Amid a blizzard of headlines detailing the demise of quality journalism, there’s at least one spot of sunshine poking through the clouds: The New York Times is intensifying its environmental coverage with "a new, crack environmental reporting unit that will pull in eight specialized reporters from the Science, National, Metro, Foreign, and Business desks in a bid for richer, more prominent coverage," reports the Columbia Journalism Review.

The Times’ fortified environmental unit debuts in contrast to depleted environmental teams elsewhere. The L.A. Times significantly reduced its unit last year, and CNN went even further, axing its environment, science, and technology reporting staff altogether just over a month ago.

What kind of added depth can you expect from the Times’ new environmental all-stars? According to CJR:

One of the primary goals is to get more interesting, “big-thought” environment articles onto the front page, according to assistant managing editor Glenn Kramon, to whom [the unit’s editor, Erica] Goode will report. That means more investigative work, he added, and sifting through reporting and storytelling approaches that resonate with readers. “My goal is to make 'em angry enough to do something,” Kramon said.

Image by ReservasdeCoches.com, licensed under Creative Commons.

Unlike most of the electorate, some political reporters are not eager to wake up on November 5 with the longest campaign in history a good night’s sleep behind them. “It's kind of like, this is who I am now,” Andrew Romano, a Newsweek blogger, tells the New Republic. “[S]o the idea of the campaign being over and not doing a politics blog is a little bit like, who am I after this election?”

Politico’s Ben Smith shares Romano’s sentiments. “It's so built into my system, that it's going to be hard to stop,” he tells TNR. “It's really pathological.”

But the tight psychological grip campaigns hold on reporters won’t be missed by all those covering the political beat. After the last presidential campaign, CNN correspondent Candy Crowley tells TNR it took her “a good month to stop waking up in the middle of the night in a panic that I've missed something.” Matt Bai of the New York Times notes that some reporters have been on the trail for nearly a year: “There are guys who went out to the primaries in November, December, and thought they'd be done in February or March, and they just never came home.”

Reporter weariness recently caught the critical eye of the Columbia Journalism Review, who took the New York Times to task for what they deemed an instance of lazy campaign coverage. Questioning the relevance of a Times cover story, CJR warns reporters not to “take out their election fatigue on voters.” Just pen a few more good stories, guys, then you can come home and sleep. . .or just keep blogging.

As election day nears, new stories of voter suppression and improper voter purges continue to come to light. The polls that pundits tend to focus on may not mean much, as huge numbers of voters will likely be unable to vote on November 4.

States have purged some 13 million voters from the voter rolls since 2004, Joe Rothstein reports for U.S. Politics Today. According to Rothstein, 17 percent of registered voters in the vital swing state of Colorado have been dropped from the rolls, and 10 percent of voters have been dropped in Missouri. CNN reports that 50,000 people have had their voter registrations “flagged,” calling the viability of their votes into question, and “4,500 of those people are having their citizenship questioned and the burden is on them to prove eligibility to vote.”

Even if people manage to get on the voter rolls, some states may not be ready for the massive influx of voters on election day. The Virginia NAACP recently sued Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, a Democrat, claiming that the state has failed to prepare for all the voters, the Associated Press reports. The complaint points out that many polling stations were overwhelmed in the February primaries, with some precincts resorting to makeshift ballots that were later thrown out. The NAACP believes November 4th could be even worse, warning that current preparation could “result in a meltdown on Election Day.”

North Carolina residents who don’t have their votes counted likely will be in good company. More than 1.6 million votes weren’t counted in 2004, according to Robert F. Kenney and Greg Palast writing for Rolling Stone, and the tactics used to suppress those votes could get worse this year. Kennedy and Palast outline six ways that people are going to try and steal votes, including obstructing of voter registration drives, illegitimate voter purges, and challenging and rejecting provisional and “spoiled” ballots.

The groundwork for this voter suppression has been laid by GOP operatives over the past few election cycles, Andrew Gumble writes for the Nation. Barack Obama’s commanding lead in the polls won’t make the illegal and undemocratic efforts to steal people’s votes go away, it just makes them more desperate.

The best way to stop the election from being stolen is to make the election into a blowout, Robert Lovato writes for New America Media. That way, manipulated and stolen votes won’t matter as much. If that doesn’t work, Lovato floats the idea of a general strike, protests, office-takeovers, and other non-violent protest demonstrations.

One of the organizations trying to make sure the vote goes as smoothly as possible is the Video the Vote project, an organization profiled by the New York Times that is supplying volunteers with video cameras to document any election misconduct. The Times also points to the Voter Suppression Wiki and the Election Protection Wiki as user-generated efforts to protect people’s votes on election day.

Image by Ceridwen, licensed under Creative Commons.

Here’s what the Republicans have mustered this week: A DNC counteroffensive that mocked the Democrats' stage and blather about how 80,000-plus people showing up for a political speech is somehow a bad thing. And now there’s this: A seemingly last-minute, hail-mary VP pick driven by the now-stale strategy of luring disgruntled Hillary supporters.

Word broke this morning that Sarah Palin is McCain’s pick. The first-term Alaska governor is so unknown on the national stage that CNN’s breaking coverage of the nod was basically a rewrite of the governor’s web bio.

She’s got ethics reform on her short resume (and an ethics investigation) and some green credentials. But most importantly and most obviously she is a woman. Why else would McCain throw his experience mantra under the bus? To paraphrase Josh Marshall, If you’re a 72-year-old cancer survivor running for president you better pick someone who’s ready to step up, especially if your entire campaign is based on your EXPERIENCE.

Here in Minnesota, we’re all buzzing about what doomed Governor Tim Pawlenty’s chances. (Our office pool was a boring failure, since everyone picked Pawlenty.) He was the frontrunner in chatter yesterday, had canceled his week’s schedule, and then suddenly broke the Republicans’ tightly controlled message management and—not sounding too happy about things—told a local radio station that it was a “fair assumption” that he wasn’t going to be the veep. That leaves the impression of a last-minute decision, one forced by the unexpected strength of Obama’s performance last night.

While Democrats—egged on by Republican teasing—stewed in doubts about Obama not hitting back hard enough, or Obama leaving himself open for sucker punches by going on vacation, or their ranks not being unified, the Obama team clearly had a plan. They let McCain’s people play in the mud for the whole of August. And in one fell swoop of a speech, dispatched with each and every tactic in the Pubs’ playbook. The speech was smart, and, given the Republican response to it last night, it was clearly unexpected.

Now, it’s not even September, and the McCain team has been forced to chisel away at their best card—the experience card. It’s time Democrats—particularly the pundits out chattering to the media—stop letting Republicans get their goat and leave the self-doubt thing behind.

Image by  Ryan McFarland , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Why do cable news shows exist? They don’t break news, but once they find a story they like—the Reverend Wright kerfuffle or the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth for example—the talking heads will bang on the controversy like a child with a saucepan and a metal spoon. And the problems with cable news don’t stay quarantined inside of Fox News or CNN. A recent article for the American Journalism Review (AJR) scrutinizes the "cable news effect" on the rest of the mainstream media. Most journalists understandably recoil at the notion of the 24-hour news networks influencing editorial decisions, but cable news’ ability to keep a story on the media agenda is undeniable.

Cable news viewership is eclipsed by that of network news, according to research by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), but its influence is not to be underestimated. One reason, according to AJR, is that most mainstream newsrooms have at least one television constantly tuned to a 24 hour news network. Some editors have spoken of an “osmosis” effect, where the cable news ideas tend to seep into the minds of the rest of the media.

It must be difficult for cable news programmers to fill some 18 hours of programming each day. But instead of focusing on important issues, PEJ research shows that, “tabloid-tinged crime and celebrity” stories and bombastic pundits tend to dominate the airwaves. The repetitive, formulaic coverage offered by the 24-hour news networks doesn’t always serve to elevate public discourse, but it gets the point across.

The problem is that the cable news formula has been working. The AJR reports that cable news has been gaining in  popularity and prestige over recent years, and so far there’s no reason to think that trend won’t continue. So long as cable news continue to influence the rest of the media, those talking heads won’t go away any time soon.

After 9/11, Al Jazeera immediately assumed a more significant role on the global media stage. The news station’s privileged access to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan—and its position as Osama bin Laden’s preferred videotape recipient—placed Al Jazeera leaps and bounds ahead of sources like CNN and BBC (both of which have relied on feed from Al Jazeera). The station quickly came to serve as America’s primary window to the Middle East.

In the most recent issue of Islamica, Silvia Gaiani dissects Al Jazeera’s rise to international prominence. Gaiani, a Bologna, Italy-based journalist and scholar, credits the station’s prolonged success to its coverage of issues with pan-Arab appeal. It’s also come to be considered an accurate source of local news in countries with highly censored media. If there was a riot or protest, Gaiani notes, the news used to spread by word of mouth. Now, it’s Al Jazeera.

The unexpected by-product of Al Jazeera’s success, Gaiani argues, is that “[f]or the first time in modern history, the flow of information is no longer just from West to East.” This is a point that cannot be understated, especially now that the network has branched out into English, effectively doubling its market from 40 million Arabic-speaking viewers to 70-80 million. And its influence should only rise as Al Jazeera eyes the Urdu-speaking market of South Asia.

Even though the network has yet to broadcast in the United States, its entry could be exactly what American news needs: a voice that forces the hand of top domestic networks to reshape their coverage of the Middle East.

—Eric Kelsey