Former Virginia governor Mark Warner hasn’t launched a presidential campaign; neither has Senator Chuck Hagel. But both have been featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine as potential candidates. Is Warner the anti-Hillary? Is Hagel the un-McCain? Somehow the vetting process for 2008 has already begun. NYT ...

What are fringe politicians who want to stand out on Capitol Hill to do? Or a politico with a pet issue for the national stage? Here’s an idea: announce a run for president. New Republic Senior Editor Michael Crowley tells Brooke some of the many reasons why a hopeless candidate ...

This July, Mexican voters will elect a new president. Campaign season has reflected a general loosening of the government’s stranglehold on media during the past six years. But the opening has also made way for a new media phenomenon: negative advertising. It’s a tactic that reflects the influence of political ...

If you’re looking for information about local candidates for office, you’d better not waste your time with local TV news. But one watchdog group thinks programmers can do better. The Media Access Project is asking the FCC not to renew the licenses of stations in Milwaukee and Chicago, pointing to ...

For years, gun ownership has been one of the most persistent and polarizing aspects of America's "culture war." But have the media done justice to both sides of the issue? Some journalists have admitted that mainstream media tend to stereotype hunters and gun collectors as raging lunatics. Which, in turn, ...

The New York Observer recently took note of an odd political flirtation developing between none other than the junior senator from New York and the News Corp. mogul from Australia. Ben Smith wrote the piece, “The Odd Couple ’08,” and joins Brooke to discuss how a Clinton/Murdoch alliance could benefit ...

It's election time again – in England. And fresh from watching the political strategy employed during our elections, Tony Blair is facing many of the same criticisms that Bush did. But the similarities stop there. Chief among the differences is that the kind of deference afforded to the president here ...

We've all by now heard about the sleeper factor in Election '04: moral values voters. But recently, some commentators have been questioning that explanation. They point to new data from the Pew Center showing that voters identify "moral values" as their biggest concern only when presented with a multiple choice ...

Could the election have been stolen? Since Kerry conceded, the blogosphere has been abuzz with reports of polling irregularities, and allegations of all-out fraud. Over the course of the week, new organizations’ inboxes were deluged by emails demanding answers. And gradually, the mainstream media began to pick up the strands. ...

It was an exhausting evening for everybody, and especially for Kerry supporters who bothered to look at early exit poll returns on the Internet. Those numbers showed Kerry ahead in all the crucial states, and so by the end of the night, how the seemingly mighty had fallen. But it ...

The front page of a section in the London’s Guardian newspaper on Thursday was all black, save two white words in the middle of the page: “Oh, God.” The reaction to Bush’s victory in much of the rest of the European press was only slightly more muted. Brooke gets a ...

As we've all seen, voters in those all-important states are being swamped by ads and canvassing in a last ditch attempt to close the sale. In one of the more novel tactics, the Bush campaign has taken to sponsoring local radio traffic reports. In many swing-state markets, listeners can now ...

On Tuesday, the networks will rely on a new apparatus for determining poll results. It's called the National Election Pool, and it has risen from the ashes of the Voter News Service, which led the networks to call Florida for Gore in 2000. The NEP will be doing exit polling, ...

Another weekend, another round of endorsements. But in the end, how much influence do the editorial pages have over voters' choices on election day? The answer depends on the candidate's position on the ballot. The further down you go, the more voters depend on their trusted dailies. But where presidential ...

There's more than a week left before the election, but many have cast their votes already, including Americans abroad, shut-ins, and newspapers. Editor & Publisher senior editor Joe Strupp has been tracking editorial endorsements in a daily roundup, and joins Bob to discuss the backroom process through which editorial boards ...

Two weeks ago, Sinclair Broadcasting Group unleashed a hornet's nest when it ordered its 62 local TV stations to air a documentary attacking John Kerry's anti-Vietnam War activities. Advertisers pulled out in the face of a boycott threat, and Sinclair's stock plummeted. This week, Sinclair appeared to backtrack, announcing it ...

Election polling will soon come to an end, and the public will once again be free to keep its opinions to itself. Pollsters will likely use the quiet to recalibrate their methodologies in preparation for the next big race. But some skeptics aren't convinced that progress lies in creating a ...

The conflicting methodologies of the various pollsters, from ABC to Zogby, have resulted in election forecasts that are all over the map. But the media are unswayed by the lack of certainty, and continue to shower us with more polls. Philip J. Trounstine, director of the Survey and Policy Research ...

A few weeks ago, a British newspaper kicked off a campaign to win hearts and minds in the swing state of Ohio. The Guardian asked concerned Britons to write directly to voters in a hotly contested county, and implore them to vote for Kerry. Ohioans were less then impressed. While ...

Several reliable polls suggest that for most Americans, local TV newscasts are a prime source of information about local government. But a recent study found that in the weeks leading up to the 2002 elections, about half of the local newscasts in the top 50 markets didn't air a single ...