Newsweek, Mired in Red Ink, Cancels Longtime Political Series (New York Times)

 

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By JEREMY W. PETERS
November 13, 2011

It has been one of Newsweek’s signature ventures and a staple of American political journalism since 1984.

Every presidential election season, the magazine detached a small group of reporters from their daily jobs for a year to travel with the presidential candidates and document their every internal triumph and despair — all under the condition that none of it was to be printed until after the election.

Then two days after Election Day, the sum of their reporters’ work would appear in the magazine. But the ambitious undertaking, known inside the magazine simply as “the project,” is no more. Newsweek, bleeding red ink and searching for a fresh identity under new ownership, has decided the project would not go forward this election season.

Explaining the decision to end the series, Edward Felsenthal, executive editor of Newsweek and The Daily Beast, its online partner, cited the quickening speed of the news cycle. In a news environment when scoops are often measured in milliseconds between Twitter posts, fewer news organizations are comfortable waiting to publish the kinds of attention-grabbing anecdotes that they would have once saved for longer articles.


“Sitting on election news felt to us out of place in an era where so much information comes out so fast,” he said. The pace seems measurably faster than even four years ago when many of the most titillating anecdotes about the 2008 campaign were reported in “Game Change” by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, a book that did not hit store shelves until January 2010.

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Pro Publica's Guide to the Best Coverage of Ron Paul and His Record

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by Lois Beckett
ProPublica, Aug. 23, 2011

This is the latest installment in a series of reading guides on 2012 presidential candidates. Here are the other guides.

Three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul is consistently disregarded by the media, a point made recently by comedian Jon Stewart and confirmed by a Pew Research Center analysis of news coverage.

But the 76-year-old Texas Republican congressman's tiny-government ideals have become increasingly relevant to the national debate. And despite some eye-rolling by television anchors, there's been plenty of substantive coverage of Paul's ideals and track record. Here's our guide to some of the best reading on Ron Paul.

The basics:

The best place to start is a 2001 Texas Monthly profile by Sam Gwynne, who explains why Paul remained such a viable Republican congressional candidate despite his refusal to toe the party line.

Paul, an obstetrician who has delivered an estimated 4,000 babies, is a pro-life Libertarian who believes that much of the federal government is unconstitutional. (His son, Kentucky Republican Rand Paul, is a U.S. senator and Tea Party favorite.)

Ron Paul's 2012 campaign website summarizes his policy views, which include abolishing the Federal Reserve and the IRS, eliminating income and capital-gains taxes and refusing to raise the debt ceiling.

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Perry’s Blunt Views in Books Get New Scrutiny as He Joins Race (New York Times)

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By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
September 2, 2011

WASHINGTON — Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, believes that climate change is a “contrived, phony mess.” The federal income tax was the “great milestone on the road to serfdom.” And the Boy Scouts of America are under attack by “a radical homosexual movement.”

Mr. Perry also thinks that senators should be chosen by legislatures, not the people. And he says that Social Security, the retirement program for the nation’s elderly, is a “failure” enacted during a power grab called the New Deal and is “something we have been forced to accept.”

Those blunt assertions are in two books Mr. Perry wrote while building a deep base of support in Texas among evangelical voters and Tea Party supporters. But the books have drawn new scrutiny now that Mr. Perry, a Republican, is running for president.

On Wednesday, Mr. Perry is likely to be asked about some of the statements he makes in the books when he takes the stage in his first nationally televised presidential debate. How he responds, and whether he defends the ideas or distances himself from them, will be an early test of his campaign.

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