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The Sun Shines on My Book
The New York Sun (which I’ve seen Tina Brown reading before, so hey) today has a little item on the party for the new book I’ve co-authored, All the President’s Spin (for those of you playing along at home, it’s due out on Tuesday, and you can order it now from Amazon.com).
Here’s the item, from the Knickerbocker column (no free links, sadly):
SPIN CYCLE Brendan Nyhan is a Duke University graduate student. Bryan Keefer is assistant managing editor of Columbia Journalism’s Review’s Campaign Desk, which monitors the press’s coverage of politics. Along with their friend Ben Fritz, who works in Los Angeles for Variety magazine, they are editors of the web site Spinsanity.com, a nonpartisan watchdog web site devoted to analyzing political spin and fact-checking the press from a non-partisan perspective.
The authors told the Knickerbocker that Spinsanity.com does not focus on bias, which is “speculation about motives,” but rather examines rhetorical devices in the press and looks for distortions of facts. The web site is adept at examining why mainstream press is so ineffective at countering political spin, and how surprising formats such as political satire, ideological press outlets, and web logs can break through the spin.
They have co-authored the book “All the President’s Spin: George W. Bush, the Media, and the Truth” (Touchstone). While the book does scrutinize both sides of the aisle, it mainly criticizes the Bush Administration for spin, strategically ambiguous language, and half-truths.
Messrs. Nyhan and Keefer were on hand on Tuesday at a book party atop the Gramercy Park Hotel, where a crowd came out to fete them. MediaTank, a group of young professionals in the television, film, and entertainment industries, sponsored the event. MediaTank was founded last year and this was its first large event.
Seen wereTouchstone/Fireside senior publicist Lisa Sciambra, Amy Paul, development director of Alliance Agency; Court TV publicist Barry Rosenberg, and MediaTank president Dan Shear, who works at the William Morris Agency.
The room was filled with 20- and 30-somethings who conduct business on the phone but seldom get to meet each other. They’re the ones who may be running the show, so to speak, in a decade or two.
- July 30, 2004
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Hollywood Reporter Reports on Me
I’m cited in a piece in an article in the Hollywood Reporter about blogs and the Democratic Convention. Here it is:
Most bloggers readily acknowledge that what they do is far from journalism. Bryan Keefer, assistant managing editor of Campaigndesk.org, a Web site on the 2004 campaign that is run by the Columbia University School of Journalism, thinks blogs serve as a check on the media, sometimes forcing journalists to cover an issue they might not have otherwise handled. . . .
Campaigndesk.org’s Keefer, who has co-run a blog called Spinsanity since 2001, thinks that the success of blogs has forced traditional media to work faster and to incorporate the best of blogs into its own operations.
- July 30, 2004
- filed under: Media
Wisconsin Public Radio
I’ll be doing an interview about my new article in the Columbia Journalism Review this Friday, July 23, at 6 PM Eastern on Wisconsin Public Radio. The show is called “Media Talk with Dave Berkman,” and you’ll be able to listen to it on stations around the state, and online.
Update: You can listen to an archived version of the show here (RealAudio).
- July 22, 2004
- filed under:
Making the Front Page
The Los Angeles Times was kind enough last Wednesday to let me sit in on their meetings on how to decide what stories to put on their front page. It was a pretty interesting look at how one of America’s major media outlets decides what news is important (and how the paper functions more broadly, as well). You can read the article on CampaignDesk.org.
- July 20, 2004
- filed under: Media
Me on Polarization in the Media
From a July 19, 2004 Christian Science Monitor article:
As liberals and conservatives clash more sharply, some Americans are taking things into their own hands to cut through the bloviation. People like Bryan Keefer. At age 21, he was appalled by the vitriol on both sides of the 2000 election fray over Florida ballots. So he and some friends started spinsanity.com, a blog on the Internet that attempts to cull the wheat from the political chaff. The site took off, and is now a mainstay for many politicos.
“We are specifically nonpartisan, we consider ourselves sort of the umpires, we call it as we see it,” he says. They’ve taken on both Michael Moore’s innuendo in “Fahrenheit 9/11” and George W. Bush’s selective use of facts—what Mr. Keefer calls the “strategically dishonest talking points.”
Every week now in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Spinsanity has a column critiquing two claims, one from the left and one from the right. “We’re holding everyone accountable,” says Keefer, who is now also the assistant managing editor of CampaignDesk.org, which is run by the Columbia Journalism Review.
- July 18, 2004
- filed under: Politics
Me and Marty
I’m scheduled to be on “So What Else is News” with Marty Kaplan on Air America radio tomorrow (the web site says it’s on from 7-8 p.m.) talking about my article in the Columbia Journalism Review.
Meanwhile, my Spinsanity partners-in-crime and I are quoted in the July issue of GQ (Question: “What would you use Bill Clinton for right now?” Answer: “Misleading the country about sexier topics than tax cuts and weapons of mass destruction.").
- July 08, 2004
- filed under:
Tsunami
I have a new 5000-word article in this month’s Columbia Journalism Review about how the candidates are spinning the press through a combination of dishonest spin, a tremendous volume of information, and the unprecedented speed with which they respond to each other. It’s a good preview of the kind of analysis you’ll be able to read more of in All the President’s Spin.
- July 02, 2004
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