Given that media critics often describe FDR as the first “radio president” and JFK as the first “TV president,” logic dictates that 2009 brought forth the first entry in a new era: the Wifi President. With his Blackberry forever in tow, a sophisticated election campaign grounded in new social networking media, and the most YouTube [...]

If you cannot speak very intelligently about U.S. policy in Afghanistan, you are not alone. Right now the debate on Afghanistan raging in the media is dominated by hawks on the right saying President Obama is “dithering,” and anti-war protesters on the left saying President Obama is becoming “just like Bush.” Meanwhile, the broadcast media has decided the Tiger Woods story is the big issue of the day

The fortieth anniversary of Sesame Street makes me wonder if our long-drawn-out debate on health care might have been better served by the likes of Kermit and Big Bird than by the current cast of pundits — maybe then Americans would actally know what was in the bill! To that end, here are three Sesame Street-inspired explanations of the three core concepts that make up the current health care reform bill.

In what may turn out to be the cruelest irony of the year, the death of Senator Edward Kennedy may have papered over a CNN video clip poised to change the dynamic of the national healthcare debate: footage of a desperate woman crying “We need help!” because she lost health insurance after her husband suffered a brain injury.

Over the past few days I have spent way too much time watching cable news coverage of health insurance reform town hall meetings. I cannot get my fill of angry Americans in high school gymnasiums shouting, “I don’t want this country turning into Russia!” at bespectacled and bewildered members of Congress.

By now we have all watched the “meltdown” video of self-styled “birther” conspiracy spokesperson, Orly Taitz. Beyond the obvious, knee-slapping twitter punch lines that come out of Taitz’ tantrum (“Orly Taitz sez the special pardon is a forgery. Kim Jong-Il really President of Kenya. LMAO”), my question is: what does this particular video gem say about the nature of political media?

What worries me about Obama’s “no drama” approach to the healthcare debate is not that he simply refuses to raise his voice when necessary. The problem is that most Americans are engaged in a deeply passionate argument about this issue, but when we tuned in to the President’s press conference, it was as if the President was completely outside those emotions. The White House has chosen, in other words, to turn the Commander in Chief into the Accountant in Chief.

In the short time since her odd and still unexplained resignation, most journalists will admit that Sarah Palin will never, ever be President of the United States. Nonetheless, Americans can expect a summer full of repetitive, insipid media improv on the theme, “What caused the political death of Sarah Palin?” The fact is, few in the media can resist a ripping good political autopsy, and Sarah Palin inspires the best postmortem politics this country has seen in decades.

The recent kerfuffle between Nico Pitney (Huffington Post) and Dana Milbank (Washington Post) over a clumsy exchange in a White House press conference brings to mind two media mavens rarely mentioned in the same sentence: Marshall McLuhan and Thomas Jefferson. Seen in the context of their ideas about media and government, a tiff between a [...]