Because there is no news this August except for the news about the moral and physical decline of America due to Death Panel rationing, an increasingly bored press corps turns to the Obama family for succor. “Enh, there’s this bit about Michelle and her shorts,” they say to each other, and that’s good for a day or two. But what shall they do next week? MORE »

Ugh SO CONFUSING. So are these healthcare-focused town hall meetings across the nation 1) being constantly disrupted by belligerent, gun-toting angry nutballs or 2) the site of reasoned and civil discussion among people who, for the most part, are acting like grownups? MORE »

Richard Wolffe, the formerly esteemed Newsweek journalist who everybody hates now because he works at the PR outfit of a couple of former Bush shills when he’s not pushing his Obama hagiography or playing Keith Olbermann on the teevee, has another book to sell! Would you like to buy it? MORE »

Pulitzer, anyone? Here is the entirety of the most important news story ever written by a human reporter since Watergate, times the Pentagon Papers, divided by the untold story of 9/11, times a million, minus Martha Gellhorn: MORE »

Here’s some happy news: Fired WashingtonPost.com columnist Dan Froomkin has been hired by the Huffington Post to run the monster-blog’s new DC bureau. Now mean old neocon Charles Krauthammer and his faux-liberal enablers at the Washington Post can’t get Froomkin fired ever again, ha ha. Something makes us think Froomkin’s page views will go way up now that he’ll be promoted on the HuffPo front page rather than buried in the unloved online ghetto of the corrupt, dying Washington Post. Eat a bag of rat dicks, WaPo! [Andrew Sullivan]

Throughout the history of American journalism, reporters have upheld one vital standard: asking the tough questions and holding to account the most powerful person in the nation, which is to say, the First Lady. But is our national legacy of unbiased investigative East Wing reporting suddenly in peril because some black gals are writing about Michelle Obama? MORE »

Who says nobody needs yesterday’s news and a bunch of old wire stories and couch ads thrown in your neighbor’s bird bath at 4:15 a.m. every day? The Chicago Tribune, one of our nation’s leading bankrupt newspapers, today offers this Roland “Pinocchio” Burris paper doll, so your poor kids can have something to play with — it’s kind of like a Star Wars action figure, but it’s free! And it teaches kids an important lesson about black senators from Illinois. [Chicago Tribune PDF]

Regarding George Will’s anti-blue jeans column of today, the Wall Street Journal had a much funnier “denim sucks” column, by your editor’s actual relative-by-marriage Daniel Akst, three weeks ago. DO NOT CLAIM YOU DON’T READ THE WSJ, GEORGE. Dan’s column is also far less elitist than Bow-tie George’s thing, because instead of Will’s example of regular American activity — playing golf, natch — Akst’s “you don’t need dungarees for that” example is “people who spend most of their waking hours punching keys instead of cows.” And then he goes in for the kill with “It looks bad on almost everyone who isn’t thin, yet has somehow made itself the unofficial uniform of the fattest people in the world.” [Wall Street Journal]

Hey, America: This is what you’ll lose, once the last bloated newspapers close forever: People like this, whining about the Most Important Thing Ever, a soggy newsprint version of yesterday’s wire copy and weeks-old syndicate features about “winter vegetables,” wrapped around a Big Lots! circular and six or seven pages of foreclosure notices in the back, along with a few “I HEREBY REFUSE TO PAY MY DEBT” classifieds, where the jobs/real estate ads used to be. Oh god. MORE »

Hey, anybody remember anything special that happened yesterday? Any big events? Because if you are a newspaper editor, you know that the article you put on page 1 above the fold tends to be about really important, major developments, “big events,” if you will, such as the inauguration of America’s first black president. That’s why pretty much every paper in the WORLD put Obama on its front page this morning, because what else were they going to write about? What could possibly be more important than this completely historic and singular event? MORE »

Back in the day before the YouTubes and the cable newses, presidential candidates had to “get the message out” by talking to the reporters who followed them around all the time. But now they don’t have to talk to anybody, they can just go on Hannity or whatever so now the job of the campaign-trail reporter is to sit on the candidate’s plane and bitch about how the candidate never talks to them. MORE »