Ben Karlin, executive producer of "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," during a Q&A; Friday on WashingtonPost.com: Question: "Why do YOU think the show resonates so well as a source of political news?" Karlin: "Many people in this country have strong bullshit detectors. For some reason, most major media outlets  more...

Mike Jenner Mike Jenner is the executive editor of The Bakersfield Californian. He joined the Californian in 1993 as the managing editor after working for four years as an independent newspaper consultant, and, prior to that, holding editing positions at newspapers including The Hartford Courant and The Philadelphia Inquirer.  more...

As Campaign Desk wobbles into the home stretch of a year of critiquing the campaign press on a daily basis, it occurred to us that readers might find useful a short list of reporters who consistently rise above the superficial to do original and often insightful work. So we took  more...

CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360," aired at 7pm each night, has lately added a short segment called "Campaign Playbook." Cramming as many lame football metaphors as possible into the allotted time, the spot takes a quick look at each candidate's day, then tells viewers which one had the "Play of the  more...

Ooops. Forget "security moms." Hot on Tuesday; stale by week's end. (Shelf life of a scone.) While many in the campaign press obsessed the last few days on this new group of swing voters - soccer moms turned Bush supporters because they believe he is the stronger leader against terrorism  more...

Thanks to a reader for this one. The Associated Press reports today: "President Bush suggested on Thursday that he wanted to clarify two things he had said recently -- that just a 'handful' of terrorists were at work in Iraq and that a bleak intelligence assessment of Iraq's future involved  more...

Back in August, Campaign Desk awoke one morning to find a press corps aggressively dissecting and discrediting charges from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that had been filling the pages and airwaves of our news all month. What had happened to push previously dormant campaign reporters to actually seek  more...

Covering a speech by President Bush in Latrobe, Penn., Raymond Hernandez of The New York Times this morning writes, "Mr. Bush said the No Child Left Behind education law he pushed through Congress had bolstered student achievement with the rigorous academic targets it requires schools to meet." A few paragraphs  more...

Campaign Desk has a thing about polls and their use and misuse. On the heels of an excellent =todays%5Ffree%5Ffeature">primer on polls by the Wall Street Journal's John Harwood, another voice is heard from. And it's an authoritative one. Mark Mellman, a long-time Democratic pollster who is working for John Kerry's  more...

One week until Bush v. Kerry Round One, and the debates debate persists in the blogosphere this morning. "Dumb, Dumb, Dumb" is how Vodkapundit's Stephen Green characterizes John Kerry's recent debate-related quip on "Live with Regis & Kelly." Regis asked Kerry why it had taken so long for the two  more...

On Monday, we posted an item criticizing CNN political analyst Bill Schneider for appearing to endorse the view of House Speaker Dennis Hastert that terrorists would operate more freely in a Kerry administration, and for distorting Hastert's comments in the process. Schneider responded, and we've added that response as a  more...

Swing voters and polls, while a far cry from cream-colored ponies and crisp apple streudels, are a few of lazy campaign reporters' favorite things. In the past few days, "security moms" have become all the rage with the political press corps, who have promptly elevated these moms to the top  more...

Yesterday Mickey Kaus, writing on Slate, referred to "this week's coming CW [conventional wisdom] sigh of relief that the campaign is finally about something important, namely Iraq." Kaus' prediction proved accurate. Since John Kerry's Monday speech, in which he took on President Bush over Iraq, highbrow pundits and opinion writers  more...

Checking in for the latest, we find that, while the Rather Roast still holds its appeal (though the latest Roger Stone tidbit is perhaps more palatable for the lefties), some bloggers have begun to step back from the remains of the CBS BBQ in order to bemoan the state of  more...

Today, the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler goes bravely where no campaign journalist has gone before: into the minds of world leaders who listened to President Bush's speech at the UN yesterday. Swami Kessler writes: President Bush's speech before the UN General Assembly on Tuesday was the verbal equivalent of a  more...

What does it take to ensure that your sound bite gets past all those sophisticated hard-bitten scribes on the campaign bus and into the news reports -- headlines, even? Apparently, all it takes is a rhyme that even a third-grader might find childish. Last time John Kerry gave a big-time  more...

By Brian Montopoli Editor's note: Campaign Desk's Brian Montopoli joined the reporters accompanying Senator John Kerry as they passed through New York City on Monday. Here is his report. At 8:15 yesterday morning, a group of groggy, coffee-swilling reporters and cameramen emerged from a Sheraton in midtown Manhattan and climbed  more...

Newsweek's political reporters are good at coming up with details that seem to offer readers a fly-on-the-wall glimpse inside the campaigns. This week's roundup of the basic state of the race, focusing on John Kerry's recent decision to come out swinging on Iraq, leads with the story of how, before  more...

By Bryan Keefer and Steve Lovelady There's an old saying that you never want to watch either sausage, legislation or journalism being made. Now that we know a little bit about the internal machinations that led to CBS' Bill Burkett sausage, several things seem abundantly clear: First, the network rushed  more...

When will the outcome of the presidential election be known? Within hours of the close of polling? Within a week? Or, as was the case last time around, only after a weeks-long battle ended by the U.S. Supreme Court? As the Wall Street Journal's Jeanne Cummings reported last week (subscription  more...

As a Campaign Desk reader pointed out, something strange is afoot in today's Associated Press story by Pauline Jelinek. The headline reads: "Candidates Play on Fears of Attacks, War." In her first sentence, Jelinek lays out how one of the candidates is "playing on the fear factor" by writing, "Vice  more...

Over the summer Campaign Desk came across Vaughn Palmer, a columnist for the Vancouver Sun, who reacted in the most curious way when two contradicting polls were released measuring local government elections in British Columbia. Palmer not only reported the results, but also used the majority of his print space  more...

Over the course of this election season, Bill Bishop of the Austin American-Statesman has been crunching voting data and rolling out a fascinating series called "The Great Divide" (registration required). The most recent installment examines the dramatic consolidation of Democratic voters in urban areas and Republicans in rural ones. Bishop  more...

At a campaign rally on Saturday with Vice President Cheney, House Speaker Dennis Hastert declared that al Qaeda "would like to influence this election" with an attack similar to the Madrid bombings that occurred days before the Spanish national election last March. Asked by a reporter whether he thought al  more...

As November 2 draws ever closer, left-leaning bloggers are bottom-lining election 2004 -- pondering what the race boils down to and what still must be done. According to Josh Marshall, "what this election is about" is "words and excuses meet incompetence, chaos and death." That is, opines Marshall, "the president  more...

As Campaign Desk has before him, Frank Rich in today's New York Times bemoans CNN's "casual abandonment of even a fig leaf of impartiality" by keeping James Carville and Paul Belaga on as hosts of "Crossfire" even as the two slave away as the newest recruits to the battalion of  more...