Buzzfeed reporter McKay Coppins followed Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential election. Like Romney, Coppins is a practicing Mormon, although he never actually told anyone in the Romney family that he shared their faith. Brooke talks to Coppins about how his faith and his reporting intersected, and why the Romney campaign saw his religion as a liability. 

Yo La Tengo - On Our Way to Fall

The first presidential debate of the season electrified Romney's supporters and disappointed Obama's. Brooke looks at the reaction to the debate, and checks in on what the pundits are saying.

The Album Leaf – There is a Wind

Political conventions used to be places where decisions were made and delegates truly participated. Now, they are just a series of scripted speeches covered by the media as though they are breaking news stories. Bob reflects on the last two weeks of this modern convention style.

In January, two Reuters reporters, Andy Sullivan and Greg Roumeliotis published a piece about Bain’s takeover and subsequent management of GS Technologies – a steel mill in Kansas City. The piece is a long, nuanced piece of business journalism. The plant failed under Bain’s stewardship, but the piece points out that, overall, Bain has an excellent track record and that larger economic forces were at work in the plant's failure. It also points out that despite that failure, which was probably caused at least in part by the debt Bain loaded unto the company, Bain made $12 million on their $8 million dollar investment and at least $4.5 million in consulting fees.

Interest in Romney’s time at Bain made the piece notable when it was published (it was cited by Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry) but it didn’t really start making its way in the world until Priorities USA Action (a SuperPac closely, really closely, aligned with President Obama) made it the backbone of a series of ads against Romney.

The Obama and Romney campaigns have been slugging away at each other this week about transparency and disclosure. And yet Tuesday, the Disclose Act, which would have allowed you to better know the people behind superpacs was smothered in the Senate by filibuster without earning a single Republican vote. Huffington Post reporter Dan Froomkin explains to Brooke what happened.

This week saw both news organizations and the Romney presidential campaign arguing over the veracity of claims made by the Obama administration about Romney's tenure at Bain Capital, the financial services company Romney co-founded. Political scientist and media critic Brendan Nyhan says that part of the problem is that the media has fallen down on the job in properly reporting this story.

The big political story this week was an argument between the Obama and Romney campaigns about whether or not Romney would have killed Osama Bin Laden, were he president. As the New Yorker's John Cassidy observed, the argument was actually beside the point -- it was a piece of calculated political distraction by the White House. He explains to Bob how it worked, and what news we missed as a result.