NewsTrust - All Rated Stories

If I Take Down Fox, Is All Forgiven?

Mon, 23 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Magazine - By Jason Zengerle - May. 23 (Special Report) - David Brock has spent the last decade apologizing to liberals for his role in creating the vast right-wing conspiracy. Now he’s trying something more ambitious and hoping it gains him the respect he craves from the White House.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 8 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

AilesHas Extensive Influence On GOP Politics,Thinks Palin Is An "Idiot"

Mon, 23 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Media Matters - May. 23 (Special Report) - New York magazine is out with an extensive profile of Fox News chief Roger Ailes that details the significant role he plays in conservative politics. Furthering the evidence that Fox News is simply a campaign arm of the GOP, the piece quotes an anonymous Republican aide who states that "You can't run for the Republican nomination without talking to Roger," and notes that Ailes actively encouraged Republican Governor Chris Christie to run for president. Ailes also apparently doesn't think too highly of his employee, Sarah Palin, who, according to a source close to Ailes, he thinks "is an idiot."

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America Is a Joke

Sun, 12 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New York Magazine - By Chris Smith - Sep. 12 (Special Report) - Stewart made himself into the leading critic and satirist of the media-political complex, starting with “Indecision 2000,” The Daily Show’s parody of that year’s presidential campaign. His comedy is counterprogramming—postmodern entertainment but with a political purpose. As truth has been overrun by truthiness and facts trampled by lies, he and The Daily Show have become an invaluable corrective—he’s Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, although in keeping with the fragmented culture, he’s trusted by many fewer people, about 1.8 million viewers each night. Years ago, Stewart lost out to Conan O’Brien and Jimmy Kimmel for late-night network jobs, but the shifting media fortunes have made him the long-run winner, with vastly more job security and cultural influence than his conventional talk-show competitors—and most conventional journalists.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Revolution Will Be Commercialized

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New York Magazine - By Gabriel Sherman - Apr. 26 (Special Report) - From the time of her infamous wardrobe selection, money had been an issue in Palin’s politics. Her relationship with the McCain campaign had been plagued by financial misunderstanding. In her book Going Rogue, she claimed that the McCain campaign had left her on the hook for her Troopergate bills. Palin was furious. “Deep down, she wanted to make money,” a McCain adviser says. “There was always financial stress. They’re not wealthy people.”

NewsTrust Rating: 4.0 average - 11 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

About This Whole Goldman Sachs–Greece Thing

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

New York Magazine - By Heidi N. Moore - Feb. 19 (News Analysis) - This week, Goldman Sachs won the dubious distinction of being the first thing that has united Europe in the past 50 years, or maybe ever. Politicians in the European Union, including those from Greece, Italy, France, and others, jumped at the chance, in unison, to blame Goldman Sachs for their countries' disastrously mismanaged finances, long-lost derivatives deals, and leaving the toilet seat up that one time. The Daily Telegraph in London even ran an article claiming that Italians think their country is controlled by Goldman Sachs — an impressive allegation coming from a nation that created the Mafia, and whose top politician, Silvio Berlusconi, also owns most of the television stations. (There are a lot of people and things waiting in line in the "controlling Italy" queue ahead of Goldman Sachs, is what we're saying.)

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Why Declaring War on Fox News Could Be a Mistake for Obama

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Magazine - By Chris Rovzar - Oct. 13 (Opinion) - ... if Team Obama ignores Fox, it just gives the network's talent the chance to further caricature him as a socialist, foreign, effete, America-hating Other. It isn't a racist portrayal, necessarily, but is certainly one that gives actual racists a lot of comfort. Not countering that will help Fox viewers conveniently forget that Obama is intelligent and well spoken. George Bush, who certainly wasn't the latter, came across as human and likable in interviews. It was one of his greatest strengths (and for critics, one of his most confounding attributes).

NewsTrust Rating: 3.2 average - 6 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Benefits of Distraction and Overstimulation

Mon, 25 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Magazine - By Sam Anderson - May. 25 (Special Report) - Over the last several years, the problem of attention has migrated right into the center of our cultural attention. We hunt it in neurology labs, lament its decline on op-ed pages, fetishize it in grassroots quality-of-life movements, diagnose its absence in more and more of our children every year, cultivate it in yoga class twice a week, harness it as the engine of self-help empires, and pump it up to superhuman levels with drugs originally intended to treat Alzheimer’s and narcolepsy. Everyone still pays some form of attention all the time, of course—it’s basically impossible for humans not to—but the currency in which we pay it, and the goods we get in exchange, have changed dramatically.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.6 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Columbia J-School’s Existential Crisis

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Magazine - By Erica Orden - Mar. 12 (News Report) - Part of the problem is the perception that the situation is a “a zero-sum game,” as one person put it, where adding lessons in video production or law for bloggers will dilute or displace the school’s long-heralded focus on journalism’s core precepts: concise prose, ethical reporting, and sophisticated editorial sensibilities. “There’s this big, huge, fundamental issue: How much of the skills do you teach?” says journalism school dean Nicholas Lemann. “You can go to the Learning Annex and take a Flash course. I don’t think what we should do is be replicating courses you can take at the Learning Annex. But you have to have some familiarity, or you’re not able to execute a website.”

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Should Gender Equality Extend to Drinking?

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Magazine - By Alex Morris - Dec. 08 (Special Report) - As she drank more, her career advanced. “It was like a one-of-the-guys kind of thing. In terms of success, people wanted to work with me. They’d be like, ‘Ugh, I have to work with X,’ you know, another girl. But with me, it’d be like, ‘Oh, this will be so fun.’ ” Rather than trying to hide how much she drank, she realized that her party-girl image would make her more relatable. “You have to be a bitch to survive—and then they’ll call you a bitch. I think maybe for me the drinking let me balance out the kind of stern, bitchy attitude at work with, like, Yeah, obviously, when I’m not working, I’m really fun. It made me look a little more human.”

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What's Behind Barack Obama's Consideration of Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State?

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Magazine - By John Heilemann - Nov. 22 (Opinion) - So it appears that we’re about to embark on a new chapter in the Obama-Clinton saga. Motivating the characters is a blend of cold-eyed calculation and gauzy idealism; selfishness and selflessness; the good, the bad, and the ugly—all the stuff that’s made the drama in which they have co-starred as operatic, twisted, and riveting as any in modern political history.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.4 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Conventional Wisdom

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

New York Magazine - By Dan Amira - Aug. 25 (News Analysis) - We developed a highly scientific formula to measure their star power, counting blog, newspaper, magazine, and TV-news mentions so far this year, Google hits, and how many presidential debates (in the primaries or planned for the general election) they moderated. Then, each pundit's popularity in each category was calculated as a percentage of the highest score, and those five percentages were averaged. (So, theoretically, a dominating pundit who topped each tally would end up with a popularity score of 100.) Here's the top 40.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.4 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Raise the High Rafters

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

New York Magazine - By Sam Anderson - Jun. 24 (News Analysis) - Barack Obama's upcoming speech at the Democratic National Convention is--barring the miraculous reanimation of Winston Churchill's corpse, sometime in mid-July, to recite the Sermon on the Mount in twelve different languages--pretty much a lock to be the rhetorical blockbuster event of the summer.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Is John McCain Bob Dole or Dwight Eisenhower?

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

New York Magazine - By John Heilemann - Apr. 14 (Special Report) - That McCain's political resurrection owed as much to the weakness of the Republican field--not to mention blind shithouse luck--as to his talent and grit makes it no less remarkable. Yet for all the hosannas being sung to him these days, and for all the waves of fear and trembling rippling through the Democratic masses, the truth is that McCain is a candidate of pronounced and glaring weaknesses.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.4 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Who'll Stop the Pain?

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 12:10:00 -0700

New York Magazine - By John Heilemann - Mar. 29 (Opinion) - Gore and Edwards may have the most party clout. But there's only one person Hillary will finally listen to. Her name isn't Bill. -- In the days after John Edwards's withdrawal from the Democratic race, the political world expected his endorsement of Barack Obama would be forthcoming tout de suite.

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Does the Mainstream GOP Finally Need John McCain?

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Magazine - By John Heilemann - Jan. 12 (News Analysis) - Among Republican politicos, the view is that McCain is now sitting prettier than most people realize. That with a victory in either of the next two primaries--in Michigan on January 15 or South Carolina four days later--he will assume a commanding position in the race. That the GOP Establishment will rapidly close ranks behind him, putting him on an unobstructed glide path to the nomination.

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Can Obama Withstand the Scrutiny of Being the Front-runner?

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Magazine - By John Heilemann - Jan. 07 (News Analysis) - Though change soundly trumped experience in Iowa, Hillary's advantage in the latter department will become more salient as Obama commits his first major gaffe as a front-runner. The Clinton team will also hammer away at Obama on substance: his at times maddening programmatic vagueness, his focus on process over bottom-line deliverables, the thinness of his policy accomplishments―all of which, I can attest, become more vividly apparent the more one hears him speak.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.6 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Huckabuchanan

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0800

New York Magazine - By John Heilemann - Dec. 17 (Special Report) - Huckabee's posture on matters of taxing, trading, and even faith represent something shrewder: Buchananism minus the bombast, the paranoia, the out-front efforts to court the clenched-fist-and-camouflage crowd.

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Iraq, Iran, and the President Who Cried Wolf

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 09:25:29 -0800

New York Magazine - By Kurt Andersen - Nov. 09 (News Analysis) - On the one hand, Iran really is both a bigger potential threat to peace and U.S. interests (and to Israel) than Iraq ever was, and at the same time a likelier candidate to become a great democratic beacon in the Islamic Middle East. Yet we simply don't trust the Bush administration to deal with the threats or the opportunities correctly, let alone deftly. On the one hand, we Democrats and default-Democratic independents can taste victory--that is, can imagine America returning to a reasonable and effective geopolitical M.O. 441 days from now. Yet we understand we won't get there with a Democratic candidate who comes across as lacking the gene for toughness and Realpolitik. We can't afford to be irresponsibly naïve on this suddenly pressing national-security issue that the Republicans can exploit (don't forget: At the end of Aesop's fable, a wolf really does show up) and--a different thing--we can't afford a presidential candidate who seems like a naïf or a wimp. We have a visceral distaste for Hillary's Clintonian ambiguities and triangulation on this issue, but we understand that may be a requirement for any non-Republican to win.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.5 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Global Warming and the Tricky Road Ahead

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0700

New York Magazine - By Kurt Andersen - Apr. 18 (Opinion) - How and why is this happening so quickly? As always at such moments of bandwagoneering social change, it's hard to distinguish between causes and effects. The science has gotten more unambiguous and empirical. And in this Infotainment Age, Al Gore successfully distilled (and, um ... dramatized) the relevant science in last year's An Inconvenient Truth. The anecdotal folk science--New Orleans flooded, January days in the seventies--has been freakishly on-message. (Katrina was the liberal equivalent of neoconservatives' blaming Saddam for 9/11, a connect-the-dots opportunity too good to resist, even if it wasn't true.) Giant, super-American, ultra-Republican corporations--Wal-Mart!--have started greening themselves. There's an acutely appealing feel-good aspect right now, as we contemplate our present geopolitical debacle--having fucked up Iraq, maybe we can manage to do better on global warming. And Americans have also come to take climate change seriously, I think, partly as a result of George Bush's strenuous discounting of the problem. Since his administration's main claims about Iraq have proved spectacularly false--the 9/11 connection, WMDs, Mission Accomplished, the insurgency's "last throes"--an intuitive syllogism has naturally taken hold among Americans: If Bush asserts something, no matter how sincerely, then probably the opposite is true.

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How Not to Talk to Your Kids

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 09:03:53 -0800

New York Magazine - By Po Bronson - Feb. 19 (Special Report) - When parents praise their children's intelligence, they believe they are providing the solution to this problem. According to a survey conducted by Columbia University, 85 percent of American parents think it's important to tell their kids that they're smart. In and around the New York area, according to my own (admittedly nonscientific) poll, the number is more like 100 percent. Everyone does it, habitually. The constant praise is meant to be an angel on the shoulder, ensuring that children do not sell their talents short. But a growing body of research--and a new study from the trenches of the New York public-school system--strongly suggests it might be the other way around. Giving kids the label of "smart" does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.2 average - 8 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

American Roulette

Sat, 06 Jan 2007 12:46:18 -0800

New York Magazine - By Kurt Andersen - Jan. 06 (Opinion) - I know capitalism is all about creative destruction, that the pain of globalization must be endured and flexible labor markets are good; inequality is endemic; life is uncertain and unfair, sure, yeah, of course. We're all Reaganites now--or at least no longer socialists by instinct. But during the past two decades we've not only let economic uncertainty and unfairness grow to grotesque extremes, we've also inured ourselves to the spectacle. As America has become a lot more like Pottersville than Bedford Falls, those of us closer to the top of the heap have shrugged and moved on. The asymmetry between the Goldman boss's compensation and that of his average employee--85 times as big--is virtually Ben-and-Jerry's-like these days: An average CEO now gets paid several hundred times the salary of his average worker, a gap that's an order of magnitude larger than it was in the seventies. In Japan, the ratio is just 11-to-1, and in Britain 22-to-1.

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His American Dream

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 13:30:35 -0800

New York Magazine - By John Heilemann - Dec. 04 (Special Report) - "How'd you like to come to New York and have dinner with the next president of the United States?"

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The Comeback Kid

Mon, 22 May 2006 03:16:33 -0700

New York Magazine - By John Heilemann - May. 22 (Special Report) - Al Gore is back in Washington and back on the campaign trail, two realms with which he has always had a distinctly fraught relationship. For the past three weeks, Gore has been touring the country, appearing at screenings to gin up buzz about his global-warming documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth. The reception has been rapturous: adoring crowds everywhere. Now he’s here at the National Geographic Society for the East Coast premiere, enjoying his freshly minted status as a semi-hemi-demi-movie star (tomorrow he’s off to Cannes), hoping to impress an audience of politicos and pundits who once wrote him off for dead. The houselights dim. The audience quiets. And Gore, up onscreen, begins to teach. An Inconvenient Truth, in case you haven’t heard, is a feature-length treatment of a slide show Gore has been honing for nearly two decades. For much of that time, he was virtually alone in the political class in fretting about global warming. But that was before what Gore describes as our recent “nature hike through the Book of Revelations.” Before the record-breaking heat waves, the melting glaciers, the drowning polar bears. Before the droughts, the typhoons, the tornadoes. And, oh, yes, before Katrina.

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