Through much of George Bush's tenure, a common narrative has suggested that the president surrounds himself with smart advisors who really make the tough decisions. Recently, a new press narrative has emerged. Ron Suskind, Paul Begala and Ari Fleischer discuss Bush’s changing image.

One constituency that will benefit from the Democratic takeover of Congress is journalists. At least that’s what National Journal columnist William Powers says. It’s not that Dems appeal to journalists’ own sympathies exactly, but that they’re prone to infighting and hijinks, both of which make for good ...

Lawyers aren’t the only ones whose livelihoods are helped along by public scandals. There are also crisis management firms, who trade on their ability to work the media and influence public perceptions. Richard Levick runs one such firm, and has been called in to finesse such P.R. nightmares as the ...

By now we know that former Congressman Mark Foley had been sending icky emails to underage congressional pages for some time. We also know that at least two Florida newspapers had tips about the emails almost a year ago. Bob talks with Neil Brown, executive editor of the St. Petersburg ...

We revisit the question with Larry Diamond, a former advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority, argues to Bob that the term insurgency misrepresents the reality in Iraq. And Peter Galbraith, an American advisor to the Kurdish government, maintains that Iraq will never be a stable, unified country.

Yet another shoe dropped in the Valerie Plame saga this week. It seems the original source for columnist Bob Novak’s scoop wasn’t Karl Rove or Scooter Libby. According to a new book by two beltway reporting vets, it was Richard Armitage, erstwhile Deputy Secretary of State and early critic of ...

On Thursday, one of the legal challenges to the NSA warrantless surveillance program scored a significant victory when a federal judge in Detroit deemed it unconstitutional. Bob speaks with law professor Jonathan Turley, who is spearheading a separate federal case against the program, about the implications of the decision.

The legal landscape is still feeling the aftershocks of the disclosure, last December, of a vast NSA domestic wiretapping program. But a bill sponsored by Senator Arlen Specter would take all of the pending cases against the NSA and move them to a secret court, off limits to media and ...

The president made his first-ever veto this week, sending back a bill that would have loosened restraints on government funding for embryonic stem cell research. But ABC’s Jake Tapper tells Brooke that while the veto itself sent one message, press releases from the White House were sending another.

Sticks and stones, among other things, continue to break bones in Iraq. But this week’s best-covered (if not bloodiest) battle took place on Capitol Hill, and was all about names. Republicans seized on Dems’ disagreement about troop withdrawals, accused their opponents of defeatism, and taunted them for wanting to “cut ...

Last week, presidential speechwriter Michael Gerson announced he was moving on to greener pastures. And thus, the White House lost the man who did perhaps the most to fill the president’s famous eloquence gap. Guest host Mike Pesca speaks with New Yorker staff writer Jeffrey Goldberg, who profiled Gerson earlier ...

Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert emceed the White House Correspondent Dinner, giving a 20 minute irony-drenched jab at the president (who happened to be sitting next to him). Bob gives his take on Colbert sticking it to both the president and the press corps.

Two months ago, a historian in Washington discovered that intelligence operatives were secretly re-classifying documents in the National Archives. This week, an internal investigation at the Archives concluded that about a third of the records pulled from the shelves should not have been reclassified. Brooke speaks with J. William Leonard, ...

It used to be quite common for presidents to reach into the ranks of the press corps to find their spokesmen. But for almost three decades now, press secretaries have come with P.R. bona fides – not journalistic ones. Bush’s appointment this week of Fox News TV and radio personality ...

This week, White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters something they didn’t know. To wit: he will soon be stepping down, for good, from the podium. Reporters might have seldom gotten what they wanted from his daily briefings. But taken as a whole, his tenure speaks volumes about the ...

This week, the 2006 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced. Almost immediately, some slammed the awards as showing an anti-Bush bias. Escaping the controversy was Washington Post fashion writer Robin Givhan, winner of the prize for criticism. But a closer look at her writing shows that in Washington, even getting dressed ...

These days, partisan politics are everywhere – dinner parties, the editorial pages, movie previews, and even children’s literature. But can simple prose and bright illustrations help explain the confusing world of politics? Or is it just colorful propaganda? Are children developmentally equipped to understand politics? Bob talks to Katherine DeBrecht, ...

Over the course of several decades, investigative reporter Jack Anderson managed to break some of the era’s biggest political stories, and to alienate some of Washington’s most powerful men, among them J. Edgar Hoover. Now, it appears that Anderson’s antagonism with the Feds has followed him to the grave. The ...

You are a White House reporter, invited for a rare sit-down meeting with the President. The only condition is that the conversation, whatever it covers, will be strictly off-the-record. Do you agree to talk with the President on the President’s terms? Knight Ridder White House correspondent Ron Hutcheson weighs the ...

There’s a gulf not only between Latino and Anglo coverage of the U.S. immigration debate, but also between American and Mexican treatment of the question. North of the border, the issue percolates to the surface from time to time in the national media, but in Mexico, it is a constant ...