.

Westward Whoa! Speaking at an emotionally charged hearing on the DOE's proposal to store nuclear waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, the mayor of Las Vegas threatens to arrest anyone who drives a truck with a cargo of high-level nuclear waste through the city.

Fresh from his induction into the "Little League Hall of Excellence," President Bush agrees to engage in a silly publicity stunt with the NFL, CBS and FOX.

Bill Maher advances the politically incorrect notion that Danny Almonte should share the blame for deceiving Little League officials.

With only so many people to sell cable, Internet, and phone service to, increased corporate profits will come from consolidation and higher prices. This tour of the media industrial complex identifies who's trying to get in your wallet and who's working to keep them out.

Who's the Enemy? Ben Cohen asks "Why does the federal government want to spend $344 billion on the Pentagon, when it currently spends only $42 billion on education, $26 billion on affordable housing, $6 billion on Head Start and $1 billion on school construction?"

Cast your spending vote at Cohen's splashy "Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities" Web site.

Online Journalism Review's Ken Layne mixes it up with Business Week over his charge that a writer for the magazine's Web site plagiarized one of his columns.

The standoff between VP Dick Cheney and the GAO over who attended meetings to draft the administration's energy plan is down to the wire.

The fur flies as CNN stages a raid on the "talent" at Fox News Channel.

Hard Right Eric Boehlert, reporting on CNN's courting of right-wing viewers, notes that following President Bush's stem cell address, "Not only did no Democratic elected officials appear on screen, but CNN didn't present one Democratic-leaning pollster, consultant or columnist to utter a stern word in protest."

Wall Street Journal editor John "Family Values" Fund will be championing this cause after reading what Media Whores Online published about him.

Time's person of the week? It's you!

The Financial Times reports that China is set to allow News Corp. and AOL Time Warner access to its domestic television audience in return for their agreeing to make China Central Television widely available in the U.S.

The Freepers cannot contain their excitement over Janet Reno's candidacy.

Ad Prose The jeweler Bulgari paid British writer Faye Weldon an undisclosed sum to mention the company at least a dozen times in her new novel. Weldon, a former advertising copywriter, went them one better, naming her book "The Bulgari Connection."

Rick Moody and other authors respond to Weldon's mercantilism: "Don't your books sell enough copies already? Don't be a jerk!"

He Said That?! The kid glove treatment that most mainstream media afforded Jesse Helms when he announced his retirement from the Senate fails to square with Helms unrepentant racism and homophobia. Charlotte's Creative Loafing on "The Prince of Darkness."

David Broder attacked reporters for ignoring Helms' racist career in covering his announcement, but was mum about Helms' nastiness for the previous 15 years- in other words - when it mattered.

Longtime New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael has died at 82. Read a Salon profile, interviews with Cineaste and Modern Maturity, her comments on the fun of writing and visit a fan site. Her 1969 Harpers essay "Trash, Art, and the Movies," was named as one of the top 100 works of U.S. journalism in the 20th century.

Recapping the glorious summer of Condit, Frank Rich quotes Salon's Jake Tapper, who was looking for a story at the D.C. hotel where the closed-door Social Security commission was meeting: "It was weird that there were no other reporters in sight. Maybe there would have been if Anne Marie Smith had been staying there."

Writing in one of AOL Time Warner's top brands, Lance Morrow wonders, "Can it be that the corporate owners of the media have an interest in corrupting the investigative functions of journalism and diverting its resources to sensational but essentially insignificant stories?"

Inspired by "Truth in Love," a campaign that encouraged gays and lesbians to change their sexual orientation, a coalition of conservative groups is launching "Shake the Nation," which includes sending baby rattles to senators to show support for an anti-abortion Supreme Court nominee.

Lights Out E. J. Dionne wants to know why the "so-called liberal media" and Democrats in the Senate aren't demanding that Vice President Cheney make public exactly whom he consulted in creating his pro-industry energy proposal.

The Los Angeles Times names names, describing a who's who of Republican lobbyists, large energy companies and trade groups that successfully influenced Cheney's report.

Unlike Bill O'Reilly's Fox News Channel program, which purports to be "spin free," www.oreilly-sucks.com is up front about its bias.

Read Me The New Yorker profiles one of the last veteran practitioners of the dying art of preparing and holding cue cards.

A coalition of environmental groups takes legal action to delay preliminary work on President Bush's missile defense program

Public Housing Ernest Hollings, South Carolina's 79-year-old "junior" senator, says that 98-year-old Strom Thurmond is no longer "mentally keen," but that "the poor fellow doesn't have any place to go. He doesn't have a home and someone has said the best nursing home is the U.S. Senate."

The Greatest Vendetta on Earth After Regardies published a controversial profile of the Feld family, which owns the Ringling Brothers-Barnum & Bailey Circuses, Feld Entertainment spent the next eight years harassing the article's freelance author.

Send in the Clowns Part two, in which Feld Entertainment engages in "one of the strangest campaigns ever waged against a writer," an eight-year-long operation to divert Jan Pottker into different projects.

Hearing is Believing A blind city councilman in Naples FL wants satirical paintings of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky removed from a local art center because he was told they're obscene.

In These Times reports that Pinkerton's, which "cut a bloody swath through American history as union-busters and kidnappers," is now heading up high school snitch squads.

A Georgia man gets a visit from the Secret Service after affixing an anti-Bush sentiment to the back of his truck.

Viewing strategies for people without a television.

Longtime Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk reports from Gaza: "I cannot fail to remember Beirut in 1982, when Sharon's invading army had surrounded the PLO. Gaza now is a miniature Beirut -- it's as if Arafat and Sharon are replaying their bloody days in Lebanon."

Fisk's Middle East reporting for the Independent is archived here.

A Jew who was one of the most beloved men in a Palestinian village is gunned down.

A journalism prof writes that "the entire nation has been treated all summer to something too depraved to be called a media circus; such a description does a disservice to even the grimiest backlot circus and grifters."

Clowns and carneys in Gibsonton FL took umbrage at being lumped in with a previous media circus.

Top-Shelf Grifting Secrets of the PR pros revealed! How to make up to $450 per hour in the fast-growing field of crisis management.

Read the new installment of Bruce Kluger and David Slavin's pitch-perfect satire: "Memo to George."

Is mall walking your game? If so, you'll be interested in the latest controversy involving these sneaker-shod chronics.

TomPaine.com publishes a hilarious batch of over-the-top-nasty letters it received from Fox News Channel viewers.

Winners Talk, Losers Walk "Crossfire" hosts a lively debate over the government's role in gambling, including an interview with one of the four Powerball winners, who calls lotteries "the poor man's hope."

Get Over It? In a Los Angeles Times profile, Mark Crispin Miller argues that voter outrage over the 2000 Presidential race outcome is intensifying.

Book buyers vote against the Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore decision.

Why does President Bush continue to read the same pre-school book to elementary students?

The president also invites the media to watch him work, gives every American a nickname and makes fun of a bald guy.

Tank God A Methodist church in Rosslyn VA ousts its long-time tenant, a colorful character whose Exxon station occupied the ground floor of the country's only "pump N pray."

Multiperplexing Thirty years ago there were approximately one-sixth as many movie screens as today, yet there were six times as many movies showing. Instead of giving moviegoers variety, multiplexing has given them monopoly.

Gross Receipts Verlyn Klinkenborg writes that "Even summer has to offer something more essential than the democratic sensation of having seen 'Jurassic Park: The Rerun' the same weekend everyone else in America saw it."

Paul Gigot, who famously described the storming of Dade county recount deliberations by paid Congressional staffers as a "bourgeois riot," pens his final "Potomac Watch" column.

Al Franken on CNN's talks with Rush Limbaugh.

Big Get Bigger The audience for news and information Web sites grew almost 15% in the last year, with the biggest gains going to well-established news outlets.

Yahoo responds to FAIR's charges that editorial and opinion columnists on Yahoo -- whose 11 million monthly users give it the Web's largest news audience -- are inordinately white, male and conservative.

Church and State The Florida Department of Corrections has established "faith-based" prison dorms where "religious" inmates live separately from other prisoners and spend their days immersed in religious services and study.

Didn't Bleed, Didn't Lead A rural Minnesotan eloquently laments the decision by a Twin Cities public TV station to kill a newscast that was a valuable antidote to corporately-produced blather.

Alan Dershowitz and Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner have been mixing it up over the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore. Listeners discuss their appearance on public radio's "The Connection," and host Nina Totenberg's treatment of Dershowitz. (note: To hear Dershowitz, start at minute 19 of the broadcast.)

Read an e-mail debate between Dershowitz and Posner.

Read more about Totenberg's professional conduct.

Do you have what it takes to host NPR's "Talk of the Nation?"

Los Angeles Times media critic Howard Rosenberg writes in his analysis of Connie Chung's interview with Gary Condit: "It's an old story, media inflating a story with their own gaseous helium and then using the monstrously oversized blimp they create as justification for their relentless coverage."

Howard Kurtz covers the coverage and a Vanity Fair writer says Condit didn't challenge her use of the term "affair" when he was interviewed for the magazine's December issue.

Swearing at the police is not a crime.

TV's "clueless clutter" is about to get worse as UPN proposes selling on-screen advertising during its shows.

Commentators from East, West and South challenge President Bush's pronouncement accompanying his "Home to the Heartland Tour" -- that the country's rural center is a bastion of traditional values.

A community broadcasting veteran writes that the 30th anniversary of NPR (National Private Radio) is no cause for celebration: "Poor NPR. Emasculated, lost its nuts, and at such a young age."

The once ubiquitous free glass of water falls victim to business's push to sell the bottled variety.

"Ask CNN" toes Monsanto's corporate line on GMOs, as "Headline News" gets yet another makeover.

A new survey finds that AOL Time Warner is trusted even less than Microsoft!

Can a Federal Reserve plan to honor "Consumers of the Month" convince Americans to spend the country back to economic prosperity?

The Washington Post flatteringly profiles Barbara Comstock, the National Republican Committee's queen of "oppositional research." "Digging Dirt," a BBC documentary on the 2000 presidential election, paints her work in a less positive light.

The Dueling Dons On the Media examines the gold-plated paradox of Don Imus, whose highbrow/lowbrow duality attracts listeners from across the spectrum. Phillip Nobile indicts and Frank Rich defends.

TomPaine.com's "Imus Watch" chronicles the I-Man's slurs.

It's all in a day's work for Rep. Bernie Sanders, as he offers a critique of corporate media and a call for political revolution.

Newspapers go loco over local coverage. Plus, how to stop worrying and learn to love.

College campuses heat up, as porn stars deliver guest lectures and male professors overcome the stigma of teaching adult studies.

The Thing How information went from being the lubricant of ideas to "the thing itself."

The Miami Herald reports on the clash between free speech and sanitized TV, as the Latin Grammys move from Miami to Los Angeles to avoid anti-Castro protestors.

White power music can't count on a televised awards show anytime soon, but the Internet is helping take high-decibel hate worldwide.

Read about "hatecore" label Resistance Records and view photos from Hammerfest 2000, the movement's Woodstock.

Peace of Art Thieves who stole a Chagall painting from a NYC museum in June say they will return it when Israelis and Palestinians are at peace.

Take a tour (with pictures) of Russia's Arctic armpit.

Living Room LIVE! A San Antonio TV station experiments with citizen correspondents.

Mag Flags Journo's Slags Variety's editor-in-chief, Peter Bart, "one of the most despised and feared people in Hollywood," was suspended after a Los Angeles magazine profile charged that he frequently used racist, sexist and anti-gay language and sold a movie script in violation of the paper's policy.

Amy Wallace's profile, a must-read for insight into the workings of Tinseltown, has caused such an uproar that the Los Angeles Times dispatched six reporters to cover the story about the story.

A British novelist lashes out at the "cultural imperialism" and "sheer stupidity" of Hollywood films which reduce world-changing events to "slushy romances."

Noting his futile attempts to retire from New Media criticism, "I keep coming back like some punch-drunk loser," OJR's Ken Layne disses Salon: "On its best days, Salon offers something comparable to the alternative weeklies you pick up at the liquor store, for free, if your hands aren't full."

MSNBC invites readers to play editor and decide if Gary Condit trumps welfare reform.

W After Dark President Bush's speeches lose coherence as the day goes on, leading to a stop in technological Transylvania.

Synergasmic Sluething CNN's revamped "Headline News" is busted for inordinately plugging shows on other AOL Time Warner networks.

The newly-appointed chairman of Time Warner's interactive division spells out his company's plans to get even more money from cable subscribers.

American Family Radio's Rev. Don Wildmon built a Christian radio empire by exploiting a loophole in FCC law that allowed him to take over small-market "translator" stations, many of which were owned by NPR affiliates.

MTV is filming this season's "Real World" in Chicago's Wicker Park, prompting residents to rage against the machine.

Should you be able to call a reporter at home?

Fantastica! A California Superior Court judge is removed from the bench for compulsive lying, but his attorney prefers "pseudologia fantastica."

CBS decided not to broadcast a handful of "Family Law" reruns after Procter & Gamble -- which has a $300 million ad contract with CBS and corporate parent Viacom -- said it would withdraw its commercials because the content was too controversial.

What are the 10 worst-selling books on Amazon.com?

Mickey Kaus announces a plan to expose the New York Times for ripping-off story ideas without crediting the original's author.

Last year, Daniel Forbes exposed the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy plan to reward magazines and TV Producers for publishing anti-drug editorial, and weaving it into their storylines. Now, he uncovers a similar arrangement with classroom newscaster, Channel One.

Manhattan's Milosevic A how-to guide for anyone interested in placing Henry Kissinger under citizen's arrest.

Online Journalism Review's Matt Welch takes on the critics of Chandra Levy coverage.

Read the quarterly earnings report for Bush Inc.

In an interview with the Guardian, Michael Wolffe says that media consolidation is "born out of pure desperation and ego mania. It's about being weak. In one way it's scary but in another, it's pathetic. This whole idea of aggregation is meaningless. It's just artifice in place of an audience."

Browse Wolffe's magazine media columns.

Last year Wal-Mart was sued almost 5,000 times, second only to the U.S. government. Web sites such as Wal-Mart Litigation Project counter the company's hardball stance against plaintiffs, while Wal-Mart Watch and Wal-Mart Sucks counter everything else.

Tobacco companies are engaging in a legal sleight of hand to defend their continued magazine advertising to minors.

An Iowa man is selling everything on e-Bay, and he's documenting it at allmylifeforsale.com.

Patently Ridiculous At the heart of high drug prices is "patent protectionism", or as the drug companies prefer to call it, "intellectual property rights." To support it, Americans are paying at least $4 in higher drug prices for every $1 that drug manufacturers spend on research.

Consumers looking for price relief in Mexico are being subjected to unsafe counterfeit drugs, as a new market emerges that mirrors the international narcotics trade.

Bad Beat Nick Hornby listens to Billboard's ten best-selling albums, one of which was responsible for "the single most dispiriting moment of my professional life so far this millennium."

The top ten signs that a Green Party convention has been hijacked by Republicans.

Read an interview with "Fast Food Nation" author, Eric Schlosser.

The Daily Howler masterfully excoriates The New York Times and Maureen Dowd for their piddling obsession with Al Gore's new beard. And don't miss The Howler's critique of "Hardball" host and "full-time dissembler," Chris Matthews.

Showdown in Waco An unedited anatomy of a protest against the President of the United States.

Dean Baker debunks the myth of free markets, writing that "Conservatives like the government every bit as much as progressives do, they just don't advertise this fact."

Rather Candid Following President Bush's stem cell address, Dan Rather told CBS viewers that the subject is too complex for TV and radio, and recommended that "if you're really interested in this, you'll want to read, in detail, one of the better newspapers tomorrow."

With athletes thanking Christ for just about everything, it was only a matter of time before "Jesus sports statues" hit the market.

How Bill Clinton's memoir might deal with the media and the ladies.

The lure of danger and discomfort as a corrective to the seductive ease of modern life.

Are you someone who drinks water, has indoor plumbing and drives a car? If so, you may want to read this commentary on the state of the nation's infrastructure.

A twenty-five-year-old reporter for the Huntsville Item gives a methodical account of her job covering Texas' executions.

The New York Times profiles fraud-hunters who unmask pretenders to military glory.

The Wall Street Journal editorializes against Senator Clinton's move to ban the interstate shipment of game fowl used for cockfighting: "Someone should tell her to quit sticking her beak in where it isn't wanted."

For more on the subject, read Burkhard Bilger's "Enter the Chicken (On the bayou, cockfighting remains undefeated)" from Harpers, and the story of a Dallas woman's futile attempt to halt a neighborhood cockfight.

Pray and Say Cheese Arianna Huffington writes that a Bush administration photo-op cynically exploited prayer.

Bush adviser Karl Rove fails to mention ties to his own firm in a financial disclosure form.

Stocking the Deck Since going to work at the White House, Rove has met with officials or trade association representatives of at least six companies in which he said he had more than $100,000 worth of stock.

The Weekly Standard profiles Rove "The Impressario," while The Nation's David Corn wonders if he's "Rove-r and Out?"

Trash Talkin' South Dakota's governor says that he's thinking about scrapping his state's Adopt-a-Highway program rather than allow a gay-rights organization to participate in it.

Dead to Rights Even though Invesco Funds Group paid $60 million to put its name on Denver's new football stadium, the Denver Post will continue to call it Mile High Stadium. Read an op-ed by Ralph Nader opposing the naming rights sale. Could this become a national trend?

The Rocky Mountain News toes the corporate (bottom) line.

Lying Eyes The controversial face recognition software used by Tampa police fingers the wrong man.

Writing in Vanity Fair, Gore Vidal defends Timothy McVeigh as a heroic freedom fighter.

As part of a lawsuit, blacks working at Christian Coalition headquarters charge that they were forced to enter through a back door and use a separate lunch room.

Suge Knight walks and he talks. Plus, getting trashed with Wu-Tang Clan.

Are Bill O'Reilly and Chris Matthews becoming caricatures of themselves?

Faith based ponzi schemes are increasing dramatically as an army of con artists for Christ spread the get rich quick gospel.

Attorney Barry Richard, the registered Democrat who supervised President Bush's Florida legal team, tells the ABA convention that the Supreme Court made a mistake by stopping the recount.

Clinton beats Bush in cardboard cutout popularity, while White House rent-a-protestors cater to checkbook activists.

The Financial Times advances the theory that global consumer brands are no longer a sure bet.

CNN's revamped "Headline News" bullies viewers not to change channels, is headache-inducing and "a lame televised text service with generic talking heads who have about as much personality as Max Headroom." All of which may be good news for newspapers.

In his last dispatch from Washington, a British journalist says that the one thing he won't miss is America's love affair with 24/7. USA Today reports on the explosion in round-the-clock businesses.

The White House hands Talk magazine a publicity bonanza over a "jailbird" photo spread of the first twins.

Party Politics Two surveys of voting habits indicate that the gulf between Democrats and Republicans is not about economic class, as much as it is about different cultural conceptions of sexual freedom.

Christopher Hitchens on the charm and eternal absurdity of the California dream.

Boomers are creating a boom in boomer-bashing books.

There's a new arrival on the nuclear weapons scene and it's a bunker-buster, the Bush administration's baby nuke.

The li'l nuke however, is no match for the government's missing H-bomb. The Air Force has gone to great links to conceal its loss of a thermonuclear weapon -- one of 11 nukes lost since 1945 -- that has been MIA off the coast of Savannah, Georgia for the past 40 years.

Death Penalty Food and underwear conglomerate Sara Lee Corporation received a legal slap on the wrist after contaminated meat from its Bil Mar foods division killed 21 people and seriously injured more than 100.

Read the unusual "joint press release" issued by Sara Lee and the U.S. Attorney announcing the plea agreement, a Detroit Free Press article on the settlement and the paper's special report on the killer hot dogs.

"The Beast" is known for its ravenous appetite, and "when it heard the word 'intern,' its hunger synapses glowed." Plus, how to keep a story going when there's nothing left to go on, and a look back at a 1950's media feeding frenzy.

Something from Nothing Mark Crispin Miller discusses how President Bush uses speech not to say anything, but merely to depict himself as saying something, "boldly" and "decisively."

Maureen Dowd on Al Gore's re-election campaign and his chances of evicting the White House's "Scalia squatter." "Poor Al. He is the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, and yet he never will be."

Republican activist Barbara Olson insincerely apologizes for calling Bill Clinton's mother a barfly.

For the first time since 1991 a journalist has been jailed by a U.S. federal court, for failing to surrender notes and tapes involving a murder case. Follow the story at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press Web site, read a Washington Post account and a Lakeland Ledger editorial.

Getting it Right Reacting to the success of the Fox News Channel, new CNN head Walter Isaacson meets with GOP congressional leaders on how to improve his network's image with conservatives.

CNN's "Headline News" gets an MTV-style makeover.

Double-Agent As his own newspaper was reporting on a major investigation by Minnesota's attorney general into Allina Health System, the state's largest health care provider, Minneapolis Star Tribune publisher John Schueler was also advising Allina's CEO on how to deal with the media as part of its "war room" effort to sway public opinion.

The long and short of Bush v. Gore.

Rep. Henry Waxman is persisting in his attempt to get an election night video that purportedly shows GE's Jack Welch lobbying NBC News to call the election for George W. Bush.

A posting at Plastic.com refers to an article on Coca-Cola's Web site lauding an Olive Garden campaign against water consumption, that was designed to increase beverage sales. Coke appears to have already removed the article from its site.

The critical acclaim for "Apocalypse Now Redux" was largely missing when the film was first released in 1979.

Tim Robbins defends his vote for Ralph Nader, and compares Democrats' demonization of Nader to the party's treatment of Upton Sinclair when he ran for governor of California in 1934. Will the Green Party even run a presidential candidate in 2004?

Would you like to have the president in your pocket?

Actions Without Retractions William Saletan finds that most of the publications, pundits and TV news programs that reported a minister's phony claim that his daughter had an affair with Gary Condit have done a poor job of fessing up to the truth.

If you should be wary of PR, shouldn't you be wary of the journalism that feeds on it?

CNN makes its choice, and it's the mercurial Sinatra of politics, the man to Bush's mannequin.

Memo To George: It's time for Operation We Have to Get Black People to Like Us!

The New York Observer profiles a "literary hooker cum-novelist," who says that in her experience, hooking is probably much healthier than writing.

The 24/7 working over of working people.

Butterfly ballot designer Theresa LePore strikes again.

Not 'N Sync A bad economy meets worse pop culture offerings.

Paramount Pictures is playing hardball with magazines that publish reviews before a movie's opening day.

Are you looking for a good t-shirt marketing idea?

GLAAD reports that Fox News Channel was duped by a guest claiming to represent the non-existent "Gay Inclusive Advertising Campaign." Read the story and the transcript.

Joe Conason says Americans were duped by the U.S. military, which recently confirmed the presence of a radar beacon on the missle shot down as part of the much-publicized July 14 test. He criticizes the mainstream media for not following-up on the revelation, failing to note that word of the beacon appeared in a Newshour interview on July 16.

OxyContin sheds its "hillbilly heroin" image as it moves into big cities and suburbs.

Celebrity Statesman Bill Clinton begins a second attempt to launch his ex-presidency, as a poll finds Americans wishing that he was still running the show.

Much to the dismay of technology firms, "upgrade fatigue" has set in among tech-sated consumers.

Discarded Decadence Vultures swoop in to pick clean the carcass of a dead dot-com.

As an advertising slowdown hits the magazine industry, conglomerates are gobbling up independent titles.

Eric Boehlert writes that "Journalism today, particularly the bold brand perfected in Washington over the past decade, has become such an odd, arrogant animal it no longer plays by any recognizable rules."

Is there a rule against pornographers in the newsroom?

The sneaky marketing of Lucinda Williams' new album.

Nevada Woman magazine is selling cover stories for a reported $15,000, but not letting readers in on the deal. The "Women of Wells Fargo" bought their way onto June's cover.

A high-powered New York publicist's reversal of fortune makes for "one of the greatest Schadenfreude festivals in modern memory."

A former Republican consultant offers a searing indictment of the Bush admininistration's unilaterism. Are they monkeying around in the wrong direction?

The Navajo "code talkers," who used words that had never been written down to foil Japanese intelligence during WW II, are finally honored, with Congressional Gold Medals. During the first 48 hours of the battle at Iwo Jima, they relayed more than 800 error-free messages.

Car 54 How Could You? "Telecaust" survivors demand sitcom reparations and the establishment of a special "air-crimes" tribunal.

Now That's Crazy! According to one tabloid reporter, "Hollywood hasn't been this crazy since Liz Taylor and Richard Burton."

Ian Frazier on the rise of spontaneous ignorance.

Nike's Australian billboard campaign mocks its critics by lampooning the idea of slave labor.

Right Back at Ya Nike isn't laughing about an Austrian billboard campaign featuring far-right populist Jörg Haider posing with a child whose shirt is adorned with the swoosh.

In an interview with London's Daily Telegraph, far-right Clinton-harasser Barbara Olson attributes President Bush's reliance on women as high-level advisors to the example set by his mother: "Look at Bill Clinton's mother, as opposed to George W's. Is your mother a barfly who gets used by men? Or is your mother a strong woman who demanded respect for her ideas and always received it?"

It's an Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad World. And a noisy one too.

IBM hits the ground advertising to commercialize public space.

She's Baaaack! In a move that should assure a successful get out the vote drive for Florida's Democrats, Katherine Harris plans to run for Congress in 2002.

Marriage Split The New York Times' editorial page support of same-sex unions doesn't extend to its wedding announcement page.

Bill and George W On the 15th anniversary of President Bush's sobriety, a fellow ex-drinker speculates on how the president's decision to quit drinking informs his politics.

Jimmy on Dubya In an interview with a Columbus, GA newspaper, an ex-president uncharacteristically criticizes a sitting one: "I have been disappointed in almost everything he has done."

Death Next Door With two high-profile executions behind it and 18 more coming down the pike, Terre Haute "promises to be a different place twenty men from now."

Todd Gitlin on why TV's "barking heads" are drooling.

Can truth outlast a green light for media mergers? Robert Scheer writes that "what's good for the bottom line, and the journalists' bank accounts, may not be good for society."

Healthy Battle Jack in the Box takes on big tobacco and gets the last laugh!

Dying To Be Thin A pro-anorexia movement has sprung up on the Web, preaching the gospel of thinness and providing a controversial support network for starving girls. Eating disorder professionals react.

Rupert's Psychic Friends Network In an effort to fill the many hours that it devotes to Chandra Levy coverage each day, Fox News Channel has added psychics to the mix, regularly interviewing them about Levy's disappearance.

Move over Roger Clinton, it's Darrell Wayne Condit's time to shine.

Left Central Add Alternet to the list of Web sites that is successfully challenging the media infotainment machine -- with a little help from George W. Bush. Since his election, traffic is up 500%.

Writer Eudora Welty, who died Monday at the age of 92, also left an Internet legacy. The designer of the e-mail program Eudora, said that he named it after her because he had been processing so much e-mail that he felt like the Welty character in "Why I Live at the P.O."

A libel case brought by Mexico's national bank claims that two journalists defamed one of its directors by fingering him as a cocaine trafficker. Free speech advocates are worried that because the case is being heard in New York, it could set a precedent allowing powerful corporations and individuals to harass Internet journalists with libel suits anywhere in the world.

British libel law and a gold mining company with close ties to George H. W. Bush conspire to muzzle muckraking journalist Greg Palast. Read Palast's investigative gem, "Bush family finances: Best Democracy money can buy."

Promising the World No longer competitive in a global marketplace, the lowly brand gives way to the MEGABRAND.

Muscovites find that drinking and dunking don't mix.

NPR's "On the Media" examines why the U.S. press is going soft on Henry Kissinger.

True Believer President Bush interrupts a sight-seeing tour of Rome to inform reporters: "I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe -- I believe what I believe is right."

Frank Rich on how America, summer of '01, was fated to become Condit Country, and Maureen Dowd on misanthropic Seinfeld creator Larry David, and his HBO show "Curb Your Enthusiasm," in which David plays himself, an out-of-work Seinfeld creator

Partly Cloudy A dispute over information erased from computers used in Katherine Harris' office during the Florida recount is testing the state's "Sunshine Laws."

Memo to the President: "We got ballot trouble in Florida boss."

The Wall Street Journal reports that the dinosaurs from "Jurassic Park III" are kicking down the wall separating editorial and advertising, as newspapers superimpose the silhouette of a flying pteranodon from the film over pages of stock quotes and weather reports.

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ernest Hollings strikes fear into the hearts of conglomerators, by calling for an 18-month moratorium on the FCC's efforts to relax restrictions on media ownership.

A reporter soaks up the media feeding frenzy outside of Gary Condit's Wahington D.C. condo.

The 2001 Webby Award winners are announced.

Salon reports on the amazing disappearing book review section: "Enthralled by marketing surveys, the newspaper industry's managerial caste has decreed that readers want more space devoted to the Backstreet Boys than to books."

A "pool report" filed by the Washington Post's Dana Milbank "has raised eyebrows among Bushies," according to the National Review. "They think it drips with contempt for Bush, and shows the 'real Milbank,' an intelligent reporter but one singularly unimpressed with W."

Paper View The next phase in the evolution of online content is the digital delivery of newspapers. The New York Times, working with NewsStand Inc., plans to launch a paid edition later this year. If successful, it could mark the beginning of the end for full content on free Web sites.

Read about the industrial-type efficiency with which Venezuela turns out its most prized export -- beauty queens.

E.J. Dionne on dirty pool in Florida.

Take diarist Abraham Sutherland's taxicab tour of L.A.

Spend a night on the town with a team of bar shills from undercover marketer Big Fat Inc., as they try to build buzz, one drink at a time.

Ballot Pox A new study finds that four to six percent of the 100 million votes cast in the 2000 election were not counted, a figure that is at least twice as high as an earlier estimate.

Search and Deceive Ralph Nader's Commercial Alert has filed a complaint with the FTC, asking it to investigate whether eight of the Web's largest search engines are violating federal laws against deceptive advertising by concealing the impact that special fees have on search results.

With the release of "Tina and Harry Come to America," a biography that roughs up "the media world's Über-power couple," Michael Wolff analyzes the Tina Brown backlash and the trap that she finds herself in: "We are enamored by her because she was such a success; we are repelled by her because of what it took to be a success."

Supplying Demand In an ingenuous attempt to expand market share, the manufacturer of the antidepressant Paxil spent millions to publicize a little known malady called "social anxiety disorder." The PR campaign created the impression that this debilitating form of bashfulness was extremely widespread, but easily treatable--with Paxil!

The launch of Celexa, an antidepressant similar to Paxil, offers a fascinating look at the hard sell that pharmaceutical companies put on physicians.

An eye-opening new report by Families USA finds that pharmaceutical industry spending on research and development of new drugs -- the justification for high and increasing prices -- pales in comparison to marketing expenditures and CEO salaries.

Just Say Blow In April, the Bush administration announced that it will deny financial aid to students who fail to answer a question asking if they have ever been convicted of possessing or selling drugs. Now, Students for a Drug-Free White House is asking President Bush to forego his salary until he comes clean with his own drug past.

Different Story, Same Players Talking heads and attorneys who fueled the content machine during the Monica Lewinsky scandal have found new work stage-managing the Chandra Levy spectacle. Says one: "Once you've gained expertise in a subject like this, you can be sure your services will be used over and over in Washington."

"Official spokesperson" may be one of the world's fastest growing postmodern vocations. Even spokespeople have them!

Inserting virtual ads into televised sporting events is becoming commonplace. This year's Indy 500 included "giant virtual billboards," while ESPN Classics drops new ads into old games. Facilitating the deception is an outfit called Princeton Video Image, "The worldwide leader in virtual advertising and imaging solutions."

During the Florida recount, Bush operatives gained a major PR victory when Democrats challenged overseas absentee ballots. Now, a New York Times investigation finds that Republicans operated under the media radar with a more effective, two-pronged strategy -- pressuring Florida officials to discard "illegal" civilian votes that they assumed would be for Gore, while defending equally defective military ballots. The Times found 680 questionable votes, 80% of which were in counties carried by Bush.

Eric Alterman writes that "the Times has done a journalistic service in forcing us, once again, to face up to an ugly, but increasingly incontrovertible fact: The 2000 election was stolen; not from the hapless Gore and Lieberman ticket, but from the democratic process itself. We are all the poorer for it."

The Los Angeles Times piles on, reporting that Florida Republicans may have broken the law by superimposing Governor Jeb Bush over the state seal in an absentee voting pitch. The Times also examines Bush's phone records and concludes that despite his recusal, "it appears that Jeb Bush was more involved in the recount than he has publicly acknowledged."

More evidence that "the opinion that's on TV starts from the center and leans to the right."

Trading cards have taken a turn to the right, but with a psychedelic twist.

The sweet life of soft money.

You've Got Britney! "AOL seems to consider itself a sober news organization," writes Brendan Koerner in The Washington Monthly, but its celebrity-oriented drivel and trifling service pieces make it seem like "little more than an online amalgam of Entertainment Weekly and The Montel Williams Show."

What's a spinmeister to do when the "crisis consultants" become the crisis?

Read an interview with self-proclaimed "full time son of a bitch" Joe Queenan, and find out why the downfall of the baby boomers -- the subject of his latest book -- can be traced to April 21, 1971, the date Carole King's "Tapestry" album was released.

e's Not a Book! Authors are handed a victory by a federal judge who rules that a contract to publish "in book form" doesn't automatically include electronic books.

The Bush administration now admits that Karl Rove met with a Salvation Army lobbyist. The SA Web site fails to mention the growing controversy, but does feature some surprisingly scantily-clad models.

The Salvation Army weaves an anti-gay Web.

NASCAR and Fox's "America's Most Wanted" teamed up for a cross-promotion featuring a Chandra Levy bumpersticker, after the TV show approached a racing team "to get publicity for the show and the search for Levy." The AMW segment on Levy, which coincidentally ran the night of the race, was promoted on Fox's Web site, next to a blurb for upcoming NASCAR coverage.

The Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly -- who criticized CBS for the restraint it has shown in the Levy story -- claims to be a journalist in an interview with media critic Mark Crispin Miller.

Cronies or Criminals? Read the transcript of a joint appearance by Alan Dershowitz and Vincent Bugliosi on Good Morning America, in which they aggresively argue that partisan politics outweighed legal principles in the Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore decision.

In "The Perils of Covering Porn," Online Journalism Review reports on industry myths perpetuated by mainstream journalists.

Salon teases LAPD crackdown on "extreme" porn purveyor Seymore Butts. Don't miss this inspired animated attack on Butts that takes issue with his defense strategy.

Lord of the Fliers Walter Kirn's new novel chronicles one man's quest to accumulate a million frequent flier miles.

The House has moved to block DOE plans to shorten turnaround time for resuming nuclear tests in Nevada from three years to 18 months. The Guardian reports that it's part of a broad strategy by the Bush administration to free the U.S. from the constraints of a nuclear test moratorium and the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty

Nevada recently commemorated the golden anniversary of becoming ground zero. In the 1950s it was kitschy fun, as Vegas' casinos threw "atomic cocktail" parties and crowned "Miss Atomic Bomb." Now, Downwinders and the Shundahai Network are already mobilizing against a possible return of testing to the state.

A resumption of testing could coincide with development of the "mini-nuke," a Sadaam-inspired low-yield nuclear bomb designed to knock out hardened or deeply buried targets such as leadership bunkers and command centers. The Senate approved a study of the "bunker buster" a year ago, with a report due this month.

The National Federation of Scientists calls the low-yield bombs -- which would be the first nukes developed in the U.S. since the 80s -- a technological impossibility and explains why.

The Ego Has Landed The New York Times profiles "me-zine" electronic publishers and finds that low overhead may be the surest route to (marginal) Internet profit, but only if one places no value on their time.

A defender of chain bookstores argues that bigger is better.

A CBS News producer on all-Chandra all-the-time: "It looks to me like this feeding frenzy of people who are excited that maybe he was involved in her murder. It feels like people are hoping, dreaming that it'll be a sensational story that will see them through the summer."

At the half-way point in the season, it's time for this year's media all-stars to take the (mostly center and right) field.

McBeef A high school student is disciplined for telling McDonald's representatives what he thinks of the company and its products during a job interviewing seminar.

Rushing the Web Has the Internet become talk radio for liberals?

Todd Gitlin reviews the reviewers, and reports that "the media elite are reviewing Henry Kissinger's latest tome with their usual fawning gullibility. Best not to mention those bony hands reaching out from the grave."

All Consuming Cheap cocaine has taken hold among Brazil's vast underclass, sparking a violent, slum-centered turf war among "cocaine commandos" trying to grow market share.

Although President Bush campaigned on unshakeable principles, criticizing his predecessor for being poll-driven, Frank Rich and Daniel Schorr write of the agility with which he has flip-flopped on major issues, regardless of how ardently they were originally espoused.

Concerning issues on which he is less malleable, Bush has recently threatened to go "back to Crawford," -- return to his Texas ranch after one-term -- unless he gets his way.

Someone's running the White House, but there's disagreement as to who that is.

Class Act Filmmaker Barbara Kopple, who has been dubbed "a poet of the proletariat" for her portrayal of workers in Harlan County, USA and American Dream, is now looking at how the other half lives, in The Hamptons Project.

Hampton's scenester mows down 16 with Mercedes SUV!

A company hired by the U.S. government to fly missions against coca and poppy growers and processors in Colombia may be involved in heroin smuggling.

Bunker Bunk In February, VP Cheney said: "The days of the 'war room' and the permanent campaign are over." Now, USA Today reports that observers from both parties say "the West Wing of the Bush White House is home to what may be the most sophisticated, hands-on political operation ever run out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave."

Read how Canadians get the last laugh when talking to Americans.

MSNBC.com's editor-in-chief discusses the business of Web news and what Salon must do to survive.

Writing in The American Prospect, Chris Mooney chronicles the coordinated effort to demonize Tom "Puff" Daschle since he became Majority Leader.

Cigarette advertising in alternative weeklies goes up in smoke.

Richard Cohen writes that an interview President Bush gave to Peggy Noonan reads as if Bush is "parodying a president returning from an overseas trip."

Don't expect to see Carlos Fuentes at the White House anytime soon.

The self-appointed "dean" of the Adult Webmaster School talks job security.

One more reason why too much O.J. is never enough.

American teens declare independence from historical facts.

A Nation of Man President Bush on what Independence Day means to him: "It means what these words say, for starters. The great inalienable rights of our country. We're blessed with such values in America. And I -- it's -- I'm a proud man to be the nation based upon such wonderful values."

The Newest News An AP story on Dick Cheney's first day back at work after receiving a pacemaker may have been pre-written and inadvertently posted at 1:26 am Monday, hours before Cheney made it into the office and before any of the morning's activities described in the piece took place.

Arianna doesn't believe Dick, and she may have good reason not to.

The Fox News Channel wants to have it both ways -- presenting itself to viewers as "fair and balanced," while trumpeting its appeal as a right-wing alternative to CNN. In a new study on Fox's editorial balance, FAIR reports, you decide. Of course, it's nothing we didn't already know.

Watching the watchers in Tampa.

Canada's National Post reports on how magazines, "those conduits of the entertainment industry," manufacture celebrity, American-style: "Waving their magic wand and making little Zsa Zsas out of wet behind the ears actors and actresses who have yet to see the release of their first decent film."

Molly Ivins on the hardball battle between Boise Cascade and the Rainforest Action Network.

Fidel Castro's recent fainting spell had the Miami Police Department on high alert.

The Bush administration looks for ways to spin its man to the center.

As Mexico's economy heads south, more illegal immigrants could be heading north.

Returning Crisis Publishers are seeing a double-digit increase in bookstore returns, getting one book back for every two shipped!

In the last month, judges in Argentina, France and Chile have attempted to get Henry Kissinger's testimony concerning South American death squad activity in the 1970s. A summons served on Kissinger at Paris' Ritz Hotel in late-May "set a new precedent in pursuing human rights abuses around the world," according to the Financial Times, and was front page news in Le Monde.

Christopher Hitchens questions the virtual blackout on this important story in the U.S. media: "They usually find the views of "Henry" to be worthy of respectful attention. I admit my own interest, but I still feel able to ask: By whose definition is Kissinger's moment at the Ritz not news?"

Marc Cooper, who was Salvador Allende's translator in the early 1970s, writes that the legal action initiated against Kissinger, along with recent developments in the Pinochet case, represent "a magical moment for human rights activists worldwide."

Sweet Deal Three months ago, Coca-Cola promised that it would stop hard-selling soft drinks to schools. Since then the company has made little progress, as both bottlers and schools are reluctant to give up the revenue.

To satisfy bottom-line demands, Viacom is pressuring CBS stations to deliver 50% profit margins. For Minnesota's WCCO-TV, that's five times what it was 12 years ago under independent ownership!

The station has been reduced to seeking government assistance for a new St. Paul bureau, promising that it "will cover, promote and serve the community better than any other Minnesota broadcaster." Promote?

Media insiders say CBS is wildly spinning ad sales figures.

A Gannett-owned newspaper in West Virginia forced a reporter to resign after he visited porn sites to research "mouse-trapping." He says the real reason he was asked to quit is his environmental stance: "I don't hesitate to call myself a tree-hugger.' And I am ruthless on the subject of coal companies.''

Is Anyone Listening? The Telecommunications Act of 1996, which unleashed unprecedented deregulation and media consolidation, was especially kind to a few companies that now control the radio airwaves. Eric Boehlert reports on how the television industry is positioning itself for a similar windfall.

Getting serious about what celebrities need from their real estate professional.

Extreme Opposition The Frontier Freedom Foundation, a front group for the tobacco, oil and timber industries, is lobbying the IRS to revoke the non-profit status of the Rainforest Action Network, while Boise Cascade takes on funders of the "environmental extremist group."

A Washington D.C. firm with close ties to the Bush administration is coming under fire in Montana for generating fake grassroots opinion in order to provide cover for supporters of energy deregulation.

Critics agree on this summer's must-read article!

Still Sorry Former American Spectator writer David Brock, who traded one career as a right-wing sleazemonger for another built on renouncing his vitriolic past, says he's sorry -- again. In an excerpt from his new book, "Blinded by the Right," Brock writes that he lied to protect Justice Clarence Thomas' reputation.

That lie was told in Brock's review of "Strange Justice," an account of the the Anita Hill/Thomas clash. At the time, FAIR questioned Brock's tactics in a critique of his review.

Check out the American Spectator's educational work.

Bad Behavior An 82-year-old Eugene attorney and former Congressman has launched a campaign to impeach the five Supreme Court justices who voted to stop the Florida recount.

For more on Eugene, read "Notes From Underground," a profile of the city's younger hellraisers.

ABC has agreed to remove footage involving kids who were interviewed for an upcoming environmental special, "Tampering With Nature," after parents complained that producers hid the identity of controversial host John Stossel, and that Stossel's questions "mislead the children to evoke the responses he wanted."

TV critic says, "Stossel oughta pick on kids his own size."

Stossel strikes back at "totalitarian left" critics.

Next Question Please After Henry Kissinger struck a deal with the National Press Club to ignore audience questions about war crimes accusations made against him, two journalists ask: "How can it be ethical to agree secretly with an author before hand not to ask a certain set of questions?"

Kissinger had successfully avoided engaging his accuser, Christopher Hitchens, until he made the mistake of referring to Hitchens as a "holocaust denier."

Hillbilly Heroin The Guardian's Julian Borger files from Justice, West Virginia, and reports on the holy hell that OxyContin abuse is visiting on rural communities.

The manufacturer responds to a lawswuit that WV has just filed, charging "coercive and deceptive" marketing to doctors. More Oxy? Read the Cincinnati Enquirer's "Oxycontin Pipeline."

How severe is our addiction to speed? MPR's Marketplace reports on the accelerating pace of everyday life.

The U.S. Supreme Court hands freelancers a victory, the Writers Union celebrates and big media says it will start deleting freelance articles from its databases.

Dying to Sell Frank Rich writes that the much-predicted "closure" from Timothy McVeigh's execution never materialized, leaving McVeigh and "his commercial sponsors who benefited from the pumped-up ratings of his final show" as the big winners.

Rich notes that Wal-Mart, which banned the sale of a journalistic book about McVeigh, anxiously hawked household goods to those watching the execution coverage.

Barbara Ehrenreich writes that "while it might be comforting to dismiss McVeigh as a maniacal, one-of-a-kind deviant, he was in fact, just a particularly apt student of the very government he hated."

Are the all-news cable channels a good case for modification or repeal of the First Amendment?

All Abhored Amtrak has a deal with the Drug Enforcement Administration, whereby the DEA uses information provided by the railroad to determine which passengers fit a "drug courier profile." In return, Amtrak gets a bounty of 10 percent of any "drug asset" seizures made on its trains.

Railroaders react to the railroading, while Amtrak tells riders it "respects your privacy."

Set-Top Surveillance The next big thing in demographic slicing and dicing could be "addressable advertising." Cable and satellite giants are installing technology that tracks viewers' habits, allowing them to send different ads to different households.

Time Warner is being sued for creating and selling profiles about its subscribers, including whether they buy premium channels such as HBO and Playboy.

To protest the "Disneyfying and dumbing down" of the Smithsonian Institution under Secretary Lawrence Small, disgruntled staffers have leaked a list of "Unit Naming Opportunities," an inventory of all the nooks and crannies that the museum could sell off to sponsors.

Gored Again With "absolutely no support within the Democratic Party" for another Al Gore presidential run, David Corn observes that if Gore decides to go for it, "The party would be disavowing the guy it claimed actually won the race. Talk about not standing by your man."

A New York Times profile of Fox News Channel includes Bill O'Reilly's unique assessment of why Gore lost: "If Al Gore had appeared on 'The Factor,' he'd be president of the United States."

A Freeper convention flops when advertised appearances by Judge Sanders Sauls and Katherine Harris fall through. Wanna get Freeped out? Read "God Sees the Freepers": Part 1 and Part 2.

Polling Place Candidate George W. Bush promised that his presidency wouldn't be a hostage to the polls, but the current administration is turning out to be just as poll-driven as its predecessor.

Marie Coco writes that you can bank on the ethics of the Bush administration, while Joshua Micah Marshall suggests that it's makeover time for the word "scandal."

India Calling Indiana When people are waking up in the U.S., it's 9 p.m in Bangalore, where an army of Indian telemarketers, with adopted American names, begins dialing for dollars. It's the latest offshore trend, helping U.S. firms drive down labor costs and reduce turnover. Whither Omaha?

A Good Run It appears that for the first time in 26 years, fuel economy standards for SUVs, minivans and other light trucks will be tightened. A legacy of the auto industry's quarter century of lobbying succces, is that the gas guzzlers now account for nearly half of all passenger vehicles sold in the U.S.

Is the Bush administration feeling the heat?

As newspapers cut back book review sections in response to higher newsprint costs and less advertising, what's going to happen to the out-of-work book reviewers?

The Wall Street Journal makes a big mistake. (last item)

In arguing against further gutting of media ownership restrictions, senators Hollings and Dorgan point out that "Prior to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the top radio station group owned 39 stations. Today the top group owns more than 1,100 stations."

Chuck Palahniuk insists that his novels about sexual deviants, con artists, lost revolutionaries drug addicts, anti-consumerists and cynics are really romantic comedies, "but they're just romantic comedies that are done with very dysfunctional, dark characters."

Does U.S. Rep. Bob Barr eat with that mouth?

Christopher Hitchens makes Page Six, threatening to sue Henry Kissinger for calling him a holocaust denier. Hitchen's two-parter in Harper's, calling Kissinger a war criminal, can be read here, and here. Or read about it in this forum moderated by Lewis Lapham.

Although Harper's is notoriously stingy about putting its content online, you can find hundreds of the magazine's articles right here, including a must-read history of George W. Bush's business career.

Slate's Timothy Noah explains why there was no price to pay when Karl Rove became the first Bush administration official caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

Joe Conason imagines "the thermonuclear blast of outrage that would have consumed George Stephanopoulos or John Podesta if they had ever done what Karl Rove admittedly did."

In a rare interview, Norman Mailer talks about his colorful career as a literary enfant terrible, the parallels between boxing and writing, common ground between Jesus and Marx, and why politics has gotten so ugly.

A former CBS and ABC news correspondent debunks the myth of liberal bias at PBS, by revealing the network's hidden ties to conservative foundations that fund ideologically-driven programming. Could this be behind PBS' declining subscription rates?

Parody Capital E.J. Dionne writes that Washington D.C. is the city that makes fun of itself.

FAIR wants to know why the mainstream media failed to take notice when Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill advocated eliminating the corporate income tax and questioned the need for Social Security and Medicare in an interview with the Financial Times, which described his comments as "political dynamite."

The DNC's "Stock Tracker" has been keeping tabs on the increasing value of O'Neill's 2.3 million shares of Alcoa, which he finally unloaded almost three months after reluctantly agreeing to sell.

Big Meth Lab CO2 may be the most well-known villian of global warming, but methane gas is lurking beneath the surface. "The Day the Oceans Boiled," a new documentary, details how massive releases of methane emissions, triggered by man-made global warming, could propel earth's ecological systems towards catastrophe.

Shifting the global warming debate from !!! to ???

Good Money After Bad Salon's David Talbot has floated the idea of moving to a subscriber-only model, but a critic dismisses the sites current pay offerings: "'Bushed!', no ads and dirty pictures, I don't know if that's enough."

Larry King and Don Imus get what they deserve -- each other! Tompaine.com indexes the I-Man's racial slurs.

Read an excerpt from Alan Dershowitz's "Supreme Injustice," and a call to "Freep Dershowitz's book on Amazon."

If you're still in a sunshine state of mind, read Vincent Bugliosi's "None Dare Call it Treason," which was recently published in paperback as "The Betrayal of America."

Read a Q & A with Bugliosi, who, in spite of his book's bestseller status, says that "For the first time in my literary career I've not appeared on any of the morning talk shows. Their response to my publicist was that the election is over with, and we're not covering the matter any further."

Resume Builder The Boston Globe reports that eight lawyers who worked on Clinton scandals or the Florida recount have already been picked for high-level jobs in the Bush administration.

A Not So Nutty Idea A neurologist says it's time to find out if Tony Blair is bonkers, Jacques Chirac is cuckoo or George Bush is batty: "Pilots of airliners are in charge of a few hundred passengers, and we monitor their mental health in the most detailed way. By contrast, politicians control the lives of millions, but we let them run around without any form of psychological profiling."

Chris Matthews' and Bill O'Reilly's culturally-based working-class shtick is becoming the "reigning ideological stance on the political talk-show circuit."

Dirty Business? The Consortium's Robert Parry wants to know the story behind a "peculiar" entry on Bush's pre-presidential travel resume -- a "business" trip to Guatemala.

Following its fake movie critic scandal, Sony admits to using employees as bogus fans in testimonial commercials.

The Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, whose goal is a memorial in each of the country's 3,067 counties, is meeting opposition from liberals and even some conservatives.

Softer, Yet Harder Editors at news weeklies try to have it both ways.

A network news veteran says that the network newscasts seem almost ashamed to be in the hard news business, while local newscasts run a race to the bottom.

A circulation guru calls the magazine distribution business "something out of the Middle Ages." Nearly two out of every three magazines sent to newsstands are recycled after being returned unsold.

William Saletan employs Charles Darwin to explain what doomed Al Gore: "Just as Clinton had no record of avoiding jams, Gore had no record of escaping them. Gore died a Darwinian death: He was put in a jam by Clinton and couldn't get out."

A Taxing Question Is Bill Clinton an entertainer or a statesman?

A profile of New York Times Magazine editor Adam Moss asks: "In a town lousy with celebrity editors, why isn't this man famous?" It's because Moss is less interested in boosting himself than his product, which "ignores the flashy trends infecting the U.S. magazine industry and focuses on the main reason people pick up a magazine: the content."

The Angry White Male Tour, featuring Answer Me's Jim Goad, promised to raise provocative questions about racial and gender taboos in America, and then, something happened. Read a review of Goad's "The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America's Scapegoats."

A service designed to help journalists anonymously find sources, inadvertently left databases of requests available publicly, making them easily accessible through Google.

In excoriating CNN for its wall-to-wall coverage of the McVeigh execution, Michael Ryan writes that "there isn't enough news in this country to fill twenty-four hours a day, every day; there is only metanews -- the carnival folderol and pseudo thought that cable channels use to eat up their time."

Enough Already Last year President Clinton designated June "Gay and Lesbian Pride Month." This year conservative groups are applauding President Bush's decision to "quietly" discontinue it.

Abduction Lingo Kidnapping is so widespread in Mexico that it has a vocabulary all its own.

Clean-Up Time Almost one year after a listener complaint was filed, the FCC has fined a Colorado Springs radio station $7,000 for airing the "clean" version of Eminem's "The Real Slim Shady."

Writing in The New Yorker, Ian Frazier traces the history of the sound bite.

It's hard times for hard copy, as a landmark newsstand specializing in out-of-town newspapers tries to weather a 50% drop in sales.

The Sweaties Wal-Mart, Disney and Nike are among the nominees for the "Sweatshop Retailer of the Year" award.

Flow-Up Economics Columnist Geneva Overholser writes that tackling issues concerning poverty or the widening gap between rich and poor guarantees her "a spate of messages setting forth the great American illusion that wealth flows to the worthy."

A study by the Citizens for Tax Justice finds that under the new tax law, 26% of U.S. adults will receive no rebate this year and an additional 13% will get less than the oft-cited amounts of $300 and $600.

You've Got Jail! Imagining a U.S. presidential debate among media moguls.

Charlotte voters rejected a $342 million package that included financing for a new sports arena, in spite of a corporate full-court press that included local media. TV reporters at one station claim that management instructed them to put "a positive spin" on stories involving the referendum.

Why subsidies for sports stadiums is the great American scam.

After using its news division to pimp Survivor, CBS is now crying foul, accusing NBC of overplaying coverage of a lawsuit filed by a Survivor contestant against the show's producer.

Bill McKibben reports on an anti-SUV rally in Boston that was joined by local religious leaders, one bearing a sign that read "What Would Jesus Drive?" Ford and GM warned area dealerships in advance, allowing them to move SUVs to the back lot and put smaller models in front.

Jeremy Rifkin, author of "The Age of Access," writes in The Guardian that global media giants are quietly lobbying the Bush administration for "the most sinister privatization" of all: turning our airwaves into "private electronic real estate."

Automatic Media has shuttered two of the Web's premier content sites, Feed and Suck, laying off all 21 employees. Plastic.com, the company's recently launched "para-site," will continue to operate thanks to the unpaid efforts (sounds familiar!) of its two editors.

Frank Rich writes that the real story of the White House thus far is the arrogance of the former CEOs who run it: "The administration proceeds on the belief that no one would possibly question its wisdom and that anything can be sold with the proper marketing strategy and enough repetition of an unvarying script."

A media critic wonders why TV reporters are so tight-lipped when it's their turn to be quoted: "Hearing a journalist offer a blanket 'no comment' is kind of like finding a guy from Hertz at your door demanding to borrow your Toyota for the week without paying for the privilege."

In The Bush Dyslexicon, Mark Crispin Miller faults the mainstream press for having "forgotten the differences between what's on TV and (what we might call) reality. Instead of interrogating the photo op, asking how it's fiddling with the truth, journalists actively collaborate with those who set the picture up, so as to help the audience discern the proper 'theme.'"

Read an interview with Miller, the introduction and an excerpt from The Bush Dyslexicon, and a collaborative interview with George W. Bush that Miller cites in his book.

Revenge-minded Bush supporters have launched a campaign to villify the bar manager at Chuy's restaurant, calling for her to be "publicly humiliated, fired from her job, impoverished, and exposed to risky and dangerous situations."

Political humorist Al Franken is interviewed, acerbic cultural critic James Wolcott is profiled and entertainer turned motivational speaker Jerry Lewis is observed.

Rheinstone Cowboys Jefferson Chase writes in Feed that "wherever there are heartaches to be sung and whiskey to be spilled on the floor, you can make country music," and that today's most interesting "Kantrie" is being made far from Nashville.

The Philadelphia Inquirer profiles Hardball's Chris Matthews and his "sound bark" style of political entertainment, speculating that the loud one may have his eye on Arlen Specter's Senate seat, which is up in 2004.

Is France really the nuclear nirvana that U.S. media make it out to be?

The working poor in Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, Nickel and Dimed, stand to pocket less than $100 annually from the Bush tax cut plan, while the country's upper 1% will be banking $690 billion over ten years. Arianna Huffington looks at their unique brand of pain and suffering.

Read a transcript of Ehrenreich's recent appearance on Politically Incorrect. (June 4)

BuzzFlash is questioning Bush spokesflack Ari Fleischer's claim that taxpayers footed the bill for 100 damaged White House computer keyboards. It reports that OfficeMax donated 100 keyboards and 500 "W" keys in January as a publicity stunt.

Corporate Web A new study says that AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Napster account for more than half of all the time spent online by U.S. users, and that 14 companies control 60 percent of online time, down from 110 two years ago.

Ken Auletta reports on the failed promise of Inside.com and how it managed to fall 95,000 paid subscribers short of its projected goal of 100,000.

John McCain is interviewed by his campaign trail buddy, Jake Tapper.

Irony Scare Novelist Benjamin Anastas looks at the escalating culture war between earnestness and irony, and wonders how a literary device become a public enemy.

Parody is also on the ropes in Texas, where two public officials who didn't get the joke are suing an alternative weekly. Read the Dallas Observer article that landed the pranksters in court.

Molly Ivins on the fine line between between Texas tough and Texas stupid.

A leaked copy of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission's report on Florida's conduct in the presidential election charges "injustice, ineptitude and inefficiency," and urges an investigation into whether federal or state civil rights laws were violated.

In a letter to the Commission, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush writes that the report is "riddled with baseless allegations, faulty reasoning and unsupported conclusions."

The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times have recently revisited Florida, finding that Bush benefited from a host of irregularities, many traceable to his brother's administration or to post-election Republican maneuvering.

The Consortium's Robert Parry connects the dots between the Times and Post stories.

When Rising Nepal, the state-owned national daily reported on King Dipendra's ascension to the throne, it left out some vital information about the circumstances that led to his crowning.

The last word on obituaries from the people who write them.

Hairdex Can CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo's hair status predict the markets?

After the GAO dismissed stories of vandalism by departing Clinton staffers, 38 of them are demanding an apology from President Bush for his administration's role in the leaks.

To counter the bad publicity it received after the GAO statement, the Bush administration has just released its own list of purported damage.

White House releases photos of messy offices.

Sony admits to concocting "David Manning" of the "Ridgefield Press," a fake movie reviewer whose raves were plastered over ads for at least four of the studio's films.

Read an interview with the nonexistent film critic and a "blurbitorial" on the controversy.

Robert Kuttner sees an opening for Democrats to reverse much of Bush's tax plan, as the major cuts don't kick in until 2005. He reminds readers of at least "nine major tax increases enacted between 1982 and 1992, when the presidents were named Reagan and Bush."

A writer for the UK's Independent says that publicity surrounding the boozin' Bush kids is the consequence of using children as political ornaments, a practice that she likens to "a failing soap opera that brings in a young cast of new characters to zap up the storyline."

The tough "three strikes and you're out" law that President Bush signed in Texas, could land his daughter in prison for six months.

Closing Deals & Ruining Meals Why restaurant patrons begrudge a real estate broker his cell phone calls.

The New York Review of Magazines Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism takes full advantage of its proximity to publishing's seat of power, launching this must-read for magazine junkies.

Gun Mall Arianna Huffington takes aim at "NRA Sports Blasts," a chain of retail, dining and entertainment complexes: "The NRA is desperately trying to remake itself -- to take the focus off party-pooping school shootings and workplace massacres and put it on making packing heat family-friendly."

Because banner ads are too subtle, devices like the ubiquitous "pop-under" ads for X 10 wireless video cameras represent the scary shape of things to come. Says one industry analyst: "In the current online ad environment, the media companies will do whatever advertisers want them to do.¹¹

Payola's Smoking Gun The Los Angeles Times has obtained detailed logs kept by the nefarious group of radio middlemen called "independent promoters." The logs document the date that a station airs a song and the amount paid by the artist's record label.

Independents also make the world of identity theft go 'round, as criminal groups utilize online data brokers who collect and sell personal information.

Ray Suarez moderates a discussion by four authors on the Mideast cycle of violence and how it might be broken.

America's 13 Scariest White Guys. Read 'em and weep!

No Free Ride In a provocative look at the energy debate, Gregg Easterbrook writes that "Bush is correct to tell the left it needs to face the music on energy production, but he can't credibly do that while allowing the right to wear earplugs on conservation. Vehicle mpg has been neglected most, and the Bush plan continues this approach."

If a $600 tax rebate isn't enough to turn a man's life around, what is?

Video Vigilantes The controversial antiabortion Web site the Nuremberg Files, has launched a new project: a plan to video the entrances of abortion clinics and broadcast footage of providers and patients over the Web.

The Buck Starts Here Pacific Gas & Electric, which doled out $50 million in bonuses and raises right before its April 6 bankruptcy filing, is asking a federal bankruptcy court to allow it to give $17.5 million in bonuses to its top management team.

Paul Krugman continues his assault on the "absurd piece of legislation" otherwise known as the Bush tax plan: "In short, the tax bill is a joke. But if the administration has its way, the joke is on us."

The Chicago Tribune profiles Cisco Systems co-founder Bob Burnett, who in addition to being very wealthy, is the new publisher of the small leftist journal, In These Times. Burnett hints at his "secret plan" to attract new readers by updating the antiquated vision of the left. "There's nothing wrong with updating that vision," he says "but no one has done it yet."

Fox News Channel CEO Roger Ailes gets nasty with critics who responded to calls by Media Whores Online and FAIR to write letters to Fox, protesting its shoddy coverage of the White House "vandal scandal."

Follow AOL's march around the globe, as the online colonizer spends billions attempting to brand the world in its own image.

Capitol Crimes Paul Krugman writes that "the pretense that taxes can be sharply cut without undermining the fiscal integrity of the nation has been maintained via financial fakery that, if practiced by the executives of any publicly traded company, would have landed them in jail."

Approvingly Distrustful A new CNN/Time poll finds that while 52% of Americans approve of the job George. W. Bush is doing, 53% do not think he "is a leader you can trust."

The journalistic culture at Time Inc.'s magazines is under seige by AOL's bean counters.

Get Bill Maher's latest punchlines without the commercials, in this transcript of an interview with the irony-challenged Larry King.

Virtual Patriotism More Americans are aware of "Pearl Harbor" the movie than Pearl Harbor the historical event. Frank Rich writes that "the infamy of 1941 is no match for the fame conferred by publicity in 2001."

People are Stranger Small towns on television, once the bucolic domain of Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best, have "mutated into a curious set of Quirkyburgs and Bizarrovilles."

After Carol Marin's "experimental newscast" (more news, less fluff) was dropped last year, the ratings at WBBM in Chicago have reached new lows.

Paul Begala and James Carville offer Democrats a three-point program to stop Bush's proposed "diminution of the government's ability to protect its citizens that is breathtaking in its scope."

Cobranding takes a hit, as the NBA snuffs out FedEX's plan to spend $100 million on naming rights for a possible relocation of the Vancouver Grizzlies, who were to become the Memphis Express. What other pro sports teams are likely candidates for corporate sponsorship?

A reporter for the "Bush-loving" Houston Chronicle makes news by asking Ari Fleischer a "semi-ballsy, anti-Bush question," concerning the President's drug and drinking advice for his daughters, a subject Fleischer deems off limits.

The Internet flirtation of news and porn.

Speculating on potential party switchers, Eric Alterman writes that President Bush is reaping what he has sown: "He has made monkeys of the national media who treated him as a new breed of Republican during the election, and fools of the voters who took him at his word."

Shelter & Food Naomi Klein writes in The Guardian that U.S economists measure the poverty level based on how much food you can afford, but that Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, Nickel and Dimed, and a new documentary, Secrets of Silicon Valley, get at the real issue -- housing.

"When the rich and the poor compete for housing in the open market, the poor don't stand a chance," writes Ehrenreich. Read an interview with her and "Maid to Order," her Harper's article that spawned the book.

Among the 131 words and phrases trademarked by McDonald's are: "Changing The Face of The World," "The House That Love Built," and "When the U.S. Wins You Win."

The practice of digitally inserting products into TV shows is one step closer thanks to AOL/Time Warner, who hope to plaster product placements throughout TNT reruns of "Law and Order."

Salon investigates the Bushies role in promoting the "White House vandal scandal" story. As the Clintonites reportedly looted and pillaged their way out of town, Fox News Channel became the epicenter of outrage. Read Fox's flame-fanning reports and the gleeful responses of Fox-watching Freepers.

Miramax's Talk mouthpiece hits synergistic stride and Esquire continues its strange affair with the celebrity profile.

Two new volumes of Robert Crumb material "raises the paradox of how this oddball cartoonist managed to become the voice of his generation."

The latest must-read from Gregory Palast, who uncovered voting irregularities in Florida for the BBC and Salon, is "Bush's Energy Plan -- Policy or Payback?" His reports combine hard-hitting investigation with a theatricality reminiscent of Michael Moore. Read an interview with Palast on the sheep-like nature of U.S. journalism.

A San Francisco Examiner editorial pulls no punches in debunking the "liberal media" myth: "Corporate media is in the hands of right-wing kooks parading as moderates and pushing the political envelope further and further to the right."

An Indian woman who crashed Al Gore's journalism class writes about her experience and how she became the teacher's pet.

Can't Lose for Winning Read how the former CEO of Internet loser Webvan made off with a $375,000 a year severance -- for life!

Rupert in the Sky Salon reports on Rupert Murdoch's attempt to seize America's satellite TV market and how John McCain might get in the way.

Add White House vandalism by departing Clinton administration employees to the list of inaccurately reported stories about his post-presidency. A GSA investigation reveals that accounts of the damage were "significantly overblown." One example is this New York Daily News story on the mayhem: "The destruction was so vast that a telecommunications staffer with more than a quarter-century of service was seen sobbing near his office one night last week."

From Silicone Valley to Glitter Gulch: Frank Rich interviews the normal folks who control the porn industry and Todd Purdim reports that the odds in real-life Nevada are even worse than at the casinos. The state leads the nation in teen drop-outs and pregnancy, as well as death from smoking, firearms, and suicide.

Hot d'Or is porn's answer to the Cannes Film Festival.

Airing reality-TV may not be a federal offense, but if the charges of a disgruntled Survivor contestant turn out to be true, the show's producer may have committed one.

Sudden Death? Salon's bleak financial picture has it racing against the clock.

Eric Alterman's list of progressive "Sites for Sore Eyes," includes a familiar site that "deserves recognition for its public service and the widest possible audience."

The Smoking Gun documents a 1955 government experiment conducted in the Nevada desert and dubbed "Operation Teapot," designed to determine the impact of a nuclear explosion on beer and soda cans stored near Ground Zero.

Thomas Friedman writes that three fundamental tenets of Bush Administration policy could come together to produce the perfect political storm.

Only in America Why does the U.S. media have so little interest in the rest of the world?

Steal His Book You may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but you may be able to judge people by the books they steal.

As the Orlando Sentinel details more ballot box shenanigans in Florida, Slate offers a handy chart showing how the President is paying back his legal team with plum administration jobs.

Eyewitness Infotainment As a means of "consumer protection," a media watchdog group has asked the FTC to stop allowing TV stations to call their local news programs "news."

Read an interview with one of the watchdogs, who suggests "Mayhem, Fluff, Weather and Sports."

Skim It and Weep According to one study, aliteracy -- people who can read but choose not to -- has been on the rise for the last 20 years and currently includes about one-half of the U.S. population.

Has the McSweeney's publishing concern become too cool for words?

The Devil's in the Details God's World News Online, a sort of Weekly Reader for fundamentalist Christian children, pushes Bush's tax-cut plan to its young readers, exhorting them to "Pray for some economic justice from Congress."

Attorney General John Ashcroft is being criticized for holding daily Bible study sessions at the Justice Department.

Organic-Industrial Complex Michael Pollan writes in The NYT Magazine about the corporatization of the organic foods industry, and how new USDA standards (allowing synthetics and additives) will allow companies such as General Mills to make organic versions of Hamburger Helper and Twinkies.

Howard Kurtz traces the Jeb Bush rumor from inception to denial.

New Media Canadian companies are selling millions of cigarette package sleeves, allowing smokers to shield themselves from the grisly images that adorn the packs and serve as health warnings.

Read how the suits at Disney responded to a creative challenge: marketing the upcoming movie Pearl Harbor in Japan.

Soft Sell The newsweeklies turn a cold shoulder to hard news.

In a visit to an international arms bazaar, a Middle East correspondent explains his fascination with the merchants of death and their products: "For 25 years now, the crudest and most fabulously designed bullets, rockets, missiles, tank shells, artillery rounds and grenades have been hurled in my direction by some of the nastiest and most 'moral' armies on earth."

Gore Vidal on his interest in the Timothy McVeigh story: "The boy's got a sense of justice. That's what attracted me to him."

The Senate Judiciary Committee has postponed a vote on the nomination of "vast right-wing conspiracy" ringleader Ted Olson as Solicitor General, because he may have lied about his role in Clinton scandal mongering.

Al Gore returns to Florida and speaks out about being silent.

If the winners of this year's National Magazine Awards are any indication, public interest and investigative journalism may be making a comeback.

Read Dick Cheney's 10 energy saving-tips and avoid ending up like those losers in California!

From Old Blue Eyes to J-Lo A nickname afficionado says that modern-day versions have been dumbed down and "reduced from descriptive tools to a type of shorthand much like the abbreviated words and uncapitalized letters used in e-mail."

The Consortium's Robert Parry writes that after years of denial, the Washington Post has finally acknowledged the existence of the "Right-Wing Machine," recognizing that U.S. conservatives have built a powerful and well-financed apparatus that can dictate the tone of the political discourse in Washington.

Cursor.org's debunking of Jesse Ventura's puffed-up military claims is picked up by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where it draws an obfuscating response from the governor's spokesman.

Lunching on the Left Apparently there's life after Clinton for Rush Limbaugh, whose ratings are up from a year ago. Limbaugh says "the Left is always more fun when they are out of power trying to reacquire it. They are wacky trying to get noticed."

The authors of Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate Journalism, assess the changing newspaper environment: "This is a world where conglomerates now rule unchallenged. Where independent papers, once as ubiquitous on the American landscape as water towers, are nearly extinct. Where small hometown dailies in particular are being bought and sold like hog futures."

Investigative reporter Russell Mokhiber has been attending White House press briefings and flummoxing Ari Fleisher with all kinds of unseemly questions that Ari avoids answering.

In an I Want Media interview, Online Journalism Review columnist Ken "Citizen" Layne decries most print reporting as formulaic, but concedes online journalism "doesn't matter anymore." Read Layne's fish out of water dispatches from the National Assn. of Broadcasters convention and a Suck profile about his NAB coverage.

If Rupert Murdoch realizes his dream of purchasing DirecTV, he will gain a subscriber base of 10 million households and be in a position to offer "the first real competition to cable."

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, titled "Unrepentant Pariah," Ralph Nader gives his opinion of the Bush administration and his reason for believing that the Greens have a political future: "By the year 2020, someone like Tom DeLay will seem centrist in the Democratic Party. The movement is all rightward."

E.J. Dionne writes that Democratic Party moderates are gutless for caving on Bush's tax-cut proposal. Dionne's definition of a moderate? "A conservative who lacks Tom DeLay's guts or candor."

Don't miss The Onion's man on the street interviews on "W's First Hundred Days."

Michael Moore debunks George W. Bush's critics, Arianna Huffington on Al Gore's First 100 Days, William Greider on the Strom Thurmond death watch and Bill Clinton sorta speaks out on his successor.

Now That's Hot! As a prelude to the National Magazine Awards, The New York Observer posted pictures of nominees and editors at HotorNot.com, where non-media types could rate them on looks instead of words.

Death Row Reporters from CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, Court TV and the Fox News Channel might have to mix it up to see who gets the two available seats at Timothy McVeigh's execution.

McVeigh has chosen Gore Vidal to fill one of three spots allowed for friends and family. Vidal plans to cover the execution for Vanity Fair.

Don't Tell W. Dick and Rummy discuss missile defense over a Johnny Walker Red.

The Consortium's Robert Parry connects the dots among three recent news events to show "what went wrong with American democracy over the past half century, as the nation compromised its principles -- and implicated young men like Bob Kerrey in atrocities -- all for the Cold War."

The New Yorker is the big winner of this year's National Magazine Awards, and Mother Jones comes out of left field to best Harpers for a general excellence "Ellie." Read a profile of Charlie Peters, Washington Monthly founder and editor, who was also honored.

The New Yorker has posted its winning articles. Also available online is a Time series by Donald Bartlett and James Steele that won for best public interest reporting: How the Little Guy Gets Crunched, Soaked By Congress and Throwing the Game.

As George Bush's Florida lawyer and Solicitor General nominee Ted Olson is grilled by the Senate Judiciary Committee, inconsistencies emerge about his involvement in the "Arkansas Project."

Nominees in 28 categories have been announced for the 5th Annual Webby Awards. The list of finalists does not include www.whitehouse.gov, which critics say has fallen victim to neglect since the Bushies hit town.

The Unexamined Presidency A new study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism finds a huge drop in news coverage of Bush's first two months in office, compared to what Clinton received during the same period eight years ago: "Despite so tenuous a mandate for his bold conservative agenda, the press has largely ignored the subject of his relationship to the American public."

The Chicago Tribune's Jim Warren on the White House Correspondent's dinner: ''It was the perfect example of all the sucking up to Bush that's been going on every day in this town since he was elected. So far, we've made a virtue out of his shortcomings.''

All the President's Businessmen The Guardian reports on the corporate payback that the Bush Administration has bestowed on donors, calling it his presidency's defining trait. "For Bush, the first U.S. president with an MBA, the election was a straightforward business proposition in which American corporations acted as venture capitalists."

More Ad Nausea "The Runner," a new ABC "reality" show, has the lead character trying to cross the country undetected, all the while frequenting businesses that have signed on as sponsors.

Howard Kurtz reports that Newsweek passed on the Bob Kerrey war story after he decided against running for president in 2000. Inside.com details how Kerrey attempted to control the spin.

The Politics of Vengeance George W. calls him "Pablo," Poppy called him "Chickenshit," and Karl Rove and Dick Cheney are calling local politicians, launching an all-out assault on the White House's least favorite U.S. Senator.

Feature This! As TiVo and other services make it easier for viewers to edit out commercials, Anthony York looks at the ways -- both scary and silly -- in which advertisers and producers are integrating products into television shows.

TV execs at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas haven't seemed to notice that this year's annual shindig coincides with "TV Turnoff Week."

The creator of a Web site that sells sleeveless shirts embroidered with the words "Wife Beater" has come under fire from domestic abuse officials, who are particularly incensed by his offer to give actual wife beaters a discount with proof of conviction.

The author of Going Live: Getting the News Right in a Real-Time, Online World, says that much "live" news coverage has more in common with voyeurism than journalism. If you think live stand-ups are too silly, here's one idea for getting your protest televised.

MoJo Rising Mother Jones celebrates its 25th anniversary year with a new editor and a National Magazine Awards nomination for general excellence.

Naked Hollywood With a strike by actors and screenwriters looming, many technicians and B-movie actors are hoping to find temporary work in the porn industry.

The Guardian profiles Myron Magnet, the guru behind much of George Bush's domestic agenda. The Manhattan Institute think-tanker argues that efforts to break the poverty cycle fail because government doesn't understand that the underclass is less an economic matter than a cultural one.

Trudi Lieberman, author of Slanting the Story: The Forces that Shape the News, says few political organizations have courted the press with more diligence and elan than the Manhattan Institute. And where in God's name did they get all that cash?

In keeping with Magnet's mandate, Bush will reportedly tap a hard-line, table-thumping acolyte of William Bennett as the nations's next drug czar. David Broder looks at the President's ongoing media-dodge and his reticence to speak out on issues of national concern.

The Independent Media Center offers extensive, virtually live Summit of the Americas coverage from throughout the hemisphere, and The Nation provides FTAA background from Naomi Klein, William Greider and others.

In a New York Press interview, Vanity Fair's James Wolcott offers his acerbic opinions on America's cultural landscape and the New York media world.

Milk of Malaysia "Georgie Menomic" is a handy linguistic device designed to help "our numero-uno malapropmeister" remember the names of more than 50 different foreign countries.

Ron Rosenbaum has become the first journalist to witness the initiation rites of the Yale secret society Skull & Bones. He was assisted by a team of Bones-hating Yale undergrads equipped with "three night-vision-capable digital-video cameras, one tape recorder, a stepladder and two walkie-talkies."

Burning Bush A man who claims to have been an intern at a Fort Worth newspaper in 1997 offers up a tall tale about a short urinal, a long joint and the current President of the United States. Read first, ask questions later.

The author of "Yellow Journalist: Dispatches from Asian America," details the denigration of Chinese Americans by media types during the spy plane incident. And the author of a forthcoming book on national security argues that the only purpose of the U.S. flights is provocation: "The closer you get to the coastline, the Chinese start turning on more radar systems. They want to generate these electronic signals and then pick them up."

The Consortium's Robert Parry says that the media has reverted to its "bended knee" posture of the Reagan-Bush era in covering Bush II.

Silent Spring As a coalition of environmental groups announces an advertising blitz to counter Bush administration rollbacks, Gore and Nader are missing in action. How does the President plan to celebrate Earth Day?

Big Media Gets Bigger A new regulatory climate in Washington, both at the Federal Communications Commission and before a federal appeals court, is expected to result in an easing of ownership limits for the nation's largest media companies.

The Nation has just published the most extensive investigation to date on the GOP-mandated vote-scrubbing effort in Florida. This must-read report places the number of disenfranchised voters at 200,000! But will the guilty in Florida ever pay?

The Guardian continues its eye-opening coverage of U.S. politics with an only in George W. Bush's America article about the Geological Survey worker who was fired for his Internet posting of a small chart showing the calving habits of caribou in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Kevin Phillips says the Bush Administration is racing against the clock to pass the major components of its agenda before the final round of Florida recounts and the 2002 election.

The New York Observer profiles Daljit Dhaliwal, whose World News for Public Television attracts "a certain percentage of people who watch because they think she's a hottie - a Playboy-for-the-articles kind of crowd that doesn't care if Ms. Dhaliwal talks about Rwanda or recites grain prices..."

Naughty Bits The FCC recently released a 28-page report on what it deems permissible to say on radio and TV. Wired's Declan McCullagh offers his own interpretations of what the ruling does and doesn't allow.

Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich grade Dubya's big test.

Press coverage of President Bush's appearance before the American Society of Newspaper Editors glossed over the fact that he was unprepared and obviously clueless about First Amendment issues.

An NPR member issues an impassioned call to nationalize Salon.

Project Censored releases its annual list of 25 major stories that the mainstream media ignored in 2000. Don't miss Noam Chomsky's introduction and a special report on the year in junk food news.

The man who tried to convince Nike to put the word "sweatshop" on a pair of custom-made sneakers, recounts his incredible media adventure.

Greedy TV Why do local stations, whose 40 percent profit margin is among the highest in any industry, pay reporters a starting salary that is the lowest in journalism?

The adman for Ralph Nader and Jesse Ventura on the extortionist pricing that netted TV stations a billion dollar bonanza during the 2000 campaign: "It's just totally sordid the way the system works, and it gets worse and worse every single cycle. But not too many people know about it, and fewer care."

Hunting the Man Hunter A Vietnam vet says it's time for Jesse Ventura to put up or shut up on his military record, and combat experience, or lack thereof, in Vietnam.

Variety-Show Journalism Neal Gabler reviews Don Hewitt's new memoir, Tell Me a Story: Fifty Years and 60 Minutes in Television, and calls it an unwitting account of the "slow demise of traditional journalism at the hands of entertainment."

Jack Germond scolds reporters for letting political campaigns control news coverage with staged events and dubious slogans. Recalling Bush's emergence as a 'reformer with results' after losing to John McCain in the New Hampshire primary, Germond said: "It was ridiculous, the only thing he'd ever reformed was his drinking habits."

Re-elect Gore in 2004? U.S. News reports that Al Gore is establishing an environmental PAC that will fund green candidates and quotes a close ally saying Gore most certainly will run.

brillsdiscontent.com offers acrid commentary on the merger of Brill's Content and Inside.

Laundry Detergent for the Soul A series of studies asking people to evaluate themselves in the past and present, found that most participants denigrated the person they used to be, while considering the current version to be new and improved.

Meat the Enemy A seven-month investigation by the Washington Post reveals major flaws in the U.S. government's meat safety net, as regulations negotiated between government and industry hamstring inspectors. Thomas Oliphant analyzes Bush's salmonella scare.

Norman Solomon speculates on how the U.S. media might cover the landing of a Chinese spy plane on Long Island.

Chretien Cries Cretin Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien blasts President Bush for his ignorance of Canadian issues, saying that he had to explain to Bush where Prince Edward Island was before he could discuss the U.S. ban on potato exports from the province.

An Austin doctor who earns almost $300,000 a year argues that he needs Bush's Texas-sized tax cut so he can take his family of eight for a ski trip to Utah over spring break.

Last week Minnesota's Governor and XFL commentator Jesse Ventura came under fire on CNN for his moonlighting activities. This week he defended his credentials for setting state conservation policy in a confrontational interview with a Star Tribune outdoors columnist who had criticized him. Invoking his (debatable) Navy SEAL credentials, Ventura said: "Until you've hunted man, you haven't hunted yet." Dismayed animal hunters respond.

No Votes to Recount The extensive coverage of Florida media recounts is in stark contrast to the attention given the US Civil Rights commission's interim findings on voting irregularities presented in early March. The latest recount splits the vote.

FAIR's Jeff Cohen recounts the ways in which the media has given Bush a free pass.

Investigative Editors and Reporters announces the winners of this year's awards for outstanding sleuthing in print, broadcast and online media. A top prize went to "The Secret History of Lead," that ran in The Nation.

The Taipei Times says the US Navy spy plane that collided with a Chinese jet fighter was attempting to collect data on China's most advanced warship - circling it at both low speed and low altitude.

Reporters get testy as White House mouthpieces talk in circles about the spy plane incident.

Florida's election officials were warned that a list of voters supplied to the state (to be used to delete felons) included the names of people who were eligible to vote. Don't miss "The Theft of the Presidency," the BBC's excellent report on voter scrubbing in Florida.

Inside Publishing Brill's Content is changing its name to Inside Content, as Brill Media Holdings acquires Inside.com.

Bushism Bonanza Each Monday, the White House releases transcripts of the previous week's presidential statements, speeches and press availabilities. A must read for gaffe hounds!

News Biz is Show Biz The Media Channel's Danny Schecter says ours is the "age of propoganda," but today's version is more likely to originate on newscasts than with the state: "News is no longer just selling itself with sensation, it's selling the network's other programming... becoming barely more than a hype machine."

Pissed-off Disney' shareholders think the mouse is a louse.

Financial Four The NCAA insists that press conference moderators refer to its basketball players as "student-athletes," but if they really were, would CBS be shelling out $6 billion to broadcast the games?

Euro press assails the Toxic Texan: "The new president has argued his policy is based on 'sound science' and common sense - presumably the same common sense that once considered the burning of witches to be a good idea and thought the sun revolved around the earth."

The asbestos president is making Maureen Dowd hungry for a shred of modernity: "Bush II has reeled backward so fast, economically, environmentally, globally, culturally, it's redolent of Dorothy clicking her way from the shimmering spires of Oz to a depressed black-and-white Kansas."

The winners of the 60th annual Peabody Awards for excellence in broadcasting and cable are announced.

High-Tech Tout The latest story about Brill's Media Ventures merging with Inside.com was originally disseminated by an anonymous subscriber to the Dotcom Scoop wireless newsgroup, who sent a message to approximately 400 cell phones in New York City touting the likelihood of such a deal.

In a Washington Post article on how President Bush's environmental stance is rallying Democrats, the head of Free Congress, a Republican tax-exempt front group, predicts that, "unless something happens where lots of people turn up dead before the election, these issues are not going to resonate with lots of voters."

Doyen on Dubya Helen Thomas, who has covered every president since JFK, responds to the announcement that Bush will only be holding informal press conferences.

White Whine William Saletan says David Horowitz is ignoring the principles on which his controversial newspaper ad are based.

Playing Make Believe When the men's Final Four -- 40 minutes of basketball and two hours of commercials -- is broadcast, CBS' cameras will highlight students from participating schools. But those students make up less than 5% of the crowd, as most tickets go to big donors and sponsors.

Evening the Score What does jock culture have to do with school shootings? Plenty, argues an editorialist in The Guardian: "The godlike status afforded to student athletes in America has left the so-called 'nerds' and 'dweebs' feeling isolated and angry."

The Miami Herald and USA Today spar over delayed release of Florida recount results.

Ted Turner blasts President "bought and paid for by the petroleum industry" Bush.

What's the most dangerous computer virus? According to the American Journalism Review it's Internet and e-mail generated misinformation: "Despite years of warnings, this malady keeps creeping its way into the newsprint and onto the airwaves of mainstream news outlets."

Is McDonald's McToast? With one-third of its operating profit coming from Europe and sales there off 10% this year, the arches are looking less than golden. Esquire's financial columnist says McDonald's future is smelling even worse than its restaurants. Plus, track the latest meat and poultry recalls at the USDA Web site.

As the Supreme Court hears arguments in Tasini v. the New York Times, a far-reaching case pitting freelancers against big media, the head of the Writer's Union debates a Times' lawyer.

In oral arguments, four Justices seem to favor freelancers while Clarence Thomas is still silent.

A small Minneapolis publisher breaks new ground in timely political advocacy, releasing an e-book of original essays by big-name writers arguing against drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge.

An ad critic wonders about Bob Dole's role in Britney Spears' new Pepsi commercial: "What's he doing all alone in the dark, anyway? Dole is a funny guy, why is he allowing himself to become America's official dirty old man"?

The feud continues, as Michael Kinsley fires back at Bill O'Reilly in an attempt to solve "The Mystery of the Departing Dinner Guests."

(Don't) Follow the Money When reporting on the McCain-Feingold debate, most TV stations conveniently fail to mention an important aspect: Where is all the money spent?

"Trade Secrets," Bill Moyers' PBS special on chemical industry cover-ups, is re-energizing health and environmental activists.

Eric Boehlert, in exposing inacurrate coverage of the Clinton pardons asks: "Which was more peculiar: How long the press flogged the pardon story in full investigative mode, or how little news it was able to scratch together?"

Tokin' Coverage A story in the National Enquirer alleging that Jenna Bush is a pot smoker raises questions about the war on drugs and how the press reports on the first family.

North Korean TV is a throwback to Stalin's Russia, and a few laughs to boot.

West Wing Looks Right White House TV sets that were usually tuned to CNN during the Clinton years are now on the Fox News Channel, while Ollie North says that his radio show has replaced NPR.

Salon's Jake Tapper gets riled about "Beer and Loathing," an article on Tapper and his new book that appears in Philadelphia magazine.

The Muse of Mopar Finding inspiration in his glove compartment, a linguist sings the praises of the prose stylings in "The New Dodge Caravan Owner's Manual."

Dave Eggers on the corporatization of culture: "Do we want or expect the best books to be coming from gleaming buildings in Manhattan, and our best movies to come from Hollywood? A good deal of the best things, in any form, will almost always come from outside these places."

William Saletan describes how opponents of McCain-Feingold are confounding McCain's logic and the bill.

Pundit Scorecard, courtesy of Brill's Content, tracks the accuracy (and inaccuracy) of predictions made by television's weekend pundits.

Michael Kinsley squares off with Bill O'Reilly over his contention that O' Reilly exaggerates his working class credentials.

Oprah He's Not In a business where hype and self-promotion often trump quality, the publisher of the recently-folded Speak magazine explains his predicament: ''I was never satisfied enough with the magazine that I even wanted it to be seen.''

Get Real Hollywood studios are generating buzz for new releases by launching amateurish-looking Web sites that pretend to be the work of real fans.

Eric Alterman spells out the rules of conduct among New York's media elite.

Survival of the Fattest Warren Buffet on the soaring cost of being a political player and the emergence of "market economics" in the world of political access and influence.

Taking a Stand When the publisher of Knight Ridder's San Jose Mercury News resigned, it was a rare protest against calls to increase profit margins at the expense of journalism.

Over lunch, the author of Fast Food Nation sums up his best-selling success by quoting Upton Sinclair: "I aimed for America's heart and by accident hit it in the stomach." The National Restaurant Association attacks the book on its Web site.

Why has Tasini v. the New York Times, a potentially landmark case that pits freelancers against big media companies, received so little media attention?

Smartertimes.com, a New York Times watchdog dedicated to the proposition that "New York's dominant daily has grown complacent, slow and inaccurate," says it's "smarter than the Times and almost as arrogant."

Salon is pitching a "premium service" with extra articles and no banner ads for $30 a year. Readers can already get the ad-free version at no cost.

Banditos Pornorgaficos After a $40,000 camera was stolen from a Philadelphia TV station, its news operation manager says that stations nationwide have been plagued by thieves who send the cameras to Mexico for porn shoots.

Bad Business Now that Washington is controlled by Republicans indebted to American business for their electoral victories, Robert Reich says: "If corporate America understood its long-term interest, it would use this unique moment to establish in the public's mind the principle that business can be trusted. But it's doing the opposite, and the danger for American business as a whole is profound."

The producers of "Big Brother" have launched a new reality show on Dutch TV called "Big Diet," in which twelve dieters compete to win their weight loss in gold.

"Big Brother" housemates mix it up before 100 star-struck fans at a surreal reunion gig.

Inside Broder's Beltway Eric Alterman says that while the highly respected David Broder "has managed to avoid many of the ethical, personal and social pitfalls that tend to trap most Washington journalists over time, he has not been able to escape the disease of Washington Insiderism."

President Bush is mangling the English language as often as candidate Bush, but now reporters and editors are more inclined to clean up his verbal gaffes.

Prove This! "The main reason official bribery is so hard to prove," says Michael Kinsley, "is that if the law wasn't written narrowly - essentially requiring proof of an explicit beforehand quid pro quo - it would cover much of Washington's day-to-day business."

Not Moving On Comic-strip artists and editorial cartoonists were certainly among the greatest beneficiaries of the Bush-Gore election controversy. Chadwatch 2001, in an attempt to determine who will be the last to give it up, is posting every lame cartoon that continues to use recounts as a punch line.

In a New York Times op-ed, Ron Chernow says that in recent years the stock market has functioned as an erratic mechanism for misallocating capital: "a lunatic control tower that directed most incoming planes to a bustling, congested airport known as the New Economy while another, depressed airport, the Old Economy, stagnated with empty runways."

Slate's William Saletan presents a list of "Mixed Market Metaphors" being used by financial analysts and reporters to describe Wall Street's swoon.

According to New York's Michael Wolff, the crash hasn't diminished enthusiasm for the New Economy's one undisputed business success - conferences: "Not mere trade shows but carefully orchestrated gatherings of the media-technology-complex elite. In some sense, conferences are the New Economy."

The New Yorker leads the list of National Magazine Award nominees.

Gored Again "Some Blacks were intimidated by police standing around polling places. Others stood in lines over a mile long to use ancient punch-card machines on the verge of falling apart. Sometimes, they'd stand for five or six hours." Florida? No, Tennessee, where voting irregularities may have been even more prevalent.

As two U. S. Senators plan to introduce bills that would restrict sales of snacks and soft drinks and limit marketing in schools, Coca-Cola will ask local soft-drink bottlers to end exclusive sales deals with schools. A trade group says soft drinks are "a good part of America."

The Wall Street Journal reports on how dot-orgs have become paradigms of stability in a world of crashing dot-coms.

Robert McChesney says that recent developments in Congress and at the FCC insure that radio, which should be the quintessential people's medium, "will remain the private plaything of the same radio giants who are presently carpetbombing the nation with stale content and tons of commercials."

Updating "Hit Men," Fredric Dannen's classic book on music industry payola, Salon's Eric Boehlert asks: "Why does radio suck? Because most stations play only the songs the record companies pay them to. And things are going to get worse."

The King of Cut and Paste A letter writer to Romenesko's Media News says it's "likely that the laziest column writer in the world just set a new standard for laziness." (March 12th post)

As hundreds of thousands of Mexicans cheer the triumphant entrance of two dozen Zapatista rebels into the nation's capital, Subcomandante Marcos' popularity is rising as fast as Bill Clinton's is dropping.

The author of a new book on kids and guns sees a paradox in the coverage of school shootings: "White-student shootings become big news because they are extremely rare even as they are hyped as imminent threats to every pastoral community."

Investment News During the first two weeks of the XFL season, New York's WNBC, whose parent network owns 50% of the league, ran 19 XFL-related "news" segments, while its competitors ran a combined total of eight.

Pop Politics What happens when a reporter goes into a Britney Spears chat room on AOL and asks the question: Anyone want to talk about George W. Bush?

The Florida Supreme Court says no to a lawsuit filed by a woman who accused AOL of being a "home shopping network for pedophiles and child pornographers."

Critics call the Los Angeles Times Book Review "brilliant, erudite and irrelevant."

Professor Primetime With VCR's rolling constantly on each of his eight TVs, Robert Thompson has made himself an indispensable quote machine on the subject of pop culture.

Hard Hats for White Collars A National Assn. of Manufacturers' memo implores those attending a tax cut rally to reinforce Republican arguments that the plan helps blue-collar Americans: "The theme involves working Americans. Visually, this will involve a sea of hard hats. If people want to participate -- AND WE DO NEED BODIES -- they must be DRESSED DOWN, appear to be REAL WORKER types, etc."

Arkansan Gene Lyons says that the "Clinton Rules," adopted in the mid-90s "when the entire Washington press corps appeared to be taking dictation from local crackpots," have informed coverage of the ex-President's pardons.

Anatomy of a Flim-Flam Read the account of a Bush Administration attempt to re-spin its tax cut plan and how the Washington Post took the bait.

Harderball "Denise Rich and Beth Dozoretz have stirred something deep within Chris Matthews' on-air libido. He can't stop calling them attractive. It's like he's just seen a nice piece of adjective."

U.S. news bureaus follow the money to Columbia.

Christopher Hitchens discusses his Harper's articles accusing Henry Kissinger of war crimes, and says none of Kissinger's defenders will engage him: "Which is a disappointment to me, because it would be nice to have something to chew on."

Mormon church pleads with media for name change.

From Salon to Rep. Henry Waxman to the L.A. Times, the story of how "Poppy" Bush paid the pardon piper. The Guardian and the New York Times chronicle his high-stakes hustle since leaving office.

Bill Clinton LIVE? "The man needs a hobby. And, frankly, America needs a break from Larry King."

The Alliance for Better Campaigns releases "Gouging Democracy," which rings up the take by TV stations during the 2000 election cycle.

O Brothers, Where Art Thou? James Wolcott's Vanity Fair article, "Who Wants to be a Pundit? 10 Easy Steps," profiles 50 pundits, all of them white. A TomPaine.com critique points out the omission and examines why there are so few minorities in mainstream media.

White pundit ponders New York mayoral run.

Gildering the Lily The American Spectator became a household name during the 1990s for aiming its Richard Scaife-funded vitriol at the Clintons. But with no sitting President to smear, and a new owner - free-market technocrat George Gilder - the Spectator is refocusing its editorial from political dirt-digging to the "New Economy of technology, finance and the Internet."

Samir Husni, the self-proclaimed Mr. Magazine, offers his thoughts on the industry and the bursting bubble of "New Economy" magazines.

The most hated man in local TV news is also among the most successful. Bill Applegate, the driving force behind "all OJ all the time" in Los Angeles, is a legend who invokes responses ranging from "the most brilliant local TV man ever" to "the great satan."

Al Franken catches Bill O'Reilly telling a big fat lie about winning a Peabody Award. O'Reilly responds.

Better Late than Never In an excerpt form his forthcoming book, "Down and Dirty: The Plot to Steal the Presidency," Salon's Jake Tapper cites a Republican source who says the Bush camp discussed a get-out-the-vote drive among overseas military personnel, after the election.

In "Politics as Performance Art, Journalism as Drama Reviews," Norman Solomon critiques big media's superficial coverage of the Bush presidency.

The Washington Monthly asks 13 scribes how to improve press coverage of government.

President Bush is operating in the shadow of his predecessor and Frank Rich says that he might have good reason to remain there: "While a pardon for Marc Rich is a scandal with epic media coverage to match, billions of dollars in legislative quid pro quo for corporate contributors is merely business as usual. No wonder it's not news."

Read the list of politicians, pundits and media outlets erroneously stating that Denise Rich visited the White House 100 times, when the actual number was between 12 and 20.

Rupert Murdoch tells Al Gore's journalism class that if the results of the Miami Herald's recount in four South Florida counties had shown Gore winning, it would have received more media coverage. But a Fox News account that borrows from an AP story, edits out an important fact which minimizes the meaning of the four county results: it was a statewide recount that was stopped by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Reverse Snobbery Michael Kinsley calls Fox News talk show host Bill O'Reilly on his "fake humble background."

Read about self-absorbed yuppies and their shaky budget proposal.

Exile from Main Street The purging of 64,000 voters - mostly African-American and Hispanic Democrats - from Florida's lists in the months leading up to the election is front page news in Britain. Gregory Palast explains why he had to move to Europe to get stories about American politics published in the mainstream media.

Howard Kurtz on Jesse Ventura's schizophrenic relationship with the media. A voter on why Ventura prefers groupies to involved citizens. Jackals or Pukes? Let the debate begin.

When Bill Clinton spoke to media and entertainment execs, he noted that there were 24,000 stories last year on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" and only one-third as many on his initiative to reduce global debt. Here's an idea for making serious issues like global warming sexy.

Four Down, 63 to Go Most major news outlets have declared Bush the winner in Florida, based on the undervote tally in four counties. But The Consortium's Robert Parry says, "the decisive recount issue was not the count in South Florida. It was Bush's success in having his five conservative allies on the U.S. Supreme Court overturn a ruling by the Florida Supreme Court that had mandated a statewide recount of the so-called undervotes."

Will Durst offers just the FAQs on the Clinton' pardons: "Q: But isn't what people are outraged by, is the sheer audacity of pardons for hire? A. Yes, and few spectacles rival those of a self-righteous Washington politician shocked, shocked by the revelation that money gets you access which gets you influence. Oh my God, lawyers being paid to lobby, what next?"

Who's more deranged, Ted Kaczynski or his media suitors?

In a Los Angeles Times editorial, Robert Scheer says that President Bush's nomination of conservative dirt-digger Theodore B. Olson to be solicitor general, "a position of such influence that it is often referred to as the 10th member of the Supreme Court," sends the strongest of signals as to Bush's intent to use the court to advance the far right's agenda.

Read a profile of Barbara and Ted Olson, the Bill and Hillary of the far right.

This is (not Marc) Rich! Which president pardoned a Watergate felon, a Cuban exile terrorist and a Pakistani heroin dealer? Hint: the Watergate felon was pardonded only months after pouring more than $100,000 into Republican Party coffers. Second hint: one of the felon's attorneys was Theodore B. Olson.

A former TV news reporter talks about leaving the industry to "spend more time with my principles," and sheds light on the tried and true sweeps stunts that unimaginative stations import from other parts of the country.

The Agony of Victory With Republicans in control of the presidency, both houses of Congress, and - apparently - the Supreme Court, why are conservatives so paranoid?

A New York Times article on the paperback publication of Dave Eggers' best-seller, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, so offended Eggers that he responded with a 10,000 word "clarification" on his Web site. Slate provides details and links.

After overestimating the outrage about impeachment and downplaying the rage over the outcome of the 2000 election, is the mainstream media making itself obsolete?

Nader's Revenge Will Bush's policies veer far enough right to move the public to the left?

Rupert Murdoch will address Al Gore's Columbia University class on "the role of corporate ownership and market structure in shaping the content and distribution of news."

They Distort, They Decide A Nation cover story calls Murdoch's Fox News Channel "a calculated mouthpiece for the right that remains thinly veiled behind its misleading mantra, 'fair and balanced,'" and says that so-called liberal contributors, such as NPR's Juan Williams (remember him as the champion of Clarence Thomas' supreme court nomination, where he was used as a tool by Orrin Hatch, among others?), are at best centrists who square-off against ultraconservatives.

Salon's Eric Boehlert, who continues taking the media to task for its inaccurate coverage of the latest Clinton scandals, asks: "Now that the press corps has the Clintons dead to rights, why do they continue to fudge the facts?" And, in the spirit of bipartisanship, Jeb Bush had to return campaign contributions from the same felon who hired Hugh Rodham to peddle influence.

"Last Expression, Art from Auschwitz," is scheduled to open at Northwestern University in September. Now available online, this incredible exhibit explores a subject "neither widely recognized in the realm of Holocaust history, nor in the discipline of art history - that concentration camp prisoners produced works of art during their incarceration."

AAA has a stellar reputation for helping its 43 million members with maps, insurance and late-night tows. But the country's second largest membership organization also has a secret life as an advocate for policies that lead to more highways, more gas guzzling and more pollution.

Politically Incorrect's Bill Maher on the stalking of an ex-President: "It's my sad duty to inform the American people that this nation is trapped in a very unhealthy relationship, a codependent relationship, if you will, with a man named Bill Clinton." To extend that relationship, check out Modern Humorist's rough draft of Clinton's New York Times op-ed.

When reality TV's odd couple reunited on Larry King Live, "Multimillionaire" Rick Rockwell described how he spent their honeymoon: "I'm walking around the beach by myself with a metal detector looking for bottle caps and nickels."

Does President Bush's proposed missle defense system qualify as a faith-based charity?

According to the Tyndall Report, a daily content analysis of network news programs, Survivor II was the 4th biggest story on the morning news shows the week of February 12 to 16. The 25 minutes of coverage it received was all courtesy of CBS's The Early Show. CBS MarketWatch is also sponsoring Survivor investment clubs, which The Early Show covers as if they were news.

Take Till it Hurts After its major benefactor was revealed to be a serial mailer of racist hate literature, Augsburg College, a small liberal arts school in Minneapolis, denounced the act but kept cashing the checks. Now the donor is suing, claiming that the school reneged on its promise to name a communications wing after him.

Party Crasher On the eve of Henry Kissinger's installment as chancellor at William and Mary, Christopher Hitchens, whose Harper's article charges Kissinger with war crimes, showed up to set the record straight.

Has it Peaked? Time (The Incredible Shrinking ex-President) and Newsweek (The Longest Goodbye) focus (surprise!) on the content king. And Jonathan Alter says Clinton's the gift that keeps on giving.

Asked recently when he plans to travel to Africa, President Bush replied: "One country at a time - going to Mexico first." A Washington Post report that goes behind the scenes at many of Bush's early meetings asks: Deft or just lacking in depth?

In the spirit of bipartisanship, E. J. Dionne and William Kristol have co-edited Bush v. Gore, an anthology on the Florida recount that includes legal documents and commentary on the proceedings/ shenanigans. Snippets are free-of-charge at the publisher's Web site.

Suiting-up for Recession The Economist reports that after bottoming out in the third quarter of last year, the sale of suits has rebounded sharply: "The suit is the perfect attire for hard economic times. It speaks of seriousness of purpose and self-discipline."

CNNdn.com, the site that used CNNfn as a model to parody a future economic meltdown, is no longer available, but the real beauty is in the story. Whosealphabet.com chronicles CNN's lawsuit and the media coverage that followed.

Cuckoo for Clinton Puffs! David Corn and Frank Rich look at the media's (and our) fascination with the ex-President and now entertainer-in-chief (EIC).

Writing under the byline "William Jefferson Clinton," the EIC defends his pardon of Marc Rich. Clinton claims that the case for the pardons was "reviewed and advocated by three distinguished Republican attorneys," but all three say that's just Willy being slick again.

After the Onion signed a deal with Miramax Films, editor in chief Robert Siegel said: "The goal for this Miramax deal is to create movies that don't suck."

Music that Doesn't Suck The Village Voice releases its "27th or 28th" Pazz and Jop critics' poll.

Read the transcript of a BBC report on the shady deal between Florida and Database Technologies (DBT) to compile a list of ineligible voters. Florida officials blame DBT for not verifying the list, which wrongly barred 22,000 black, Democrat voters, but a DBT executive claims that verification was the state's responsibility.

Asked recently when he plans to travel to Africa, President Bush replied: "One country at a time - going to Mexico first." A Washington Post report that goes behind the scenes at many of Bush's early meetings asks: Deft or just lacking in depth?

A Brill's Content review says two new books on the Microsoft trial make it plain that "Gates walked the line between evasiveness and lying in a manner that should lead him to be grateful that no Ken Starr had been empowered to watch and read his deposition."

A Weekly Standard editor reports on the American Enterprise Institute's annual gala: "When Clarence Thomas gave a fire-breathing speech at the "conservative prom," it made my head spin. And not in a good way. It seems the opposite of wisdom for a sitting Supreme Court justice to trumpet his privately held views on controversial questions of domestic policy."

Questioning Rep. Billy Tauzin's grandstanding hearings, E. J. Dionne asks what should be a bigger concern: that the networks called Florida wrong on Election Night? Or that the officially certified vote count is so widely seen as flawed that the much-criticized news media have had to undertake their own tally to find out who really won the election?

Todd Gitlin says the election night miscues are the tip of another grander scandal: "the dominance of the national voicebox by vastly profitable organizations, operating on public airwaves, collecting hundreds of millions of dollars from political ads while lobbying furiously against campaign finance reform."

Bush's Machiavellian Prince Karl Rove, the President's top political strategist, has a long history as a Nixonian-style dirty trickster. Says one political opponent: "This guy is worse than Haldeman and Ehrlichman. He'll have an enemies list." In a profile that doesn't mention Rove's political dark side, The New York Times paints him as more Pygmalion than Machiavelli.

William Safire wants to know when President Bush will face the music and hold his first press conference.

Bush and Cheney have been doing an end around national media, conducting interviews with local news outlets in states that were closely contested in the election.

A media studies professor says that the FCC is the EPA of the 21st Century: "Americans spend more of their lives in the media landscape than the natural one, putting the FCC in charge of the environment most of us really inhabit."

An ad free-version of Salon that loads in seconds is made possible by the folks behind the "deboning movement."

Without Fear or Favor? FAIR presents its first annual roundup of the year's most egregious examples of owner, advertiser and government influence on the news.

The New Yorker debuts online with a handful of selections from the current issue and Joseph Mitchell's 1939 feature on steak houses: "All You Can Hold for Five Bucks." Critical reaction to the site is mixed.

Hollywood or Washington D.C.? "Because people lie so much here," says one reporter, "that's all the more reason to hold people's feet to the fire and not let them be anonymous. They have axes to grind. You can't let them fudge and not even have their necks on the line."

What's really behind Ralph Nader's low profile since election day?

As Florida ballot analyses trickle in and evidence mounts that Gore got more votes, Eric Alterman says "most of the punditocracy appears to think it an act of bad sportsmanship to point out that the man appointing far-right extremists to oversee the nation's legal system and its natural resources is a pretender to the throne."

The Apologist Online Journalism Review's Matt Welch takes Michael Kinsley to task for his ongoing attempts to "humanize Bill Gates and attack Microsoft's critics, all the while swatting down anyone with the nerve to question the propriety of his own ethical balancing act."

Ad Nauseam Channel One, the 12-minute "public-affairs" program that reaches nearly half of all American teenagers, was much-maligned in the early 90s for using news as an electronic trojan horse to deliver ads for sneakers and soda pop. Russ Baker examines how it has managed to outlast its critics and become a classroom institution.

Lowering the Charm Bar Arianna Huffington gets at what's behind the success of Bush's charm offensive: "The reason it's been so easy for Bush to charm the other side is because, in many fundamental ways, it's really the same side." Independent Bernie Sanders, representing the real other side, offers a tax-cut plan that gives every American $300 per year.

Facial Scrubbing A producer on the Jail Babes video series talks about the porn industry's proactive response to the new administration: "Anxious to sanitize their product to the point where it passes muster with compassionate conservatives everywhere, major producers are proposing to discard or ban a host of sexual acts and scenarios that have become staples of the genre."

Inside.com's Kurt Anderson looks at the dire prospects for content sites and concludes that while the user-generated model seems to be the most sustainable, "their bottomless reservoirs of free content would not exist without professionally produced music, movies, television and prose for the hordes of interested amateurs to praise and slag and emulate."

ParaSite The latest, greatest example of marketing user-generated content is Plastic.com, a consortium of Web sites including Suck, Feed and Inside, that mixes message board postings with links to original content to create a unique editorial stew falling "somewhere between hierarchy and anarchy."

All Talked Out Launched in 1999 with media coverage so extensive that it generated buzz about the buzz, Talk magazine has failed to deliver on editorial, circulation and advertising projections.

Gifts that Keep on Giving In a detailed study of what was erroneously written and broadcast concerning the Clinton's gift-getting, Salon's Eric Boehlert reconfirms the adage about never letting the truth get in the way of a good story.

Hollywood meets The New Yorker Writer Susan Orlean on the bizarre experience of having her book, The Orchid Thief, adapted for film by the director of Being John Malkovich: "This is like going to some amusement park and being given a ticket for the strangest, most interesting ride in the place. So I can either not take it, or take it and maybe I'll throw up at the end. I have enough of a thrill-seeking gene, I think, why not?"

Only eight months after it began, CBS pulled the plug on WBBM's attempt to clean up local television news. The Chicago newscast, anchored by veteran journalist Carol Marin, was designed to bring back viewers who had abandoned the debased genre. Marin and other TV news observers do a thorough post-mortem on the experiment.

Chew on This In Fast Food Nation, a new book on the cultural and gastronomical sins of the burger business, author Eric Schlosser details the fast food giants' expertise at marketing to kids, "placing not just hallway ads and banners in schools but also targeted, branded educational materials in classrooms, produced with tax-deductible dollars."

Typing the name of the new president and a profanity into the Google search engine produced a results page that listed the official George W. Bush campaign store at the top. Now, the experts at Search Engine Watch explain how that came to be.

Left Out With no daily newspaper, wire service, radio network or television channel, what can progressive media do to make itself heard?

5,000 Words and Counting Trying to find a happy medium between the novella-length reporting that appears in magazines like The New Yorker, Harpers and Atlantic Monthly, and the byte-sized variety usually found on the Web, Slate launches its "experiment in long-form cyberjournalism."

Products Before People! Are you finding new brands to be more reliable than old friends?

If Bill Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich proves to be only a temporary stumble, here's how his new role as America's celebrity-in-chief might play out.

U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist returns to Arizona, the state where he began his career as an election thug, harassing minority voters in 1962.

Chief Puppeteer The Consortium's Robert Parry argues that "never before in American history have a chief justice and other federal judges exploited their extraordinary powers as brazenly to advance clearly partisan interests as have Rehnquist and his fellow Republican appointees."

Bad Writing, Good Read A Hermenaut correspondent tells why he's obsessed with The Traveler: "Some writers get compliments for making writing look easy. Joseph Albano, the editor of a free shoppers' monthly paper in Southern New England, deserves a nod for making it look impossible."

At the urging of their corporate benefactors, the Republican-leaning creators of South Park agree to take a hands-off approach to Bush's daughters.

Writing in The Atlantic, Jack Beatty says that political reporters too often act like mirrors, not lamps, becoming passive conduits for partisan volleys: "Democracy can survive the premature call of an election. It will have a harder time surviving a medium of mass propaganda disguised as an instrument of truth."

Read the correspondence between Nike and the disgruntled customer whose request to emblazon the word "sweatshop" on his personalized sneakers was turned down.

What's more cloying, Clinton "feeling your pain" or Bush on the "charm offensive?" Frank Rich says pick your poison. "Both phrases refer to the image-mongering by which chief executives hope to distract us from whatever it is they may actually be up to when they're not hawking the virtues of their own pure hearts."

Pacifica Radio's employee revolt grows, as Democracy Now co-host Juan Gonzalez bails to protest the creeping corporatization of the network's board of directors, saying that he will actively work to convince listeners to stop supporting Pacifica during current fund drives.

The DEA has been touting the success of "Operation Libertador," a 36 nation anti-drug effort in the Caribbean and Latin America, but a Knight Ridder investigation found that about one-third of the reported arrests were for misdemeanor pot posession and that 99% of the assets supposedly seized were confiscated before the operation began.

In a fascinating profile of the man mainstream media loves to ignore, Noam Chomsky says: "Issues on which the business world is united don't arise in elections, so people vote on peripheral issues the media concentrate on: personality, style - will George Bush remember where Canada is? That's how to maintain power when you can't control people by force."

Spurious George? Roll Call reports that House Republican leaders are backing away from plans to create a new committe on electoral reform, after Bush expressed concerns that it "could be used as a forum by Democrats to attack the credibility of his nascent administration."

New York magazine media columnist Michael Wolff, in an interview about the world's funniest industry: "It's filled with outsized people doing more or less show-offy things. And we've found ourselves in this comic situation in which the media business is the triumphant industry of our time."

Final Frontier As old stand-bys like sex and violence lose their value to shock, advertisers are turning to death and dying to get a rise out of jaded consumers.

The Washington Post's magazine columnist wonders why Harpers published Christopher Hitchen's indictment of Henry Kissinger, war criminal: "What's the matter with Harpers? Are they stuck in the past? Why can't they run diet tips and articles on orgasms and profiles of Jennifer Lopez like the fun magazines do?"

An American Prospect writer asks: "If one substitutes "black" or "Jew" or "woman" in the language John Ashcroft used to describe why he scuttled James Hormel's nomination, is there any doubt that his own nomination would be history?"

When 100,000 Super Bowl fans entered Tampa's stadium, they had no idea that their face was being scanned to see if it matched mug shots of "criminals, terrorists and con artists." The St. Petersburg Times broke the story and the Washington Post followed. Read the proud press release from the super-snoopers marketing the Orwellian technology.

Similar security-justified shenanigans also occur daily in New York where the NYCLU has mapped the location of 2397 surveillance cameras visible on Manhattan streets.

The Smoking Gun has unearthed suck-up letters from media figures to the imprisoned Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, in hopes of landing an interview. The letters are included in files recently donated by Kaczynski to the U of Michigan Library.

Retiring columnist Jack Germond tells a Northwestern University audience that in 2000 "successful candidates stiffed the press. They don't trust reporters at all anymore. In the past we've always gotten close to the candidates, but not now."

Howard Kurtz says that journalists are falling all over themselves to declare Bush's debut a smashing success: "He sticks to his message! He gives lawmakers nicknames! He finishes meetings on time! Not since Gerald Ford was lauded for making his own English muffins has a new president won such praise for small gestures."

David Corn is served-up a tale of Hollywoodish sex intrigue by a mysterious caller who says that he has the infidelitous goods on a hypocritical, Clinton-hating Congressman who lambasted the President for his lascivious and immoral behavior. What to do?

Eric Boehlert has the goods on Clinton-hating reporters: "After eight years of warfare between the press and the White House, could the Clintons' stay have ended any other way? In an utterly predictable finale, reporters, busily concocting motivations and connecting fictitious dots, swooped in for one last pointless, and sloppy, appearance-of-impropriety bust."

In his new memoir, Me and Ted, CNN co-founder Reese Schonfeld recounts a meeting between Jerry Falwell and Ted Turner, during which "Falwell suggested that everyone kneel as he prayed that the cloud of profanity and mayhem would be lifted from TV. Afterward, as Falwell headed for the elevator, Turner shouted to his assistant, 'Jesus Christ. Get me a joint.'"

Do you doubt the power of the Internet to educate and enlighten?

Show Us the Money! When his commitments to poor students and wealthy taxpayers are weighed, Bush's "hypocrisy index" is through the roof.

As Minnesota's Governor prepares to begin announcing XFL games, the St. Paul Pioneer Press examines his lucrative moonlighting deals. Ventura has threatened to sue the paper for hijacking his "trademarked image" with a new cartoon strip called "VenturaLand."

CBS cranks up hype machinery for Survivor II, calling the original "the show that changed television forever."

The first time anyone heard about The Organization Man he was climbing the 1950's corporate ladder. Now he (and she) are back, and they're running the Bush administration!

GBY/GBA Michael Kinsley scours the media databases and finds that ending a speech with "God bless you and God bless America," has become the political version of "have a nice day." Does "President You-Know-Who" consider himself America's "pastor-in-chief"?

How Things (Don't) Work In a Brill's Content article that is equal parts instructive and depressing, Ralph Nader details his campaign's attempts to break through the horse race mentality that drives political coverage. Norman Solomon says that most political "journalism" resembles "stenography for the powerful."

Philip Morris Square? Nader attempts to derail Boston's plan to sell-off subway stops to corporate sponsors.

What with Wall Street's discontent for content, is there any hope for sites like Salon.com?

Quality Sells? As CBS affiliates begin routinely plugging Survivor 2 on their newscasts, the findings of a study on local television news might come as a surprise.

Buoyed by the success of "Temptation Island," network execs have decided to up the ante. And, what might reality TV look like if it was based on, well, reality?

Where the Boies Are With the same agent who represented Marilyn Monroe and Bill Cosby, a new book deal and an upcoming appearance on "60 Minutes," David Boies has big plans for extending the brand.

After the Fall What will America look like in January, 2004? Tour the handful of remaining Web sites and find out.

A columnist for The Advocate says the mainstream media virtually ignored John Ashcroft's outrageous hearing testimony concerning gay issues, and that "Bush's election represents a sea change for gay Americans, but you wouldn't know it from reading the national press or watching the Sunday morning chat shows."

Starstruck New Yorkers are plumbing the depths of celebrity culture, instantaneously relaying spottings of their prey (Karenna Gore 67/Madison, wearing navy sweats) to confederates via wireless pagers and Web postings.

Arianna Huffington says that George Bush's clueless inauguration did nothing to address the rancor surrounding his tainted victory.

Failing Downward Mary Matalin's move from Crossfire to the Bush administration runs counter to Washington's conventional career path, according to Slate's Andrew Ferguson: "By tradition, a White House job is what one fails at while one is on his way to ever greater things - screw up there, end up as an analyst on ABC. The process is not supposed to run backward."

The Weekly Standard's David Brooks, a conservative-movement insider, predicts a miserable life for journalists covering Matalin's new employer: "For eight years we've been romping on the waterbed that was Clintonia, being fed daily heapings of leaks, lies and scandals. And then after being spoiled in this way--bam! In come the Stepford wives."

Tucker's World "The higher-ups at CNN have decided that the bow-tied Tucker Carlson, a Republican, is the perfect pundit to usher the network into the George W. Bush years," says one critic, "but his inane talk show is all too reminiscent of a TV phenomenon from an earlier Bush administration. Party time! Excellent!"

President Bush assures country that "our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over." The Banana Republicans present: "How to Inaugurate an Imposter." (2nd item) Eric Alterman says that inaugural pomp can't mask the actions of a hardball partisan, and try as they might, TV anchorfolk fail to give Bush media honeymoon as reality creeps into coverage.

Our Beerless Leader Read the complete list of submissions in BushWatch's name the new president contest.

With a new CBS poll indicating that only 51% of Americans consider Bush's victory a legitimate one, R. W. Apple calls television's pretty presidential pictures a key factor in overcoming the public's doubt.

Wake Me When It's Over Writing in the Guardian, an unbelieving Brit marvels at America's ease of transition: "It may be what the presidency needs, but its very smoothness is an amnesiac affront to what happened last November. A sleepwalk into pretence, from which Americans will one day wake up. The question is: when?"

Curious George You've seen the e-mails, now read the story behind the vast left-wing conspiracy to compare the leader of the free world to an ape.

Seven Iowa hospitals will no longer release information on newborns to local papers, citing security precautions against infant abductions, even though none has ocurred in the area. An editor says the ban is hogwash.

Howard Kurtz reports on the speed at which the Jesse Jackson "love child" story jumped the fence from tabloid to mainstream, and how Matt Drudge got stung at his own game.

John Ashcroft's anti-gay crusade is one issue that has received short-shrift from the mainstream media. Michelangelo Signorile says that's a shame, "because gays and lesbians are a group about which Ashcroft's hatemongering is most obvious."

Sell Out, Sell Off The board of Pacifica Radio, whose stations generate less than $10 million in annual revenues but have licenses worth $500 million, has recently been restructured to include a pro-corporate, anti-union contingent that is "the antithesis of what Pacifica has stood for for 50 years."

George W. Bush has stocked his cabinet with every kind of American except Jews, and Philip Weiss wonders why "no one has complained about this, even though everyone knows it's nuts. Remaking the American power structure without Jews is like remaking sports without blacks."

The Senator from Claritin If John Ashcroft isn't questioned about charges that he's in the pocket of drug companies, it may be because many of his former colleagues in the Senate, especially Orrin Hatch, are right in there with him.

You don't have to subscribe to The New Yorker to read contributors Rebecca Mead and Malcolm Gladwell. They post articles on their Web sites shortly after they run in the magazine. If you missed it in print, check out "Sex, Drugs and Fiddling," Mead's classic profile of wild man and punk virtuoso, Ashley MacIsaac.

The Booby Pulpit William Saletan says that to liberals, Dubya's inarticulateness is a joke, but to conservatives, it's a problem: "The question of the next four years is how a president who can't talk his way out of a paper bag can get anything difficult through a sharply divided Congress."

One Man, One Vote Former major league pitcher Jim Deshaies somehow made it onto the Hall of Fame ballot in spite of his 84-95 career record. The Web site putjdinthehall.com is dedicated to ensuring that their man gets at least one vote.

One Man, Many Undervotes David Corn travels to the belly of the ballot review beast and finds that both Republicans and Democrats may have been wrong in their assumptions about Florida's recount.

When it acquired Random House, German media conglomerate Bertelsmann found itself in the middle of a literary family feud, pitting one corporate holding against another.

Clinton's farewell tour continues with a Brill's Content interview. He critique's the media, names his choice for America's best political reporter and offers his opinion of Maureen Dowd.

Is there life after Clinton-hating for right-wing media?

As GOP political operatives joke about "stealing the election fair and square," pundits bristle at straight talk about the outcome. And the "Doody Bluster ticket" pins its hopes for legitimacy on political amnesia.

Feral Express Alex Abramovich reports that even in a time of cross-merchandising, synergistic promotions, and million-dollar placement deals, the flagrant product placement in Cast Away is something to behold.

After presaging the demise of George magazine, a media columnist wonders who he should put out of business next: "How about jettisoning Chris Mathews' "Hardball" show? Or finally sending ABC's John Stossel to some free-enterprise think tank?

A new invention, alternately code-named "IT" and "Ginger," is being touted as bigger than the Internet or PC. But you'll have to wait for two years to find out exactly how big, when "IT" is unveiled in a book that Harvard Business School Press shelled out big bucks for.

Kit's Caboodle Most city magazines never get much beyond the feel good filler necessary to offset the ads. But with a new editor whose roots are in the alternative press, Los Angeles magazine is poised to break the mold.

Slate's William Saletan says that Bush's style over substance campaign is already catching up with him: "He's empowered to do as president exactly what he promised to do as a candidate: nothing."

NewsMax.com, a Clinton-hater Web site, is reporting that the Star and National Enquirer are about to bring forth three witnesses who will attest that Jeb Bush and Kathleen Harris had an affair.

Arianna Huffington says the best choice for drug czar is New Mexico's reform-minded Governor, Gary Johnson. "It would be too bold a statement for Bush to choose me," says Johnson. "I'm a little radioactive. But I definitely think that a bold choice is what is needed."

The annual P.U.-Litzer Prizes pay tribute to the nation's stinkiest media performances. This year's winners include an infomercial for Campbell's soup on ABC's The View, and NBC's synergasmic airing of five times as much "news" about the 2000 Olympics as the other networks.

As John McCain prepares to introduce a campaign finance bill two days before George W. Bush takes office, David Corn sees a "Shakespearean whiff" to the Bush-McCain saga. Although vanquished on the first go around, "the old gladiator plots a mess of trouble for the upstart who bested him. It is a plot-line the McCain-friendly media will eat up."

The co-founder of iwantmedia.com explains why too much media is never enough.

Contending that one close shave deserves another, the co-founder of Silicon Salley, a Web site for women who work in the Internet industry, suggests a novel protest for women who want to distance themselves from the incoming president.

An enterprising reporter who uncovered a single digit tax bill owed by the president-elect's younger brother, cautions that "with a notorious deadbeat like Neil, you can't be too careful!"

All in Rupert's Family Bill O'Reilly, author of a best-selling book and host of a highly-rated show on the Fox "News" Channel, has perfectly positioned himself as "the pissed-off, middle-aged white guy who's come at last to claim that broad lunch-pail demographic that hasn't had anyone to root for since Archie Bunker left the airwaves."

From Venus to Mars Maureen Dowd says the country is "saying goodbye to a president, elected by women, who talked about What Women Want and even read Deborah Tannen, and saying hello to a president, elected by white men and absentee military ballots, who defended executions and guns, and who reads about hurricanes and sports figures."

Memory Deficit Disorder Political cartoonist Ted Rall asks why Americans, unlike grudge-holders worldwide, are so quick to forget even the most egregious political outrages.

The Smoke Screen Why did Philip Morris spend $60 million on charitable programs in 1999? So they would have something to say in their $108 million corporate-image advertising campaign!

The Smoking Gun The Web site that broke the story about Darva Conger's abusive beau, has obtained a very amusing collection of contract riders that detail the outrageous demands that rock stars make of concert promoters.

Late Night with Dubya Given the fact that one to two-hundred-million Americans doubt that the man occupying the Oval Office for the next four years is up to the job, the country might be better served if the President-elect found something to do there other than make policy decisions.

A monumental First-Amendment case is unfolding that will effectively put the drug war on trial. Two publishers are being sued for libel by a powerful Mexican, who they accuse of pushing cocaine. Says one of the defendants: "In the long run, this will be an educational process that will reveal information about the atrocity of the drug war and how it's being waged by the U.S. government and its friends in Latin America."

A BBC documentary looks at the Republican National Committee's strategy to paint Al Gore as a liar: "Establish a massive database of every utterance in Gore's 26 years in public service - and then pounce on every discrepancy like a bulldog lawyer seeking to discredit a witness." RNC operatives were surprised at how hungrily the media devoured their propaganda. Says one dirt-digger: "It's amazing when you have top-line producers and reporters calling and saying 'We trust you. We need your stuff."

With $8 million on the line, CBS's parent company, Viacom, is sure to come up with some creative ideas for synergizing Hillary's memoir.

Too Strange for Words In a series of photographs that appeared on different days in the Washington Post and other newspapers, George W. Bush is pictured in "default posture," with an identical pose and expression as he eyes various cabinet nominees.

Family Values Gove Vidal says the recent election highlighted the fact that American politics, like most oligarchies, is essentially a family affair: "A few people invariably run the show; and keep it, if they can, in the family."

Michael Kinsley disputes the notion that reasonable people can disagree, prompting Bill Bennett to dispute the notion that Kinsley is a reasonable person.

Religiously Right Attorney General nominee John Ashcroft is a big fan of Southern Partisan magazine. This "leading publication of the Neo-Confederate movement" once referred to David Duke as "a Populist spokesperson for a recapturing of the American ideal."

In "American Elections: System or Farce?" Edward Said offers Arab readers his perspective on politics, power, and the manufacturing of ideological consent by the country's mainstream media. And if you prefer something completely different, check out Melanie Griffith's online recovery journal.

Ralph Nader strikes back at his critics and reminds them that every Senate Democrat, including Al Gore, voted for the confirmation of Antonin Scalia.

Todd Gitlin says that America's long history of anti-intellectualism, much in evidence during this year's presidential race, is reinforced by television reporting and punditry, "the tributes that entertainment pays to the democratic ideal of discourse." TV reporting doesn't evaluate or research, but "covers," while punditry is "only concerned with reviewing performances, rating 'presidentiality,' itemizing themes, relaying and interpreting spin. Punditry is to intellectual life as fast food is to fine cuisine."

Mark Hertsgaard, author of On Bended Knee: the Press and the Reagan Presidency, says that not all lightweights are created equal and George W. Bush is no Ronald Reagan: "Democrats should cheer up. The next four years should be a time of wicked fun and great opportunities, if they have the wit to grasp them."

Sweet Story! Two reporters were roughed up during a Coca-Cola-sponsored PR event at the Library of Congress, after they disrupted the evening's festivities by asking the company's president why he was using a public library to promote a junk food product.

Garrison Keillor skewers Prairie Home Companion listeners who disagree with his politics: "Dear Shirley, Now you have got yourself a president who is going to restore honor to Washington and stop the partisan bickering. I think you should be happy about that and whoop it up and have an inauguration party with champagne and not fuss about some puny radio show in Minnesota."

Robert Kuttner asks: Why has the media become a cheerleader for bipartisanship? And David Corn says that all of the bipartisan happy talk shouldn't impede the task of assessing Bush's fitness to hold the highest office. He cites the President-select's clueless responses to a foreign policy question, "that sounded as if they tumbled off a couple of misarranged index cards."

In a scathing historical analysis of the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore, Jeffrey Rosen, The New Republic's legal affairs editor, says: "They foolishly tried to save the country from what they perceived to be a crisis of legitimacy. And they sent themselves to hell in the process."

How Low Did They Go? Bowing to pressure from big-bucks broadcasters, and buying into a spurious concern from National Public Radio, Congress has severely curtailed an FCC plan to issue licenses for 1,000 low-power FM radio stations.

We'll Fix That! Newsweek reports that during an election-night party, Sandra Day O'Connor exclaimed "this is terrible" when Florida was first called for Al Gore. Her husband explained that she was upset because they wanted to retire to Arizona and a Gore presidency meant they would have to wait four years because she didn't want a Democrat to name her successor.

The apocalyptic stance of network newscasters covering GatorWait was at odds with the American public, but the alarm should come as no surprise, since they're increasingly echoing the tone of their hysterical cable brethern. And, Clarence Thomas explains why his remote control is always on mute.

Dostoevsky, Bo Derek & Line-Dancing The Guardian sorts out the election mess, finally declaring the real winners and losers.

Billary, Ink. With book deals that could net them a combined $15 million, Maureen Dowd says that Bill and Hillary are about to go "from feeling our pain to hawking their own."

The Baffler's Thomas Frank says that America has found itself a sucker-in-chief: "An utterly unrepentant son of privilege, Bush embraced a novel and purely American vision of the class struggle, a market populism according to which it is one's attunement to the needs of business that signals one's sympathy for the working man."

Healers-In-Chief The Media Channel's Danny Shechter dissects the sudden about-face that television news programs did after the Supreme Court decided the election, going from partisan sounding boards to national healers, literally, overnight.

In an in-depth, post-mortem on Al Gore's quixotic quest for the presidency, The New York Times details the candidate's struggle to pursue an aggressive legal strategy while effectively managing his image. In his concession speech, Gore takes a bullet for the country, as the Rehnquist court find its legacy: "In calendars we trust."

David Corn asks: "Would Orwell be shocked by how the Bush campaign, the Republicans, and the conservative movement were able to generate via repetition the storyline that Gore was trying to 'steal' the election by 'changing the rules' to allow for 'inaccurate manual recounts'?"

Remember the Campaign? It may be a distant memory, but Susan Douglas's analysis of the media's role in legitimizing George W. Bush reminds us of how we got to this point: "The fifth column took an empty vessel and told us, over and over, that it was filled with gold. That they got away with it may be the most infuriating - and dangerous - legacy of this election."

Poppycrock! The U.K.'s Guardian reports that beyond tapping into his old man's, old-boy network for advice, a good chunk of the half-billion dollars that fueled George W.'s campaign came from companies that were paying back George H. W. for specific favors bestowed during and after his presidency.

Hunter S. Thompson on The Fix: "There was one exact moment when I knew that Al Gore would Never be President of the United States, and that was when the whole Bush family suddenly appeared on TV and scoffed at the idea of Gore winning Florida. The old man was the real tip-off. The leer on his face was almost frightening. It was like looking into the eyes of a tall hyena with a living sheep in its mouth. The sheep's fate was sealed, and so was Gore's. Everything since then has been political flotsam & gibberish."

At a time when America seems to prefer centrist politics, the voices that get amplified in the media are the loudest, nastiest and most partisan, further polarizing the national dialogue.

Unfair. Unbalanced. So what? Fox News is the fastest growing channel on basic cable. It's also the first "narrowcast" news network, targeting its programming "not at the entire country, but at the millions of right-leaning Americans skeptical of mainstream media."

F-Sharp As the media pulls out all the stops to make sure every side is heard, it creates "a loud, muddy noise."

Welcome to the Future In the most insightful of commentaries, Lawrence Weschler writes in Salon that: "What with the spectacularly intricate hydrology of focus groups, tracking polls, sound bites, empty photo ops, targeted political advertising spots and wider, more general media manipulation, with both sides marshaling the identical data and with everything arranged in a near-perfect feedback loop, is it any wonder that by the end of the exercise, we indeed end up at the center of a mathematically precise equilibrium, the dead center, of a near-perfect tie?"

Who are America's most-overrated talking heads? They include Tim Russert and Jim Lehrer, "a one-man quagmire of blandness, whose performance at the presidential debates "was to journalism what George Bush is to Camus."

You've Got Porn! AOL is expected to gross almost $18 billion this year, and not one cent comes from the direct sale of smut to its 34 million U.S. subscribers. But porn industry players and media analysts say that AOL plans to start profiting more directly from adult content after clearing regulatory hurdles and completing its purchase of Time Warner.

Maureen Dowd says that the Bushes are always gracious, until they need to go ugly: "If Jeb has to ruin his career ramming W. through, he will. If W. has to owe Tom DeLay the world, he will. And if Clarence Thomas can lend a hand to his patrons, will he?"

Fox in the Hen House John Ellis, the Bush cousin and Fox News political analyst who was criticized for his running phone conversations with the Bush family on election night, has now cashed out on his unethical behavior by selling his story to Inside magazine for $15,000. Howard Kurtz offers up quotes from the forthcoming article.

Heads Bush Wins, Tails Gore Loses. E.J. Dionne looks at the double standards that Republicans, with more than a little help from the media, have successfully put in place to block Al Gore from becoming president.

The Atlanta Constitution's Cynthia Tucker says that the behavior of Bush's minions in Florida resembles the work of Republican' mudslinger, Lee Atwater: "They say the governor doesn't read much, but he ought to take a look at Atwater's dying words. It is too late for Bush to reclaim the mantle of 'uniter, not a divider;' he has long since given the lie to that. But it may not be too late for him to reclaim his soul."

Novelist and Tallahassee resident Bob Shacochis talks about life in the big leagues: "In this pretty but not very interesting capital city of an indisputably screwball state, choosing the next president of the United States has become a family affair."

From Ponies to Pull Tabs Christopher Hitchens says that "the mass media, recipients of the soft-money fruit of the 'process,' have behaved abysmally by excluding any question or topic that is not chad related. This is not even the much-derided 'horse race' coverage; it is more like the proceedings of some tenth-rate Gaming Commission in a slot-machine county."

Unwilling to separate himself from the vitriolic rhetoric of his party's right-wing, and unable to change their tone, George W. Bush, according to Frank Rich, "lacks the clout to deliver so much as a tiny first installment" on his campaign pledge to be a uniter, not a divider.

Miami's Realpolitik No single event in post-election Florida is as fraught with political intrigue as the decision to halt the hand recounts in Miami-Dade County. The stated reason - that there wasn't enough time to get the job done - may be the least likely.

Screaming Meanies Salon's Eric Boehlert says that conservative journalists, many of whom predicted that Bush would win in a landslide, have lost it over the perfectly predictable battle in Florida: "It's as if the impeachment debacle created a minimum standard for conservative bile, and now everyone simply takes it for granted that the right-wing press will serve up bitter, resentful, ad hominem attacks on the flimsiest of pretexts."

Norman Solomon says that the Florida recount story is a colossal sideshow: "A convincing case could be made -- but you won't hear it on network television -- that the 2000 presidential election was stolen a long time ago by both of the two major parties."

How Bad has it Gotten? Residents of Gibsonton, FL, winter home to carnies and circus workers, are taking offense at reporters' description of the Florida recount as a 'circus,' 'carnival' or 'sideshow.' Says one: "I've been in circus life for 40 years, and let me tell you, a circus is highly organized and efficient. This election is chaotic."

One of the busiest shopping days of the year is also "Buy Nothing Day." CNN is the only TV network that has agreed to air Adbusters' anti-consumption ad.

Life in the Eye of the Media Hurricane "Tallahassee is kind of a hick town, and so daily our local media reports breathlessly on the influx of cold hard cash into the local beauty-shop industry, as famous TV personalities need somewhere to go every day to get their hair that special kind of poofy."

GOP Slime Time "Knowing that their legal arguments are humbug, the idea is to send out the Peggy Noonans, Mary Matalins and Bill Bennetts of the world to stall for time and rev up the party faithful with half-plausible arguments about the subjectivity of hand recounts and nasty accusations about Democratic thievery."

Knucklehead Beats Egghead Maureen Dowd says that Gore wants the presidency more than the Democrats do and that the Republicans want it more than Bush does.

The riddle of Al Gore, according to one observer, is that the personality alterations that he would have to make to become more likable are very minor: "just delete a pompous phrase here, throw in a wry, self-deflating line there, and take to heart one simple acting lesson‹Quit overacting!"

Christopher Hitchens says that if "Gore and Bush weren't such pygmies, we would be justified in calling Ralph Nader a giant-slayer. It's now up to us to insure citizenship and self-government, where neither pygmies nor giants will be necessary."

Blame Monica! Michael Moore says that it was the Workers World Party's candidate, not Ralph Nader, who cost Al Gore the election.

May the Best Man Lose Frank Rich says that the election tie was the perfect outcome of the cynical, scripted campaign: "And now, thanks to the political, legal and media histrionics of the post-election campaign, our unspoken wish has come true. Both will lose - no matter who is the nominal winner."

The Bush Family Janitor Even though George W. and Barbara Bush blamed James Baker for running Poppy's 1992 reelection bid into the ground, they turned to "the handler" to clean up the mess in Florida.

Life After Crucifixion David Corn looks at what lies ahead for Ralph Nader and the Green Party.

In a public rebuke of the unprecedented funding that conseravative philanthropies have made to push public school privatization upon the nation, voters in California and Michigan delivered a stern, anti-voucher message last Tuesday. The issue itself might now be dead, except for the conservative money and apparat fighting against public school teacher unions.

Blame the Workers World Party! After a ballot access initiative passed two years ago, Florida's ballot went from being perhaps the hardest in the country to get on for third-party presidential candidates to being the easiest.

Nattering Nabobs of Nannyism Writing in the New York Observer, Ron Rosenbaum decries the media "nannies" who are calling for closure and suggesting that Al Gore bow out a gracious loser. "Gore is being told that to give in will be a sign of selflessness, but in fact it will be a sign of selfishness -- doing the nice thing for Al Gore, not for the people he supposedly represented."

Restoring (the family) Trust The Bush monopoly is operating with the same arrogant philosophy as the Microsoft monopoly: You can have all the choice you want (as long as you choose us).

Every Vote(r) Counts! A Virginia man has lodged a complaint with the FEC, alleging that the New York Times repeatedly printed false quotes from Republican press releases that ridicule Al Gore.

No Green for the Greens A post-election look at the Green Party's prospects and Nader's decision to target Florida during the last days of the campaign. Also, hanging out with Ralph on election night.

Would Bush be a Sore Loser? Anyone who thinks that the Gore campaign is overreaching in Florida, should read the Bush campaign's strategy, articulated one week before the election, for dealing with a popular vote victory and an Electoral College defeat.

Jonathan Schell says that when an election winner finally emerges, it will offer no basis for generalizations regarding the public mind: "A foggy campaign has ended in a deep fog, as if the people, not having been offered a true choice, have simply decided not to choose."

When President Clinton made an election day campaign call to WBAI radio in New York, he must have been surprised by the grilling he received on issues of importance to progressives. Calling the tone of the interviewers hostile and combative, Clinton defended his administration and pledged to review the case of Leonard Peltier during a heated and candid discussion.

Running on Empty? Every theory floated by the press about Gore and his campaign was wrong.

Writing in The Guardian, former Random House editor Harold Evans tells British readers: "The credulous press and the cerebrally challenged TV talk shows have been too busy pillorying Gore to ask Bush to reconcile rhetoric and action." He describes the Bush campaign as "one of breath-taking arrogance wrapped up in feel-good bromides."

In a profile of George W. Bush's spokesperson, Karen Hughes, The New Republic reported that during a 1998 interview with the Dallas Morning News, Bush was asked if he had ever been arrested. His response: "After 1968? No." Read Hughes' spin on the lie, an indication of what press relations might be like in a Bush administration.

High Road meets Dead End Only nine months after its debut, CBS pulls the plug on a Chicago newscast that tried to take the fluff out of local TV news. A Chicago Tribune TV critic offers a few ideas for improving a debased genre.

A contributing editor to The Onion phones up Bush headquarters and offers a little prayer for the campaign.

Governor AWOL Reflecting on the values he learned as a Texas Air National Guard pilot, George W. Bush said that it taught him "the responsibility to show up and do your job." But according to a Boston Globe investigation, Bush did neither during the last 18 months of his service.

George W. Bush's vague "strategy" for peace in the Middle East looks like a Nixon trick, but The Nation thinks Bush resembles another, more beloved American icon. Don't miss the campaign's most striking comic image.

Dyed in the Two-Party Wool Until "Ralph the spoiler" stories became ready for prime-time, reporters covering voter disillusionment with the "BuGo" duopoly, seldom mentioned Nader's name.

Failing Upwards Todd Gitlin delivers a pre-election, post-mortem on the free ride that the media has given George W. Bush on his campaign gaffes, misstatements and lies.

No Joke David Letterman proves to be tougher on George W. Bush than many reporters on the campaign trail, grilling the candidate on foreign policy, his environmental record and the death penalty.

"Greens for Gore" is advising undecided Green Party members living in swing states to wait until near the end of Election Day before voting. "If the last minute exit or public opinion polls in your state show Gore or Bush clearly projected to win, then vote Nader. If it's too close or undecided at that point, then vote for Gore,'' says the group's Web site.

Potheads for Highway Safety Science magazine reports the findings of a British study showing that baked commuters really do make better drivers.

The Birth of the Talking Head PBS's "Newshour with Jim Lehrer" premiered 25 years ago this month as "The Robert McNeil Report." MacNeil and Lehrer discuss the storied history of the show and its role in television news.

The Green Monster The Mpls Star Tribune didn't even include Ralph Nader in a mid-June poll, but he has surged to 8% in a just-released poll, helping to turn Minnesota into a battleground state where Bush now leads Gore, 44% to 41%.

Battle of the Bulge The latest issue of Rolling Stone features a cover photo of Al Gore that reportedly had to be airbrushed to conceal the fact that he really is the stiffest candidate.

Nader Concedes Used Car Dealer Vote! Hours after filing a second lawsuit against the debate commission, Ralph Nader was once again turned away from a presidential debate. "By the time I'm finished with the debate commission, its ranking in polls will be below used car dealers," Nader said.

Forgive or Forget? When Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense, his stringent press restrictions during the U.S. invasion of Panama and the gulf war outraged many media organizations. Why have reporters failed to make Cheney's censoring past a campaign issue?

New Yorker editor David Remnick talks to Inside.Com about following Tina Brown, the prospects for the magazine ever turning a profit and when it will go online. Cartoon editor Robert Mankoff says he just wants 30% of the people who see a NYer cartoon to like it, and a new collection by Tom Wolfe includes his two New Yorker-bashing pieces from the 1960's.

Are this year's presidential debates are too civil and Oprah-fied? A creeped-out critic says that Bush's "hangman's grin gives me the willies" and a trendwatcher identifies a staple of debate coverage: the "George W. Bush drool watch." Moderater Jim Lehrer explains why he hasn't voted since 1964.

Life After Commies Soldier of Fortune magazine is celebrating its 25th anniversary, and by extension the career of its founder, Lt. Col. Robert K. Brown (Ret.), a classic American character "who never met a war he didn't like." Brown's picture appears 21 times in the anniversay issue, besting the 15 pics of Oprah that ran in the debut issue of her magazine!

McSweeney's has just published "The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature," supposedly penned by a Zelig-like humorist with a great imagination who may or may not exist.

Is Gore Ready to Rumble? It might seem unlikely after his near-narcoleptic performance in the second debate, but in an interview with Salon's Jake Tapper, Al Gore says the rest of the campaign is "going to be very hot and heavy."

Blocking the Exits Both Slate and Matt Drudge courted controversy by publishing early exit poll results of presidential primaries. What do they have planned for the general election?

Naked Truth The best thing to happen to Russian TV may have been the country's 1998 financial crisis. Cheesy imported programs became too expensive, forcing the Russians to produce their own cheesy shows. But Moscow's hottest "zine" relies on imported talent. It's published by two politically incorrect American expats.

Inside the Death House Since the death penalty was reinstated in the U.S. in 1977, one-third of all executions have taken place in Texas. On October 12th, NPR broadcasts "Witness to an Execution," a chilling documentary that interviews people who have witnessed or participated in the killings.

Bob Herbert of the NY Times reports on Death Penalty Victims: "You will never hear another sound like a mother wailing whenever she is watching her son be executed."

It may be back to ambulance chasing for Carol Marin's experimental (bleed doesn't = lead) newscast in Chicago. A top commentator quits as CBS gets ready to return to a more traditional (unwatchable) approach to local TV news.

As Republicans home in on Al Gore's credibility, read how reporters turned Gore's initiative "During my service in the United States congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet," into Gore's invention.

Political performance artist Danny Hoch talks about his censorship experiences with Rupert Murdoch. Hoch's film "Whiteboys" was buried by Murdoch's Fox Searchlight division, and "Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop" was shelved when Rawkus Records, financed by Murdoch's son, pulled soundtrack clearances.

Hope I die before I get targeted. The AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons) is launching My Generation, a magazine aimed at "baby-boomer seniors" between 50 and 55.

The Contra Club, a group of guerilla filmmakers in Minneapolis, is shooting their own Ralph Nader "Contramericals"some of which are too edgy for the campaign and buying air time to run them in cities where Nader rallies are being held.

What a Joke! Read the line delivered at a Gore/Lieberman fundraiser about George Bush's religion that so offended Dick Cheney and Bill Bennett.

Boston Massacre Slate's Jacob Weisberg says that Bush got his clock cleaned because the first debate was mostly about policy: "Whereas Gore understands policy and can engage in a detailed discussion about it, Bush doesn't and can't." The Other Gore In an interview with Salon, Al Gore's distant cousin, Gore Vidal, discusses the presidential campaign, the corporatization of politics and how America made Ralph Nader boring.

An Australian journalist blasts Yanks covering the Olympics for their laughably clueless reporting confusing kangaroos for wallabys, kookaburras for magpies and thinking that g'day is a greeting, not a farewell.

It's hard to imagine reading USA Today for any reason other than Larry King's column, but a reporter for Las Vegas's City Life picks up his first copy in years, and reflects on the impact that McPaper's "extreme centrism" has had on other newspapers.

How is American Beauty playing in Togo? The Academy Award winner is receiving mixed but interesting reviews around the world, as different cultures offer their own interpretations of what it says about the U.S. and Hollywood.

The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), a lobbying arm for the media congloms, is pushing to knock down the FCC proposal to license low-power radio stations. NAB's annual convention in San Francisco was protested by grass-roots groups trying to take back the airwaves.

Bad News for Good News A Chicago TV critic says that Carol Marin's attempt to deliver a smarter nightly newscast that foregoes sensationalism, synergy and pandering to viewers' lifestyle interests competitors deride it as "PBS on CBS" may be running out of time.

While the mainstream press pays lip service to Ralph Nader, some Internet outlets are covering the candidate daily. Look for Nader to attend at least one of the debates, while supporters plan protests at each of them. Read an interview with his running mate, Harvard-trained economist Winona LaDuke.

Not Another Peep After birders cried foul, CBS has come clean and decided to stop broadcasting canned bird songs during its coverage of golf tournaments.

The DeKathieLee As athletes from around the world compete for Olympic gold in Sydney, young ladies from third world nations showcase their speed and stamina assembling fashion and athletic apparel in a new olympic event inspired by Kathie Lee Gifford.

Who's a Journalist? When the Poynter Institute denied an editor for a trade association publication a spot in a writing seminar, it sparked a debate over how to define a journalist.

America the Blue The U.S. economy is soaring and there are few if any threats to the country's peace and prosperity. So why are so many Americans so depressed?

Is Ralph Nader Dating? Not yet, but a grassroots effort launched by the "Coalition to Find Ralph Nader a Special Someone" hopes to change that.

Democracy Inaction Find out which TV stations in your market are making exorbitant profits from political ads while refusing to offer candidates free air time.

The Web Economy Bullshit Generator allows you to string together random verbs, nouns and adjectives to come up with Internet buzzterms that can be used to attract large sums of venture capital.

Start Making Sense Read one critic's across the political spectrum choices for television's best talking heads.

The Right Whines Eric Alterman says that the cases of John Stossel and Jeff Jacoby expose the "pathetic paranoia that underpin's the right's obsession with an imaginary 'liberal media.'"

Down with Nightline An embarrassingly clueless Nightline report on hip-hop culture misses the mark by about 18 years.

Commodifying Democracy The business of TV is delivering "eyeballs to advertisers," and since political coverage, unlike Ally McBeal for example, doesn't deliver enough eyeballs, politicians must pay to obtain them. "This has made American TV increasingly rich, American politics increasingly corrupt and American voters increasingly ignorant."

A new report from the Center for Public Integrity, titled "Off the Record: What Media Corporations Don't Tell You About Their Legislative Agendas," offers insight into the big bucks lobbying of the media giants.

Voting is for Losers Former globe-trotting CEO and VP candidate Dick Cheney has failed to vote in 14 of 16 Texas elections since 1995, including this year's Republican primary.

"The Spice Girls" are three female reporters who cover the Gore campaign for The New York Times, Washington Post and the Associated Press. They've come under attack by Gore partisans and other journalists for their "attitude" and seeming dislike of the candidate.

Virtual Celebrity The Internet has democratized celebrity, drastically widening the pool of potential candidates and producing online phenoms like Mahir Cagri, Jennifer (JenniCAM) Ringley, Matt Drudge and Cindy Margolis. But until they leverage that notoriety into the real world of TV and Hollywood, Web celebs exist in a vacuum.

The author of The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam, says there is no evidence to support the enduring media myth that soldiers returning from Vietnam were spat upon: "The image of spat-upon veterans is an icon through which the country constructs its memory of the what the war was about and the fictive nature of the icon suggests that America has never come to grips with the war itself."

Wal-MartSucks.com The Internet has made it a bad idea to rub disgruntled customers the wrong way. It's estimated that at least half of all Fortune 500 companies have inspired complaint Web sites.

The False Advertising Gallery covers the commercial waterfront with an amazing array of parody ads from the likes of StarSucks, Shitibank, Calvin Klone, Killsbury, Baby Gasp, Lucifer Technologies, Scamway and TicketBastard.

After striking a deal to make The New York Times the only national paper in its 2,200 U.S. locations, Starbucks is banning all free local papers, saying that it wants to reduce clutter and improve the asthetic quality of its stores. Alt-weekly publishers say Starbucks is selling out the community.

gorewillsayanything.com View the Republican's long-awaited character assault on Al Gore, and decide for yourself if it's the "tongue-in-cheek" treatment that George W. Bush claims it is.

Mediachannel.org presents a must-read package on "the hidden disease of American electoral democracy," that explores the interwoven relationships between media industries and politicians and examines the candidates' positions on media policy.

The Alliance for Better Campaigns is launching a new Web site called greedytv.org, to let voters know which TV stations are pledging to give candidates free air-time and which ones are just making a quick buck from democracy.

The ME in Media In many ways we are defined by what we consume, "but we are defined especially by our media, which speaks, after all, to our very consciousness." What do your media choices say about you?

Net Partisans Small-circulation magazines with a political agenda are beefing up their online component to benefit from election-year interest.

Norman Solomon says that the beauty of the two-party media system is that it makes sure that democracy doesn't get out of hand.

Reverend Billy, a "self-ordained orator for the cynical and sidelined," preaches the gospel of anti-consumerism to his flock at New York City's Church of Stop-Shopping.

Multi-Level Manipulation A literary agent representing Amway co-founder Rich DeVos, attempted to get his client's book, "Hope From My Heart: 10 Lessons for Life," on the New York Times' best-seller list by ordering 18,000 copies from bookstores that report sales to the list keepers.

The AP reporter who broke an anonymously sourced story about a grand jury being impaneled to hear evidence against President Clinton, followed it up with stories about Democratic accusations that Republicans were behind the leak, even though he knew the true identity of the leaker, an Appellate Court judge. Dan Rather had his own (wrong) ideas about the leaker.

Lost Cause In spite of the presence of 15,000 media members at the Democratic convention, coverage of protestors and their issues was limited to police confrontations and arrests.

Another Los Angeles event given short shrift by mainstream media was the Shadow Convention, where Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold spoke on the corrupting influence of corporate money. Read transcripts of all the speeches, which were much more provocative, entertaining and enlightening than anything delivered at the Staples Center.

It's Time for Them to Go Cheap punditry has replaced expensive reporting, as rapid-response, televised political coverage increasingly focuses on the irrelevant and the obvious.

Novelist Steve Erickson says that American politics has declared war on the pursuit of pleasure.

More Rupert! As if America's broadcast television landscape isn't barren enough, Rupert Murdoch has just purchased a number of UPN stations and is planning a Fox 2 network.

If you're in the habit of reading Larry King's USA Today column for comic relief, you'll enjoy this parody of a parody.

In 1996 Bill Clinton paid $2 per vote to win the presidency. Now a Maryland man is auctioning off his vote on e-Bay.

Free Publicity. Priceless! Ralph Nader told MasterCard to "lighten up," after it filed a $15 million lawsuit against his campaign, asserting that the purpose of the candidate's parody TV commercial was "to take advantage of the famous reputation enjoyed by MasterCard."

It's the Merchandising Stupid! One political observer says that since we relate better as shoppers than as voters, Al Gore should quit reintroducing himself to the American people and just release a series of "collectible plates," featuring his image and his obsessions.

The ABC's of Checkbook Journalism ABC paid an attorney $25,000 to convince Kenneth Starr's office to relax an immunity agreement that barred Monica Lewinsky from talking to the media. Her subsequent interview on "20/20" was the most-watched news program ever broadcast by a single network, generating $20 million in ad revenue.

Me, Inc. A "personal branding guru," and co-author of a new book, Brand Yourself, is redefining and corporatizing the vocabulary of self-empowerment, by trying to convince people to think of themselves as "products for sale."

The Naderite Next Door Want to know which political candidates your neighbors are supporting? A snoop-friendly Web site allows you to search political contributors by zip code.

The Killa in Da Grilla An Australian invention called "roo bars," designed to protect a truck's front end in a collision with a kangaroo, has become a hot accessory on SUVs, and a fatal threat to pedestrians.

Priceless Truth Ralph Nader unveils his first TV ad, a take-off on Mastercard's "there are some things that money can't buy" campaign. The spot, created by Twin Cities' adman Bill Hillsman, is playing to rave reviews from political pundits.

The New York Observer's Philip Weiss says that the Republican convention offered further proof that they're running away from the "C" word, conservative, and that "George W. Bush's traditional base is on board, but a good part of Gore's base could give a shit." David Corn says that it was one tall tale after another at the "GOP's Lie-apalooza."

Suite Talk The real action at the Republican convention wasn't on the floor, but in the corporate sky boxes. Said one CEO: "Being a delegate distracts you from really getting into the convention."

Pump, Pump, Pump A media critic is "creeped-out" by recent developments in TV news, where a CBS news reader hosts a prime-time game show and "cross-promotion" and "vertical integration" have replaced journalistic ethics. Has CBS been negotiating with the estate of Shirley Jackson to turn "The Lottery" into a prime-time reality game?

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow As corporations buy up TV stations and pile up debt, the role of outside consultants, who offer advice on everything from helicopters to an anchor's hair color, is being minimized.

What's Ralph Nader's secret weapon? According to Slate's Scott Shuger, it's "the world's greatest political adman." In an AP interview, Nader says the Democrats, "sunk in the same pit of corporate cash" as the Republicans, have themselves to blame if he costs Gore the election. And Robert McChesney, author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy, tells why he's voting for Nader.

Al Gore's senior thesis at Harvard was on the inevitable collision of television and politics, and his prescient examples were a telegenic president (JFK) and his stiff, less-telegenic vice-president, (LBJ).

Streaming Audio In what some have described as a piss-poor promotion, ABC is installing high-tech billboards above restroom urinals, where, according to Variety, users will hear Norm MacDonald making various toilet jokes and promoting his series, Norm.

Michael Moore tells the 100 million non-voting Americans who "refuse to haul themselves to some smelly elementary school gym to participate in a Soviet-style election with no friggin' choice on the ballot," that it's their turn to make history.

While media pundits like to talk about the optimism of the American people, depicting the U.S.A. as the global headquarters for hope, Norman Solomon says that a majority of the population remains pessimistic about the future.

Media Watchdog Has Rabies The Village Voice wants to know why Steven Brill's Contentville, is selling writer's work without their permission, including Voice' articles that are available for free on the paper's Web site.

Well-Heeled Dick Cheney's stint as Secretary of Defense was the perfect training-ground for his job as CEO of a company that sells oil well drilling services. Going through that revolving door has made him worth more than $40 million.

Students For Sale A high school student tells what happened when he tried to voice his displeasure with Youth News Network, a "news" service that pipes commericals into classrooms.

Blow-Dried Survivors The union representing employees at a CBS affiliate in Kansas City has filed a complaint, because on-air talent is being forced to participate in promotional spots for Survivor that blur the line between news and entertainment. At Minneapolis' WCCO, there's no line left to blur.

Advertising Hurts Rice Krispies Treats has jumped on the bandwagon of a new trend called "ouch advertising," with spots featuring a severed limb, snap-crackle-and popping off of the body of a subway rider.

While George W. Bush promises to "restore honor and integrity to the Oval Office," David Corn says that there wasn't much of either in the office Clinton inherited, it's just that the elder Bush was a more acomplished liar than Clinton.

Read an interview with Nader's VP choice, Winona LaDuke. And Tom Tomorrow asks: A Third Party? Has the world gone mad?

Gotta Give to Receive It will cost Democrats and Republicans about $60 million in private donations to stage their conventions. Read a list of the corporate sponsors and what they hope to get for their giving. Then read about Arianna Huffington's Shadow Conventions, convened to raise issues that don't appeal to billionaires for Bush or Gore: campaign finance reform, child poverty, income inequality and the failed war on drugs.

A flap over a Playboy mansion fundraiser during the Democratic Convention, continues a new wave of attention being showered on Hugh Hefner. Writing in Slate, David Plotz analyzes the bizarre media revival of Hef, the "Unfrozen Caveman Swinger, cryogenically preserved since the 70s."

Lyin Times? Ken Starr's former spokesman, Charles Bakaly, admits to being a source for a New York Times article suggesting that Bill Clinton could be indicted while still president. But the Times has come under fire for stating in the article that Bakaly "declined to discuss the matter."

Content Conglomerate Suck and Feed have combined to form Automatic Media. Can the new CEO, a 17-year veteran of the cable TV industry, turn these editorially-driven sites into moneymakers?

Do Bush and Gore Make You Wanna Ralph? Adman Bill Hillsman, who sold Minnesotans on Jesse Ventura, has signed-on to convince Americans to buy into Ralph Nader. Before taking the assignment, he tallked to Salon about his strategies for outsider candidates. Listen to Nader's July 18th speech to the National Press Club.

A new book, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, says that "Anticorporatism is the brand of politics erupting in the imagination of the next generation of troublemakers."

Bull, "the first prime time series about the new economy," premieres in August on TNT. A critic questions the attraction of basic-cable actors dramatizing the eternal struggle between supply and demand.

Reality Bites In a News Hour segment on reality TV, a Poynter Institute representative says a major complaint of local news anchors, is that they're being asked to shill for entertainment programs that are produced by the same companies that own their news divisions.

Celebrity Bigots What do Don Imus, Eminem and Dr. Laura have in common? The Voice's Richard Goldstein says they're stoking America's "brotherhood of bigotry," a powerful counterculture for whom it's hip to hate. Read about the new gender hybrid that dominates talk radio: the male hysteric.

Vote Count Is it rational to vote for a candidate who can't win? Slate looks at the pros and cons of sending a message.

"CBS News" becomes "News of CBS" CBS has blurred the lines between entertainment and news with its incessant shilling for Survivor and Big Brother, making the once-vaunted news division a joke among critics. The Synergistic shenanigans at CBS come from the top.

William Greider says that Nader's provocative ideas may be viewed as over-the-top radical by campaign reporters, but will sound like common sense to lots of citizens. And a critic asks: "Why are the 'piggy Lords' who run The New York Times editorial page dissing Nader? (last item in column)

American Journalism Review takes readers inside "the new newsroom," as newspapers struggle to remain relevant in the age of electronic media.

Along for the Ride Given the homogenization of the radio landscape, the increased corporatization of college-radio,and MTV's relegation of music videos to early morning hours, indie music's last, best chance for a fair hearing is now backgrounding a car commercial.

The operating principle of Strip Poker, a show on the USA Network, is that "anyone can be trusted to debase herself simply because she has been granted five minutes of camera time."

FuckYouAndTheStartupYouRodeInOn.com An underground group of disgruntled dot-com workers, who challenge the hyping of everything Internet-related, recently announced a name change: from KillTheDot.com to BlowTheDotOutYourAss.com.

In a wide-ranging interview on PBS's Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Ralph Nader tells the two main parties: "If you don't shape up, you're going to shrink down." The Newshour's pundicrats analyze Nader's surprising momentum and the responsive chord that his candidacy is striking with voters and the media, while Slate's pundit asks: Is Nader a Spoiler or a Savior?

Product Placement Takes Off In an unlikely, first of its kind product placement, a clothing company has struck a deal with a porn producer to provide free duds in exchange for logo exposure in adult films.

Citizens for Better Medicare is a sham grassroots organization of seedy direct-mail operatives and industry-funded research and lobbying groups, that is spending $65 million on TV commercials in an attempt to keep drug prices high.

Everyone's a Media Critic Zapatista' Subcommandante Marcos issues a communique on the Mexican presidential election, challenging an undemocratic process where the media have replaced citizens as the voice of the people.

This year's convention of alternative newsweeklies was held at the luxurious Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, alongside a big bucks fundraiser for George W. Bush. A former alt weekly editor says that in spite of some remarkable fashion differences--green sportcoat, meet green hair--the two groups have a lot in common, they're both fat and happy.

PR Unspun In a dozen provocative articles that illustrate the pervasiveness of PR, the Media Channel poses the question: "Public relations: Misleading the public or letting them lead?"

Sometime between the early and mid-1990s, the prevailing media wisdom shifted, and twentysomethings went from underachieving slackers to can-do dot commers. The period produced a bumper crop of magazines, Might, Herrmenaut, and The Baffler, started by people in their twenties, who were dedicated to challenging the media stereotypes that defined their generation.

A bill that makes it a crime for government employees to leak classified information to the media has passed the Senate Select Intelligence Committee.

How A Caged Bird Learns to Sing John Leonard's varied resume includes stints as editor of The New York Times Book Review and television critic for CBS's Sunday Morning Show. He addresses how issues of self-censorship and media ethics have framed his career, and what compromises a journalist must make to survive within the pillars of the media establishment.

Two expatriate Americans who publish a gonzo tabloid in Moscow, say that life in Russia not only does wonders for the libido, but has also freed their success-obsessed American souls. "Obviously we went to Russia for the very simple reason that in Russia it's O.K. to be a loser and a failure. Being a fuckup there is your right, and that's even valued in that culture, it makes you human."

Cold New World Eric Alterman surveys the dot com news site fallout and fears that it will be difficult to survive without a deep-pocketed corporate media parent.

Boston Phoenix media critic Dan Kennedy says that the secret to news site survival on the Web is to be small, passionate and cheap.

Brand Ball A public interest group is lobbying sportswriters to quit referring to ballparks and stadiums by their corporately-sponsored names.

Noam Chomsky is interviewed on mass media, globalization and the public mind.

A new advertising campaign from Nike casts the company as a source of social enlightenment by taking pro sports to task for paying men more than women. Of course, Nike employs the same pay disparity for its "human billboards."

Read about the dot com news shakeout, including Salon's cutbacks.

USA Today profiles the paper that mocks its appooach to news coverage.

Creepy Advertising Manhattan has become a victim of "ad creep," with entire buildings being covered by advertising murals. An anti-commerical group has plotted the eyesores and come up with a map of the damage.

Half-Empty Two years after the controversy broke surrounding Stephen Glass's fabricated articles for The New Republic, the magazine was surprised to find that his fictions were still available on its Web site.

Conventional Humor A writer admits that her company made a serious lapse in judgement by sending her to a pharmaceutical convention, where she lampoons the silliness at the heart of industry trade shows.

"You shall have no other Gods before media synergy," is the first of the "Virtual Ten Commandments of the Dot-Com Faith."

A Salon article, alleging that FoxNews.com employees are leaving because of pressure to toe Fox News Channel's right-wing party line, is seconded by a former deputy editor of the site, who calls Rupert Murdoch "a bilious old jackass."

A number of recent articles have bemoaned the proliferation of media critics who write self-referential commentary about their favorite subject. Newswatch's Trevor Buterworth says that this is just more reporting on the booming business of media, and that true critical voices are still extremely rare.

The Datsun and the Shoe Tree The American Prospect parodies the free trade rantings of The New York Times's Thomas Friedman. (Thomas L. Freetrademan)

Drug War Television is awash in ads for prescription drugs, but it's nothing compared to the hard sell that pharmaceutical companies put on doctors. While drug makers justify high prices by pointing to astronomical research and development costs, the real money is in the marketing.

Read an excerpt from BOBO's in Paradise, a new book that says the merging of the bohemian and bourgeois sensibilities marks the end of America's culture clash.

The Publisher of 'O', a German fetish lifestyle magazine, says that Oprah Winfrey stole his trademarked name for her new magazine. Read his cease and desist letter to Oprah's publisher.

One of advertising's hottest new stars is the grim reaper, now appearing in an astonishing array of TV spots, as marketers weave the stuff of ultimate dread into the banal, commodified everyday.

A reporter tags along with former Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards on his final free days before the Feds lowered the boom. America's wittiest politician is facing up to 250 years on corruption convictions.

After Dark, Before MTV When Politically Incorrect broadcast a week of shows from "The Mansion," it was paying homage to Playboy After Dark, a late 60's relic that aired at a time when viewers could still be expected to have an attention span longer than 15 seconds

As far as television goes, Jesus Christ has never been hotter. The supplicants at Teevee.org conduct a phoner with the superstar.

Hack Attack Journalists used to go out in the real world and find interesting stories to report. Now they increasingly write about themselves and their fabulous friends and colleagues in the media biz.

Microsoft's online magazine Slate has fingered its boss's software as the root cause of the Love Bug virus.

Take Larry King (Please!) Norman Solomon says that concerns about the Love Bug virus easily spreading in a Microsoft monoculture, should also raise concerns about our mass media monoculture.

Executive Birds Corporate jets, once the ultimate symbol of executive privelege, have given way to a new generation of opulently-appointed ego platforms that resemble flying hotel suites. Why aren't the traditionally publicity-hungry aircraft manufacturers sharing clients names with the media?

The Schmios are the anti-awards to the ad industry's Clio Awards. Read about the entertaining presentation ceremony and the big losers.

The winners of this year's Webby Awards have been announced. Best news site goes to Medianews.org, and founder Jim Romenesko gets celebrity treatment in New York magazine.

Bottom Line Journalism In a new poll by the Pew Research Center, four in ten journalists admit to purposely avoiding newsworthy stories or lightening their coverage to benefit the interests of the news organizations they work for.

TomPaine.com's recent controversial ads in The New York Times have taken on the paper for its one-sided op-ed coverage of the IMF/World Bank protests, and blasted Don Imus's racial slurs, accusing a number of big-name journalists of complicity for appearing regularly on his show.

A reporter finds the dirty little secret of cable internet access: it's very simple to hack your neighbor's computer.


Stupid and Stupider American movies have a long tradition of putting down brains and revering the goof, the idiot and the loser. A conference on intellect and ideology in media culture explores why Hollywood has such a difficult time with intelligence.

Writing about the 20th Anniversary of "Nightline," Eric Alterman says that while it's by far the best news show in the business, it could do much more to shape the way that television covers news.

e-Bay of Pigs Bidding was halted on e-Bay for a raft that the seller claimed was the one on which Elian Gonzalez and his mother attempted to cross from Cuba to Florida. With a high bid of $1.5 million, it was one of 125 pieces of Elian memorabilia for sale on eBay.

The National Magazine Awards have been announced and the big winner is The New Yorker with three awards: General Excellence, Public Interest and Fiction.

ATM meets MTV On the theory that too much TV is never enough, Wells Fargo is adding commercials, news and movie trailers to their ATM machines.

Bush-League Interviewer When the "McNeil Lehrer Newshour" became the "Newshour with Jim Lehrer," broadcast journalism lost one of its best interviewers in Robert McNeil. A critic says that after watching Lehrer's softball interview with George W. Bush, PBS has become the Polite Broadcasting System.

Cash Cow 2000 Broadcast networks and their local affiliates will be the major beneficiaries of a record $600 million in revenue from political spots this election year. And what are they offering in return? Less coverage than ever before, as the sales manager, not the news director, now occupies the most important political desk on the premises.

Wazzup Elian? A Web site that uses Budweiser's "Wazzup" commercials to parody the government's snatching of Elian Gonzalez, was shuttered after the Associated Press, intent on policing copyright infringement of its "Elian abduction" photos, threatened legal action. But the AP backed-off after being overwhelmed with e-mail protests.

The Onion has obtained a copy of Elian's schedule for the day before he was seized by federal agents.

From Penthouse to Flophouse Bob Guccione's soft-core empire is in dire financial straits, raising doubts that he'll be able to keep it up through the end of the year. That prompts one observer to ask: "Is Guccione the only man alive who can't make a buck selling sex?"

Viewer's Bill of Rights With the May sweeps upon us, local newscasts are once again trafficking in sensational and trivial reports designed to boost short-term ratings. As an antidote, a television research firm has fashioned the results of a national survey into a manifesto for local news viewers.

Reformer With Results A recently released poll finds Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader running third, with almost twice as much support as Pat Buchanan. If Nader is excluded from the presidential debates, anti-corporate globalization activists could descend on the debate sites, with protests similar to the ones staged in Seattle and Washington D.C.

Nader's Green Machine Supporters say: "Let's get this party started!"

Ralph Nader, Arianna Huffington and Mark Crispin Miller discuss the state of advertising and the corrosive effect it has on a culture that's awash in it. They were all presenters at the 4th annual Schmio Awards, a send-up of the advertising industry's Clio Awards.

Expert Schmexpert Television newscasters routinely and cavalierly toss around the word "expert" without identifying the person's particular area of expertise. Of course, the expert is often just someone with a vested interest in the story being reported.

Elian is Hell The New York Times' Miami bureau chief says the Elian story is "the dumbest thing I've ever covered. Some people think hell is a place where you wake up in the morning in a bed of coals. I think it's where you wake up and find out you'll be writing about Elian for the next 643 days."

O.J. Here He Comes! Newswatch.org reports that Elian has now surpassed Princess Di and JFK Jr. in "celebrity coverage" on the network newscasts, leaving him second only to O.J.

An Esquire magazine parody profiles FreeWheelz, a company that gives away free minivans emblazoned with feminine hygiene ads. But the joke was lost on real companies with similar business models and ad agencies wanting to get in on the action.

Brands "R" Us. What does it mean when every product, person or thought presented in the media comes with its own marketing campaign?

CNN Meets the Enemy While independent media outlets spend plenty of time bashing their corporate big brothers, it's a rare--and revealing--occasion when CNN reports on its antagonizers.

A dispute has erupted in the alternative press over Project Censored. Its annual list of the 25 most overlooked stories has become a journalistic staple, but recent inclusions are drawing criticism.

Are you sick of getting your news from cosmetic-caked talking heads who bear little resemblance to real people? Try Ananova, a British export with no such pretensions. She's billed as the world's first virtual newscaster.

Whatever It Takes The presidential candidate who appears ready to spend everything, claims that his opponent will "say anything to get elected." Political writers are debating Bush's use of that catch-phrase, which he recently reeled off four times in a 20-minute speech, after polls and focus groups indicated that it effectively exploits a Gore weakness.

Pundit's Stock Plunges Read what the author of the book "Dow 36,000" and other observers of the new economy are saying about the carnage on Wall Street.

Dam Shame Environmentalists protesting the construction of China's gigantic Three Gorges Dam, which has been called the "Chernobyl of hydroelectric," have launched a media campaign urging consumers to boycott the Discover Card, because the company that issues it, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, is financing the project.

Are you looking for an antidote to cynicism? Try the super-positive world of infomercial king and modern messiah, Anthony Robbins.

School House Hype As the one-year anniversary of Columbine approaches, education officials and police have stepped-up their campaign against school violence. But new statistics show that there's no increase in violence, just a lot of media-hype about it.

Boxed-In Activist groups have been carrying on a three-year campaign against "big box" retailers in Flagstaff, AZ. Protestors have become a fixture at a Barnes and Noble store there, regularly picketing it, while handing out maps to local independent bookstores and coffee shops.

Above It All Jim Hightower comments on helicommuting, the latest craze that lets the well-to-do rise above the traffic snarls that make earth-bound life such a drag.

Pulitzer OverSite The Online Journalism Review says that a number of excellent Web sites fit the Pulitzer's criteria for what a newspaper is, and that they should be considered for future prizes.

Loving Elian Like No Other While the made-for-TV drama surrounding little Elian Gonzalez has led to a national obsession with his plight, the media spotlight does not shine so brightly on America's poor children, whose daily existence is too downbeat and humdrum for prime time.

Poor people of any age are seldom interviewed in the media, but Eric Alterman says that there are some outlets--mostly print--that do a good job of telling their story.

Felonious Floridians In spite of a seemingly insatiable media demand for all things Elian--especially cute photo-ops and a steady stream of anti-Castro invective from his keepers--only scant attention has been paid to the criminal past of his extended Miami family and rabble rousing hangers-on.

As Not Seen on TV The Schmios, a satirical response to the advertising industry's Clio awards, skewer irresponsible ads and recognize achievements in the war against eventual forehead branding. The 4th annual awards ceremony will not be televised.

Corporate News When TV newscasts in Seattle reported on a new study concluding that the Internet has a positive impact on children--contradicting most studies on the subject--it failed to report that Microsoft had funded it. Seattle's alternative weekly, The Stranger, looks at how corporations infiltrate newsrooms.

In a tribute to American ingenuity, a company has developed the "Hunter Orange Wallet." It is intended to stop police officers in New York City from mistaking unarmed citizen's wallets for handguns.

Project Censored has just announced its Top 25 Censored Stories of 1999. The three media stories include one by former CNN correspondent, Peter Arnett, who examines what's behind the alarming decrease in foreign news coverage by US media.

Editorial Crack Salon reports that the scandal over TV networks submitting scripts to the drug czar's office for approval, also involves six major magazines, including The Sporting News, U.S. News and World Report and Parade. If the articles were deemed "on-message," the magazines qualified for advertising credits from the government.

Smoked Out Drug czar accuses Salon writer of being pro-drugs.

Celebrity News You might think that any news program voted the favorite of TV Guide's readers would be embarrassed to admit it, but that's not the case when the "winner" is Entertainment Tonight.

CNN's Pentagon Correspondents During the final days of the war in Kosovo, several officers from a U.S. Army covert propaganda group worked at CNN headquarters in Atlanta. The story was first reported in Dutch and French publications, but it has received little coverage in the U.S.

Lab Rat High As companies try to win over consumers at an ever younger age, cash-starved high schools have come to resemble giant marketing labs. An outfit called YouthStream Media Networks boasts that they "surround the young adult market" with marketing programs that are "leveraged" by more than 7,000 high schools.

C is for Commercialization Sesame Street once ended its program with a line like, "this show has been brought to you by the letter Z and the number 2." Now it's "Pfizer brings parents the letter Z--as in Zithromax." How have these blatantly commercial messages, which are at odds with FCC regulations, wormed their way onto children's public TV?

Mr. Hoch Goes to Hollywood Hip-hop performance artist Danny Hoch details his outrageous experiences with TV networks and movie studios, in attempting to develop multi-cultural programming that goes beyond stereotypes.

Intellectual Strip Mining A noted biographer says that her work is regularly ripped-off by big magazines and film companies to satisfy their insatiable need for inexpensive content. Christopher Hitchens answers her charges with a particularly vitriolic response.

Capitalism Gets a Human Face Social critic Jeremy Rifkin says that human relationships, not goods and services, are the basic commodity of the Internet economy, resulting in more and more of daily life being held hostage to the bottom line.

Read an interview with Rifkin on "Commidifying the Human Experience."

Out-of-Print Newsstands that sell out-of-town papers have seen a significant fall-off in sales, as readers flock to the Internet for news that takes days or weeks to reach them in print.

The infotainment media's exploitation of Jon Benet Ramsey's murder moves into full gear--again. This time around it's two made for TV movies and a book tour by the parents, that includes a FIVE-PART interview on the Today show and TWO consecutive nights on Larry King Live.

Stopdrlaura.com Activists have taken to the Internet to stop a planned TV version of Dr. Laura's hate-mongering radio program.

The Race of a Lifetime Even with the beginning of a Presidential campaign, the all-news cable channels have been losing audience over the last few months. Faced with the longest--and potentially most boring--race in television history, to what lengths will they go to attract viewers?

At least nine NBC affiliates have banned  the cartoon series God, the Devil and Bob, bowing to pressure from religious groups who suggest that the portrayal of God--an amiable character who looks like the late Jerry Garcia--is offensive.

No Business but Show Business In 1999, U.S. movies earned about $30 billion out of a global take of $33 billion. How did Hollywood come to so thoroughly monopolize the world's cinematic stage and what are the cultural and political consequences of its dominance?

Durst Case Scenario Political comic Will Durst rebels against "awards season," by offering his list of winners for outstanding (under) achievement in the news. 

Off Life Support The difficulty of profitably publishing a general interest magazine in a special interest world has taken its toll on Life magazine, which is folding for the second time in its 64-year history.

Avon for the Information Age If infomercials are windows on the national unconscious, the "Internet Tool Box" come-on, which promises an e-commerce business for only $49.95, is required viewing for anyone hoping to tap into the Zeitgeist.

Truth be Told With McCain and Bush claiming the mantle of Ronald Reagan, Eric Alterman offers up a reminder of the Gipper's habits of invention, forgetfulness and bald-faced lying. 

Televising the Revolution Award-winning anchor Carol Marin is trying to turn Chicago's low-rated CBS' news into the rarest of media vehicles: a local TV newscast that you can watch without cringing. Read about her first day on the job. 

The Hierarchy of Hotness John Seabrook, a writer for The New Yorker, documents the shift in American cultural values that coincided with Tina Brown's tenure at the magazine. Read a review of Seabrook's new book, "Nobrow: The Culture or Marketing, The Marketing of Culture."  

With entire cable networks now devoted to confrontational kibitzkrieg, The McLaughlin Group, the grandaddy of gasbag punditocracy, has lost its uniqueness and its edge. Ratings are down and former panelists admit that they no longer watch the show. 

Dearly Disconnected As callers rack up the cell phone minutes, endlessly and self-importantly chattering away, Ian Frazier waxes nostalgic about the romantic memories invoked by the lowly pay phone.

What's a Guru to Do? After his "Today" show interview was shelved, Deepak Chopra says that an NBC producer told him that we was "too brainy" for the show.  

Britian's Independent Television News, the largest commercial news broadcaster outside of the U.S., has riled free speech advocates by suing tiny Living Marxism magazine over its claims that ITN doctored 1992 footage of Bosnian war prisoners.

Is Prozac Driving Wall Street? With 20 million Americans on antidepressants, a University of Michigan professor theorizes that investor caution is being inhibited by psychotropic drugs, which are responsible for keeping the bear mood at bay. 

Ralph Nader announces another presidential run, vowing not to "spend a nickel on polling, consulting firms or TV ads." While his forty-year record as a real reformer puts the other wanna-bes in the race to shame, will he run a serious campaign this time around?

Nader says that the beneficiaries of Rudy Giuliani's corporate socialism are New York's big media and financial companies.

I've Been Drudged! MSNBC gossip columnist Jeannette Walls has come under fire from Matt Drudge, who she calls a closeted gay, in her new book about the people who have been responsible for the tabloidization of the media. 

TV News Dials 911 A media watchdog group in the Bay Area gives newspapers high marks for relevance, while television news gets a D+ for its overreliance on 911 stories which offer good visuals. 

Prime-Time Propagandist In an ethically questionable arrangement with ABC News, a right-wing foundation has taken the network's specials that are anchored by conservative reporter John Stossel and turned them into classroom study guides. And after researching Stossel's television reports, FAIR asks, Has ABC News given up on accuracy?

McCain's Walking Mate After 14 months on the road, 89-year-old Granny D.'s cross-country walk for campaign finance reform ends in Washington D.C. on February 29th. Read her essay on the need to do away with money in politics and then cheer her on at grannyd.com.

Is the Internet a leveler of the journalistic playing field or a launching pad for rumor mongers? A forum on mediachannel.org explores the issue in a special package on Net news coverage.

Hand-to-Brand Fighting Although the motives behind the recent wave of hack attacks are unclear, one writer speculates that they're the work of anti-corporate "Brandinista's," an Internet version of anti-sweatshop activists rappelling off the side of Niketown, or eco-warriors pulling up Monsanto's genetically modified crops.

From Soup to Nuts Read about the Web site that exposed multi-millionaire Rick Rockwell's secret past and the ex-girlfriend who says: "He wouldn't go out [to dinner] unless he had a coupon and then only to places like Souplantation." Finally, the last word on Darva and Rick's media manueverings. 

Mega Media Bill Moyers bemoans journalism's obsession with celebrities, its need for speed over accuracy and the proliferation of opinion and speculation over reporting. The culprit? Megacorporations making megamergers in search of megaprofits. 

Literary Sweatshop The New Yorker was surprised to learn that the results of a literary contest that it sponsored were tabulated at a maquiladora in Ciudad Juarez, but this kind of high-tech data work, called "informatics," is gaining a foothold in low-wage nations.

Pager Pranks Reporters who cover the President were simultaneously paged with the message, "Please call Alexandria Hospital Emergency Room." Fifty of them did, only to find out that they may have been the victim of a well-orchestrated prank.

Pitch Imperfect As media types become celebrities in their own right, many journalists are using their fame to pitch products. Some media ethicists are calling it the profession's "fastest-growing" ethical dilemna. 

Woe is Me(dia) Andy Rooney has a few thing to get off his chest: cost-cutting and greed are eroding the quality and reputation of the news media, reporters are just as bored by the Monica and O.J.-type mega-stories as the rest of us, and why isn't anyone paying attention to Poland? 

How Free is Free Speech? A judge's recent ruling that Northwest Airlines could confiscate and search the computers of employees suspected of e-organizing a sickout, serves as a reminder that while the First Amendment prohibits governmental interference in speech, it says nothing about commercial interference.

With more than 9,000,000 Web sites to choose from, why the media hysteria over a handful being shuttered for a few hours?

It's Only Money Ray Suarez leads a discussion--with an Internet entrepeneur, an ethicist, a screenwriter and a cultural critic--on the impact that the economic boom is having on America's values.

News You Can Use Carol Marin, the anchor who quit her job over the hiring of Jerry Springer, hopes to revive a moribund CBS newscast in Chicago. With nothing to lose in the ratings race, she plans to make it everything that local TV news isn't: insightful, analytical and synergy-free.

Meet the New Boss Last year the sports industry--not including recreational activities--grossed a staggering $213 billion, seven times as much as the movies. How did sports come to so thoroughly dominate other forms of entertainment?

SUCK announces a makeover that will "pull the plug on the mockery machine," and put the once smartass Web site in sync with the mainstreaming of the Internet and every other media fad.

Double Trouble A California woman has filed suit against DoubleClick, asking the court to prevent the online ad giant from collecting personal information on Web site visitors without their prior consent.

After realizing that very little of the gay bashing at rallies for right-wing presidential candidates is reported in the media, Dan Savage, the gay sex columnist, decided to infiltrate the Gary Bauer campaign and extract his revenge.

Savage Response Thousands of readers questioned Savage's actions, while Salon editor David Talbot says it's the kind of "gonzo journalism" that an Internet magazine ought to embrace.

Yellow Journalism Now that media entrepeneurs are part of the celebrity pantheon, is it possible that even a mogul who made his fortune on nerdy properties like the Yellow Pages can become the next Jann Wenner? 

Battling Babe Hounds Stranger than fiction and only in America, this is the story of an Internet flame war that led to a court battle between two men, each claiming to be the reigning king--through books and seminars--of teaching guys how to get laid.

Signs of Life A number of new titles suggests that there may be a quiet renaissance in literary magazines. Could the recurring reports on the death of literature, once again prove to be premature?

Columbia Journalism Review releases it's mostly white guy list of America's top-ten magazine editors.

Double Dealing Pharmaceutical companies spent almost a billion dollars on advertising in 1999, much of it on Zyban, a smoking cessation drug. What the ads don't reveal, is that Zyban doubles as an anti-depressant, under the name Wellbutrin.    

After Newsweek pulled an excerpt from a biography of Al Gore that focused on the VP's pot-smoking past, the story's main source started speaking out. Gore's former friend and newspaper colleague says he wants to clear his conscience and protest the White House's failed drug policy. 

Tokin Investigation The Tennessean, where Gore worked in the early 70s, took the charges seriously and interviewed three-dozen of his former co-workers in search of a smoking bong.

Foxes Guarding the Henhouse A PBS News hour report looks at the impact that media consolidation and alliances among major news outlets are having on journalism.

Big is Beautiful A writer argues that critics of corporate mergers have it all wrong and that we're living in the Golden Age of media.

This Game is Fixed While hometown media routinely cheerlead for the on-field performance of local sports teams, their Babbitt-like boosterism also extends to off-field "wins," such as publicly-funded stadiums. 

The Carpetbag Bowl Super Bowl XXXIV was between two teams whose owners drove their franchises into the ground, and then packed-up and moved-on to financially greener pastures.

Snow Job Fortunate Son, the discredited biography that claims George W. Bush was arrested for cocaine possession, is loaded with anonymous sources and written by a felon whose previous work includes trivia books on The X-Files and Lost in Space. How did it ever get published? 

What's more troubling: the journalistic sins of Fortunate Son or the publisher's decision to recall the book and burn the remaining copies?

Virtual Branding When Dan Rather anchored the CBS Evening News from Times Square last month, the network used video-insertion technology to place billboards for CBS programs in the background. Radio stations are using another new technology, appropriately called "Cash," to speed up the voices of callers to talk shows, making room for more commercials. 

Since digital manipulation is here to stay, it may be time to get over the old school sentimentality about the sanctity of the image.

CBS News President says no problemo to deceptive use of new technology, but others disagree. 

In spite of being disparged as "Luddite wackos" by the mainstream press, William Greider predicts that the WTO protesters could have a major impact on future economic policy. 

What were they smoking? A Salon investigation uncovers a scheme in which popular TV series--including ER, Beverly Hills 90210, and Chicago Hope--were paid by the White House Drug Czar's office to weave anti-drug motifs into their shows. The office approved, and in some cases altered, the scripts, leaving the networks open to payola charges for not disclosing the arrangement. Read about how Salon got the scoop.

Blind Eye How could the White House's anti-drug message scandal elude the networks and their billions of dollars of newsgathering capabilities?Eric Alterman wonders how the White House's anti-drug message scandal could elude the networks and their billions of dollars of newsgathering capabilities. 

Reporting on the AOL/Time Warner merger tended to be of the bigger, faster, variety, with little in the way of what it might mean for the future of journalism and freedom of information. Read Newswatch's excellent coverage of the coverage, for some insight into why journalists are no longer suspicious of big business.

Ray Suarez interviews media analysts about the merger, Ben Bagdikian wonders what impact it will have on journalism and Eric Alterman calls it a bad deal for democracy.   

Are Gerald Levin and Steve Case holy men who have merged their companies for the greater good? 

See what insiders are saying about the next round of mega-mergers. 

Strip-Malling the Web As newspaper companies pour resources into the Internet, they are also repositioning it, from a learning experience to a place for making and spending money. In 1995, articles in major newspapers mentioned "information superhighway" five times as often as "e-commerce." By 1999, e-commerce mentions prevailed by a ratio of 25 to 1.

At a time when America looms large on the global stage, and bigger is better than ever, essayist Richard Rodriguez sees signs of middle-class discontent and a hunger for life on a more human scale.

Cyber-scribe Douglas Rushkoff thinks that Americans' angst can be attributed to lives that are inordinately devoted to production and consumption. He calls for reinstating "Blue Laws," a one-day-a-week moratorium on buying and selling.

As corporations and governments ramp-up spending to ward off attacks from sinister hackers, a new study says that the biggest threat to computer security is internal, with employees accounting for more than one-third of all cyber-theft.

Anti-corporate Internet provocateur RTMark, is championing the cause of a European artist's group (etoy.com), that is being bullied by retailing giant (etoys.com) for trademark infringement. RTMark has invented a game designed to drive e-Toys' stock price down.

Parody Web site gwbush.com has joined forces with Paula Jones's attorney, and they may sue the Bush campaign for defamation.

The creator of gwbush.com has a new site--TheGreatCrash.com--and he says that the $35 t-shirts for sale (complete with no-crash guarantee) aren't as overpriced as Internet stocks.

Stockpiling Proust Even though the Y2K scare fell flat, the apocalyptic planning that preceeded it resulted in some interesting ideas about what kinds of cultural items make for a well-stocked bunker.

Sound Familiar? Entrepreneurial frenzy, information overload, and online romance, all changed how people lived and loved--150 years ago.

The latest issue of Brill's Content examines media conglomeration, including a look at the daily media diet of ten people, to see what impact the congloms had on the news they used.

Before happy-talk and gender-balanced anchor teams, local TV news was delivered by lone white guys, who may have had little connection to the world of journalism, but at least worked to uphold the pretense that they weren't as vacuous as we feared. (NY Times: requires registration)

Expanding on Norman Mailer's 1973 essay, "The Faith of Graffiti," a recent study of restroom scrawls details the differences in quantity and style between men's and women's musings.

Freaks Meet Geeks Famed circus-banner artist Johnny Meah was amazed to find knock-offs of his highly collectible work, with his signature erased, for sale on Amazon.com.

Molly Ivins offers her first installment of Shrubwatch, and says that, "if you expect George W. to do for the nation what he has for Texas, we need to talk."

Sam's Snub In an attempt to keep union organizers off the premises, and to insulate itself from discrimination charges, Wal-Mart has banned all charities from soliciting inside of its stores, while trying to paint the union as the grinch.

Going e-postal Almost one-half of all major U.S. corporations electronically monitor employees, but that didn't stop a disgruntled American Express worker from going out with a bang, e-mailing a 3,500 word manifesto to 800 co-workers as he headed out the door. Message boards at Vault.com are where the corporately disaffected go to vent.

Media Most Foul The P.U.-litzer Prizes recognize the year's stinkiest media performances. And from the hundreds of deserving entries, this years winners are...

Pay to Play Spy magazine co-founder Kurt Andersen announces a new paid--as in not free--Web venture that promises an "insider" take on the business of movies, music, journalism and new media. Since people only pay for Web sites that promise to get them rich, or get them off, where will he find enough industry wannabes to foot the bill?

Man of La Market Hitler, Roosevelt, Churchill...Jeff Bezos? Time magazine's package on Amazon.com's founder and 1999 Person of the Year, reads like an advertorial for e-commerce--don't miss the tour of Jeff's Mansion! A less fluffy read on all things Internet-related is Burn Rate author Michael Wolff's, The E-Decade, in New York magazine.

The Onion's Man of the Millenium has been responsible for losses that dwarf even those at Amazon.com.

The Laura and Larry Show Dr. Laura Schlesinger, talk-radio's most listened to personality, is also one of the media's most ardent champions of the Religious Right's social agenda. Her $1 million suit against a surf shop, for displaying Larry Flynt's Big Brother Surfboarding magazine, was recently thrown out of court.

Deepak for President? Wendy Kaminer's new book, Sleeping With Extra-Terrestrials, explores American's preoccupation with religious, New Age and supernatural beliefs, and the impact that these private, irrational convictions have on public life and public policy.

Not Ready for Prime Time What's it like for an outsider trying to pitch a television idea in Los Angeles? It can be pretty difficult if you're a large, clumsy Midwesterner and your best idea involves a talking rat who smokes cigars.

The Web's Free Lunch Media scold James Fallows analyzes the Internet news culture and finds much to like, but he wonders how long the "free lunch" of information currently available can last and if it can ever become economically sustainable.

blowyourwad.com As investors throw money at new media, the dot-coms turn right around and kick it back to old media in the form of expensive, poorly-targeted television advertising. Since less than 1/3 of Americans access the Internet, why are these virtual companies spending so much to reach so many, most of whom aren't even online?

Go Away, All Ye Faithful The holiday marketing deluge now begins before the candle in the Halloween pumpkin is extinguished. Read one disgruntled television viewer's inspired plea for Christmas to get its "fat, ugly, red-and-green ass," out of his living room.

Solidarity Stops Here The one thing that so-called "socially responsible" companies find most intolerable is the union movement. Ben and Jerry's, Border's, Working Assets, Newman's Own and Whole Foods have all fought attempts by workers to organize.

The Death of the DJ The Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allows radio conglomerates to own up to 8 stations in one market, set off an unprecendented feeding frenzy, with the big getting bigger and cookie-cutter formats dominating the airwaves.

The WTO trade talks were a watershed event for the independent, non-corporate media that converged on Seattle. Their instantaneous reports, broadcast via the Web, could serve as a model for alternative news coverage.

The New Yorker doesn't put much content online, but you can read articles that appeared in the magazine by contributor Malcolm Gladwell at gladwell.com, including his latest on how "collaborative filtering" may revolutionize the marketing of media products.

Matt Drudge's stock has fallen and his prediction that Internet muckrakers in fedoras would pose a challenge to news congloms has not come to pass, but his legacy of lowering standards to make innuendo and gossip acceptable elements of the mainstream news cycle lives on. (NY Times: requires registration)

When Ralph Nader ran for President on the Green Party ticket in 1996, he refused to do even the basics, like fund-raising and campaigning! This time around, the man who assails corporations for turning Washington into "accounts receivable," is reportedly ready to rumble.

All Ralph, all the time.

Small World, Big Media Earlier this century, the oil and automotive industries went global. The 1990s have seen the creation of global media. Read about the trend and the nine media moguls who are driving it. The Project on Media Ownership allows visitors to search who owns what media outlets.

Church of the Latter Day Satirists A Web site that reads a lot like The Onion, specializes in religious news.

Comrade Trump The Donald's plan for a one-time tax of 14.25% on Americans with a net worth of $10 million or more could only come from someone in the top tax bracket. Will his radical populist proposal increase Trump's appeal with those who have the most to gain from it?

The Write Stuff A little-reported trend in American culture is the subsidizing of right-wing authors by wealthy conservative foundations and think tanks. The acknowledgements page of one best-selling book after another reads like a who's who of conservative donors, and the writers they fund have come to dominate op-ed pages, talk shows and the political punditocracy in general.

Pump 'n Pump Gas stations run commercials on fuel pumps, ads are popping up on ATM machines, weddings are now "sponsored," and billboards in space are a technological possibility. Where will it all end?

First it was body parts on e-bay, now the folks at teevee.org are trying to address racial inequality in Hollywood by auctioning off a black sitcom writer.

I Kiss You!!!! The latest oddball Internet celebrity is an accordion-playing Turk. His home page, complete with stilted English and requests for guests ("Who is want to come Turkey, she can stay my home"), has attracted millions of visitors. Read the story behind Mahir Cagri's unlikely fame.

Svengali Speaks Former Clinton string-puller Dick Morris looks at the merger between Hollywood and Washington and the impact that it has on presidential politics.

Read Joan Didion's critique of Edmund Morris's fictionalized Ronald Regan biography, covering the early days of the Hollywood/Washington merger.

Not Ready for Prime Time After George W. flunked a pop quiz on world leaders, a reporter looks at Bush's fuzzy answers to more substantive policy questions.

Fashion Statements If you like your right-wing babes decked out in the latest fall fashions, Vanity Fair offers a who's who of conservative sirens, dressed to kill any feminist ideas to the left of Father Knows Best.

And then where was Donald Warren Beatty has apparently spurned his media suitors, saying that a 2000 campaign would be "nutty," but not ruling out a future run.

Florida's Supreme Court created a controversy by posting pictures of an execution by electric chair on its Web site. When The New York Times ran a story about it, someone forgot to check a sponsor's banner art, which depicts--someone getting electrocuted.

Brill's Content takes on The Times for its reporting on Chinese nuclear-missle espionage at Los Alamos. The Times counters that Brill's piece is a hatchet job that commits the same journalistic sins that it's accused of.

Brill's Content offers a monthly list of trends that even media critics can love.

Hard Times for Hard News As recently as 1970, international news accounted for 45% of network newscasts, by 1995 it had fallen to less than 14%. One commentator says that the "lifestyling" of news is a natural reaction to the fact that international conflicts pose little threat to people in the US and Europe.

In an age of sound bite news, political cartoons should be more popular than ever--yet at no other point in US history have they been in such decline.

All Talked Out? Reeling from staff defections and post-launch press that has turned sour, Tina Brown defends Talk magazine in an interview with The Times of London.

After St. Martin's Press was reviled for publishing a biography of George W. Bush--whose author has been charged with being a convicted car bomber--St. Martin's editor-in-chief took a new job as editorial director of Talk.
The Food Lion is dead! None of us much like ABC News (or, Disney for that matter), but the Food Lion case against ABC News was about as pernicious as judgements get. On Wednesday it was overturned.

Speak magazine is a little-known, general-interest gem that lacks the resources to attract readers and the advertisers who follow them. The publisher has taken to writing editorials lamenting the sorry state of magazine publishing and pleading for support, arguing that advertisers prefer dumb editorial content because it makes their ads look smarter.

Ben is Dead is Dead What is the future of paper-bound self-publishing in the age of the Internet? After an 11-year run, the last issue of the pop culture zine Ben is Dead, may provide some answers.

Hitler's Pope A new book, excerpted in Vanity Fair, charges that Pope Pius XII helped Adolf Hitler gain power and that he did nothing to stop Nazi atrocities because he believed Jews got what they deserved. This is nothing new, of course. However, the author was given extraordinary access to the Papal files, and his original goal was to exculpate Pius XII.

Publishing's One-Way Street While American cultural products blanket the globe, books in translation are a dud for the American audience. Why do we have so little interest in what foreign writers have to say?

What's CNN Afraid of? In an uncharacteristic media move, CNN has declined to run a television ad for Salon.com, claiming that it's a competitor. While CNN has nine Web sites, along with six cable and satellite networks that reach 800 million homes, Salon logs a mere 1.3 million visitors per month to its single Web site.

Endangered Media Species Can a new owner and a new editor breathe new life into The Atlantic Monthly, a general interest magazine that is one of the last of a dying breed? Check out their content-rich Web site.

One critic says that The Atlantic Monthly is a cultural treasure and that the new editor is the wrong man for the job of maintaining it.

She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall, is the bestselling book by the mother of the Columbine student who was shot to death after she supposedly answered "yes" to the question; "Do you believe in God?" Salon reports that the question was actually asked of a different student, who survived, and that Denver's Rocky Mountain News has been aware of this for months, but continued to present the Bernall myth as fact until after the book was published. It has sold 300,000 copies in its first 3 weeks.

Agent Provocateur Literary agent John Brockman, who sold $20 million worth of computer books to publishers in one year, is on a mission to revolutionize the way books are bought and sold, by establishing a giant online literary marketplace‹an e-bay for the written word.

Columbia Journalism Review imagines how an entry in Maureen Dowd's Diary might read.

"A Strange Book About a Strange Man," is how Edmund Morris describes his biography of Ronald Reagan. Fourteen years in the making, it took an even stranger turn when Morris, to break his writer's block and better explain the man who he has referred to as "a cultural yahoo," "an airhead," and "shatteringly banal", inserted himself into the narrative as a fictional character, startling serious historians and flummoxing Reagan's cronies. Read an excerpt from Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan.

Second Thoughts on Merger Mania When the CBS-Viacom merger was announced, initial coverage celebrated a match made in market heaven. Since then, there has been a decided turn in opinion, as many observers question the wisdom of so many media outlets in so few hands. MN Senator Paul Wellstone is considering introducing legislation aimed at blocking the merger and imposing a moratorium on others like it.

Unreliable Sources A Salon article, on the prospects of a Reform Party presidential run by Donald Trump, bizarrely quotes a half-dozen unnamed sources, speculating about "The Donald's" plans. Why doesn't anyone want their name associated with Trump?

Tracking the Zeitgeist, Internet Style From Pokemon to Pamela Lee, the Lycos 50 is a fascinating cultural barometer that ranks the people and subjects that are attracting the most search requests on Lycos.

As Advertisers, Spin Doctors and PR firms develop evermore sophisticated methods of coercion, increased media options give people more control over what messages they are exposed to. Media theorists Douglass Rushkoff and Andrew Shapiro discuss their new books, one about coercion and the other about control.

Is technology unplugging our minds? Read reviews of three new books that address the issue.

The Business of Net Politics The Industry Standard and Slate are teaming up to track the Internet's influence on the 2000 elections. So far, the biggest impact has been made by gwbush.com, the site that exists solely to ridicule the Texas governor.

The Neanderthal Nineties Ray Suarez, departing host of Talk of the Nation, has some thoughts on "the state of the national conversation at century's end," and he doesn't like what he hears.

Schoolhouse Need Meets Corporate Greed With kids between the ages of 4 and 19 wielding $150 billion a year in spending power, cash-strapped school systems are an easy target for companies anxious to turn children into brand loyalists.

How to Play the "Gotcha" Game   Imagine a world where a presidential candidate trumps the media by revealing all of his deep, dark secrets during the campaign's kick-off speech. It might sound something like this...

Small Change Equals Big Bucks  Disney's Michael Eisner has ordered producers of ABC-TV shows to slice 30 seconds from each episode to free up more time for ad space. Some half-hour shows will now be one-third ads.

Mothers Against Women Against Children Celebrated fiction writer Mary Gaitskill found a chilly reception for an essay about her decision not to have children. Before being published in Elle, it was rejected by The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and Harper's, where an editor admitted that some of his co-workers with kids were "unable to stomach it in a way."

Hooray for Today! Sick of the outrageous demands made by a bullying Hollywood PR flack on behalf of her mega-star clients, The Today Show tells one of the biggest names in celebrity publicity to get lost.

Move Over Bulworth, Here Comes Granny D On January 24, 2000, Doris Haddock will celebrate her 90th birthday in Washington D.C., the final stop on her cross-country walk for campaign finance reform. Follow her across Arkansas at grannyd.com

Harvest of (Organic) Shame As agribusiness giants move into organic farming--a dozen of California's 2,000 organic farms control half the state's produce market--workers at small farms toil for low wages and no benefits.

Adam Parfrey's Feral House publishes some of America's most controversial, maligned and bizarre books. Conspiracy theories, satanic rituals, outsider artists and apocalypse culture are the metier of the man who says he collects eccentrics like others collect Pez dispensers.

What's Wrong with this Picture? Even though they provide little substantive news coverage of political campaigns, local TV stations will be the big (money) winners in the 2000 election cycle.

News Goes Lifestyle The changing face of news reporting is exemplified by Time, whose editor says the magazine is no longer about the great men and events that built the franchise, but about "the debates happening around the dinner table rather than the senate committee tables."

Back-to-School Sale Smarmy, bow-tie wearing media hustler Chris Whittle, who introduced TV commericals into the classroom via Channel One, is back with an impending IPO for his latest scheme, a network of so-called "for-profit" private schools.

Dear Conan...After his sidekick Andy Richter announced that he was leaving the show, Conan O'Brien was innundated with inquiries from groups representing every ethnicity and sexual persuasion, lobbying him to consider one of their own as Richter's replacement.

Cocaine Cokie? Since reporters routinely ask candidate's about their history of drug use, Slate decided to turn the tables and ask reporters about theirs.

Stand by Your Ad In an effort to temper political mudslinging, a new North Carolina law requires candidates to appear in any ad that names their opponent.

Hungary for Heroes The "Whiskey Robber" is a chivalrous stick-up artist who knocks back a shot before each bank heist and gives his victims flowers. He has become an advertising icon and he's wanted by both the Budapest police and Hollywood movie producers.

Picture This! The beauty of radio is that it supplies the words and you conjure up the images. Now, Fox TV is producing a pilot of This American Life for network television. Ira Glass chronicles his Hollywood dealmaking experiences.

Rage is all the Rage Whether it's drivers raging against each other, passengers against airlines or patients against HMOs, there are more people chasing less service in America than ever before. One writer thinks it's about time that businesses be held accountable for putting record profits before pissed-off people.

Contra Diction While Bill Bradley attracts prominent liberal supporters, including MN Senator Paul Wellstone, Democrats and the media have been silent on his 1986 vote favoring Reagan's $100 million in CIA aid to Nicaraguan contras. Also, can Bradley's long shot campaign be the first to win the nomination over a sitting VP?

The Compassionate Executioner Since George W. Bush became governor of Texas, 92 people have been executed‹one about every two weeks. But given the pro-death penalty politics of Clinton, Gore and Bradley, Christopher Hitchens doubts that it will surface as a campaign issue. Molly Ivins examines the case of the mentally ill man who is scheduled to be the next to die.

Russ Meyer Attacked by Adult Film Star! A 39-year-old woman, whose stage name is "Melissa Mounds," was found guilty of "elder abuse" for pummeling the 77-year-old director of adult film classics while he slept on the couch of his Hollywood home.

The Hidden Life of SUVs They're built to go off-road, but the landscape they're really designed to conquer is the psychic one.

Hacking Hillary Add web site hacking to the bag of dirty tricks available to political candidates. A number of web surfers were re-directed from www.hillary2000.org to www.hillaryno.com, a site maintained by a group called "Friends of Giuliani."

Face-Time Face-Off. Two well-known media critics, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter (who is often seen on TV) and Noam Chomsky (who seldom is) are engaged in a snit over Chomsky's claims that the media exaggerated the extent of Pol Pot's Cambodian genocide.

Web Surfing at Work Hits a Firewall. "Access denied" messages are popping up on computer screens across the country as Corporate America breaks out the big guns in its war against on-the-job cyberspace loitering.

A Treasure Trove of Trashy Television. One of the Internet's most inspired "galleries" is at, of all places, the TV Guide website. Featuring 100s of magazine covers dating back to the 1950s, it provides a fascinating history of the medium and the culture it created.

Johns Helping Johns. The oldest profession meets the newest technology as web sites spring up where johns can post ratings of prostitutes. Reaction among the professionals is mixed, depending on the critique. To see for yourself, visit the clever folks at johnsactionguide and sign up for their "Creative Writers Workshop."

The nutty attempt to combat school violence with the 10 commandments. Logicians know that correlation does NOT equal causation, but if you make THAT mistake, you should at least have the correlations on your side.

So Many Hours, So Little News Media heavyweights discuss a new book, WarpSpeed: America in the Age of Mixed Media. In the post-Lewinsky landscape, hard news falls prey to "talk-show economics," where the story line more closely resembles soap opera than journalism.

Sob Story for the 90s. As Manhattan becomes an island of nouveau megamillionaires, the merely wealthy are left wondering what went wrong.

Learning languages NY Times' columnist invents new tense, "Safire Conditional"

We Don't Want to Hurt You, We Just Want Your Money! In a review of "Corporate Predators: The Hunt for Mega-Profits and the Attack on Democracy," you will learn, among other things, that Bill Gates is currently worth more than the poorest 106 million Americans combined. The latest release from one of the country's most important public interest publishers (tiny Common Courage Press in Maine) serves as a reminder that the economic good times of the 90s haven't come cheap.

Consuming Desires. As the economy hums along on the back of American's apparently insatiable desire to consume, this article looks at what drives people to shop, and considers the futility of the campaign being waged by Adbusters magazine (Buy Nothing Day) to get people to pack in their credit cards.

Minivans and Maxi-Ethics. A morning DJ in Oak Park, Illinois, has taken a stand against creeping commercialism. Will his decision to shun his corporate sponsors have repercussions throughout the world of journalism?

Setting the Standard for Poor Taste. In a first for the advertising industry, Just For Feet is suing their agency for a TV spot that ran during the Super Bowl and was much-derided as racist. The agency's claim: "How can we be sued for violating standards in an industry that has none?"

The question should be: How much did George Will know, and when did he know it?   Evidence compiled by the new Russian Prime Minister --in 1992-- confirms that the   Republicans' nefarious "October Surprise" plot was actually a bidding war between the Carter Administration and the Reagan campaign.  Read the story the mainstream media have totally botched.

Even Ted Koppel won't be able to save Henry Kissinger now. In February President Clinton "Tasked" all arms of the US government to report on their knowledge about the crimes of Chile's Augusto Pinochet, and the notorious "Operation Condor," for evidence to be used in his Spanish trial.

The Poetry of Going Postal The second annual worker-writer festival looks for a new generation of Ben Hampers and Charles Bukowskis, auto plant and postal workers by day, poets by night.

What Goes Up, Must Come Down For 20 years The Billboard Liberation Front has been wreaking havoc with America's oversized signage. They recently gathered to celebrate two decades of culture-jamming success. Visit the BLF's Gallery and see their handiwork.