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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 news copy. And, he tells Brooke, journalists will go to great lengths to prove that they’re not lapdogs of the left.
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, author of Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed!, and to Jeremy Zilber, author of Why Mommy is a Democrat. And he gets the expert opinion of psychology professor Dr. Andrew Getzfeld.
This week it was revealed that Scooter Libby said that Vice President Cheney said that President Bush said … that he should leak information from the secret National Intelligence Estimate, to New York Times reporter Judith Miller. Questions abound, and Brooke is joined by Josh Gerstein, who broke the news in the New York Sun, to discuss what the new facts mean for the President and for Patrick Fitzgerald’s ongoing investigation into who leaked CIA officer Valerie Plame’s identity.
The immigration policy debate has been brewing in for years in Washington. But when half-a-million people turned out for a massive protest last weekend in L.A., many Americans sat up in surprise. Many, that is, who hadn’t been consuming Spanish-language media, where the rally had been plugged for weeks. Bob talks to University of Southern California journalism professor Felix Gutierrez about what the Anglo mainstream missed.
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 focus of media attention. L.A. Times correspondent Hector Tobar tells Bob what the debate looks like from Mexico City.
The President took questions this week – from the public, from military families, and from members of the Washington press corp. And not just any member of the press – Helen Thomas got to ask a question, after three years of being purposefully ignored in the briefings. Why now? With approval ratings down, why give an outspoken critic the chance to pose a difficult question? New York Newsday columnist James Pinkerton explains his theory to Bob.
For the past seven years, intelligence operatives have been poring over public records in the National Archives. Their orders: to identify documents that should never have been made public in the first place. The problem: much of what they decided to re-classify has already been widely disseminated, and poses no apparent threat to national security. Brooke speaks with Matthew Aid, the historian who inadvertently discovered the secret reclassification program.
With revelations about the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program come questions about the role of U.S. phone companies in complying with requests to pry. Morton Halperin served in the Johnson, Nixon and Clinton administrations and has experienced wiretapping firsthand. He explains to Brooke how government surveillance and the telecommunications industry have grown up together.
