Need something to take the edge off as you wait for your fellow Americans to decide the fate of the nation? How about a distracting drinking game? (Those who prefer not to imbibe, or want to ensure they’ll be both awake and alert when the next president is announced, can substitute alcohol with stale Halloween candy).

Here are the rules, suggested by experts Bennett Gordon, Elizabeth Ryan, and Kari Volkmann-Carlsen here at Utne Reader. Drink or dig into the Halloween candy every time the following happen, unless another frequency is otherwise noted.

1. A red state goes blue, or vice versa (Potential targets for the former: Ohio, Virginia, Florida, Nevada, Colorado, North Carolina, New Mexico, Indiana. Potential targets for the latter: Pennsylvania, New Hampshire.)

2. A pundit says something he or she actually believes, mistakenly assuming that his or her mic is off (See: Peggy Noonan or the Rev. Jesse Jackson).

3. Drink/pop a Reeses every tenth time Joe the Plumber is mentioned. Anything less could cause alcohol poisoning or a hypoglycemic event.

4. Voter suppression reported. Do not drink or candy-binge for five minutes.

5. Flagrant network abuse of new Election Day gadgetry. Watch this SNL skit for examples:

6. Keith Olberman pounds his chest saying, “What’s up now?”

7. A Fox News anchor starts to cry.

8. A former candidate looks more convincing than he ever did while he was running (i.e., Al Gore, John Kerry, Bill Richardson)

9. James Carville uses folksy expression hitherto unknown to all speakers of English.

10. Network assures you, Joe the Viewer, that they won’t screw up this year by calling any race too early. Then calls a race too early.

11. Hanging chads come up.

12. Network actually mentions the Green Party (drink twice).

13. Obama wins. Stop drinking/eating candy. Go and dance in the street.

14. McCain pulls off upset. Finish off all the bottles in house.

Image by  RichieC , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

With a pivotal presidential election just around the corner, attendance was robust at the panel dubbed "Media and the Elections: Covering 2008" at the National Conference for Media Reform. The discussion didn't produce any silver-bullet solutions for immediate improvement of political coverage, but the panelists offered substantial food for thought as Barack Obama and John McCain head for a November showdown.

The starting point, naturally, was the dismal state of mainstream media election coverage: the off-the-charts obsession with remarks made by Obama's pastor, the Rev. James Wright; the racism and sexism on display in coverage of the Obama and Clinton campaigns; the gaping media blind spots on issues of race, the environment, and unemployment; and the marginalization of third-party and lesser-known candidates. John Nichols, Washington correspondent for the Nation magazine and author of the book Tragedy and Farce, put the problem in stark terms: "We're not just seeing bad media. We're seeing assault and battery on our democracy."

Robert "Biko" Baker, a community activist with the League of Young Voters in Milwaukee, brought a more street-level perspective to the topic, describing the poverty and disenfranchisement of the youth he works with—and the vast distance between them and the talking heads on CNN and Fox. "Corporate America runs the media and will continue to run the media until we stop it," he said before concluding with a clarion call: "The world is in peril. We have to challenge our contradictions."

Sirota, author of The Uprising, added a fresh twist to the discussion. Many of us, he noted, see the media as a monolithic force, and we await the news sent down from "Media Mount Olympus." But that passive role is exactly what has strengthened the role of the "paternalistic" media. "We have the chance to be our own media," he says, and we ought to seize it. For another audience, this might have sounded like a simplistic bromide. But for this crowd, made up largely of indie media activists and advocates, it sounded plausible, and when they filed out of the room, you suspected they might just go out and do it.

For more on the National Conference for Media Reform, click here.

There’s really no way to tiptoe around when writing about the possibility-of-assassination hype surrounding Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. As a journalist, you either take the plunge into sewage-clogged waters and brace yourself for silly claims about feeding the imagination of racist psychos, or you don’t.

Adam Reilly, in a recent article in the Phoenix, tries to play both sides by justifying writing about the (ridiculous) media coverage the issue has received with the (even more ridiculous) media coverage concerning how said coverage might actually increase the odds of said possibility. Besides being dizzyingly circuitous, the argument is patently lacking in something Stephen Colbert claims America has in spades: balls. Is the subject really so taboo?

Only if you think the reality of racist nut jobs with a propensity for lethal violence should be swept under the rug. Of course he’s a target, in some reactionary’s wet dream, if not in reality. And that’s worth covering. What isn’t worth covering is why some people think it shouldn’t be covered, pseudoscientific ideas concerning how covering it would affect the odds of it happening, or anything else having to do with meta-analyzing the topic.

And here’s a new rule: When discussing how worried we all are about an attempt on Senator Obama’s life, there’s no need to point out how terrible a thing it is to reflect on. We already know. And chances are, if somebody doesn’t think the assassination of our first truly viable black presidential candidate would be an enormous national tragedy, then call the Secret Service, because that’s probably the guy everyone’s worried about.

—Morgan Winters

Beware the passion of the hometown newspaper. It can seep from an editorial-page endorsement into news coverage, transforming campaign reporting into spin-infested idolatry. Such is the case with the New York Times, whose news pages of late have been stamped with Hillary-approved storylines and sources.

The most egregious case in point was a front-page feature on February 9 that, in essence, whined that Barack Obama had trumped up his drug use:

Mr. Obama’s account of his younger self and drugs, though, significantly differs from the recollections of others who do not recall his drug use. That could suggest he was so private about his usage that few people were aware of it, that the memories of those who knew him decades ago are fuzzy or rosier out of a desire to protect him, or that he added some writerly touches in his memoir to make the challenges he overcame seem more dramatic.

Reporter Serge F. Kovaleski chooses door number three, smoking out old college and high school acquaintances who didn’t remember Obama as much of a party animal. Then he dissects Obama’s drug use (which Kovaleski acknowledges takes up 1½ pages of a 442-page book):   

Mr. Obama wrote that he would get high to help numb the confusion he felt about himself. “Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man,” he penned in the memoir.

But, Kovaleski implies, there was really no such risk. Just listen to Obama’s old prep-school pal, Keith Kakugawa, who recollects: “As far as pot, booze, or coke being a prevalent part of his life, I doubt it.” (See, no chance of slipping down an ill-fated path. And what has Kakugawa been up to since those days? Well, Kovaleski reports, he “spent seven years in and out of prison for drug offenses beginning in 1996.”)

One can only imagine what the media line would have been had Obama not fessed up early in his ambitious career. Doesn’t he know he’s supposed to leave that stuff hidden, so enterprising reporters in dire need of scoops can uncover it?

The New York Times’ tack here is reminiscent of its efforts to jump on the memoir-debunking bandwagon in 2006. Inspired by the James Frey pile-on that followed revelations about the fictive liberties the author took in his one-time memoir, A Million Little Pieces, the paper’s arts section aired idiotic concerns about the importance of factual errors that were corrected in the new translation of Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir Night:

In the previous translation, published in 1960, the narrator tells a fellow prisoner that he is "not quite 15." But the scene takes place in 1944. Mr. Wiesel, born on Sept. 30, 1928, would have already been 15, going on 16. In the new edition, when asked his age, he replies, "15."

Gotcha!

The anti-Obama bias has seeped into other coverage as well. (Though there have been some valiant and nasty efforts among the paper’s columnists to counterbalance.) Take the lead story in the February 17 “Week in Review.” Veteran campaign-trail reporter Kate Zernike examines the perks and pitfalls of the “charismatic leader,” recruiting various historians to parse the Obama phenomenon. Eventually, she elicits this zinger:

“What is troubling about the [Obama] campaign is that it’s gone beyond hope and change to redemption . . . It’s posing as a figure who is the one person who will redeem our politics. And what I fear is, that ends up promising more from politics than politics can deliver.”

And who did Zernike tap for this scholarly assessment? Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, who, she parenthetically notes, is “a longtime friend of the Clintons.” Certainly there is a scholar somewhere in this nation’s Ivory Towers who—despite not having Bill and Hillary in their Rolodex—is nevertheless capable of throwing a few swings at Obama. There’s a substantive difference between the biased view of a supporter and the biased view of a friend. Transparency does not good sourcing make.

Now, the list of errant reporting can go on. (And would start with the breathlessly pro-Clinton blogging from reporter Katharine Q. Seelye during the CNN/Univision debate in Texas). But I’ll sign off with a roundup of news outlets’ poll positions that the Columbia Journalism Review’s Campaign Desk blog assembled in the run-up to the Potomac Primaries (to illustrate a different point about the media’s wrong-headed insistence on fortune-telling):

McClatchy: McCain, Obama favored to win Virginia

Agence France-Presse: Ragged Clinton campaign braces for more vote woe

UPI: Poll: Obama, McCain favored in Va., Md.

LA Times: Obama favored in Potomac primaries

Miami Herald: McCain, Obama look strong for ‘Potomac Primary’

Pittsburgh Tribune: Obama favored to sweep next 3 primaries

Wall Street Journal: Today, Sen. Obama is favored to win the “Potomac Primary” in neighboring Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia.

The Hill: Potomac primary losses could spark pressure on Huckabee to withdraw

ABC News’s The Note: Clinton’s gone cold at the wrong time, and she could wake up Wednesday staring at Obama from the other side of the standings.

New York Times: With primaries on Tuesday in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia, Clinton advisers were pessimistic about her chances, though some held out hope for a surprise performance in Virginia.

That “some” holding out for victory? Clinton’s campaign denizens, donors, and the New York Times.

—Hannah Lobel 

CBS News and Digg—the social news-sharing site where members vote to determine which stories make the front page—have teamed up for the 2008 election, reports Mike Shields in Mediaweek. CBSNews.com will allow its election coverage to be Diggable (linked to on Digg), and Digg will begin featuring CBS News video content.

This new-media/old-media alliance may do its part to freshen up 2008’s political coverage, hopefully avoiding the traditional 24/7 crawling ticker of presidential race updates. But it might also snowball into an uncontrollable media mutant, joining the mainstream perspective of CBS News coverage with that of Digg users, who tend to favor Internet sensations. Which means we’ll probably be seeing a lot more of Ron Paul.

—Michael Rowe

Photo by Bennett Gordon.