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ST. LOUIS, Oct. 2 -- Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin spent much of the past two weeks on the defensive, hounded by critics over halting performances in television interviews and questioned even by conservative writers doubtful about whether she is ready to be vice president. But the Palin who showed up for Thursday's debate against Democratic Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. was anything but defensive. In a fast-paced exchange about a range of domestic and foreign policy issues, she was the aggressive campaigner who in the first weeks of her candidacy had so energized the Republican faithful.

New ABC News/Washington Post national poll conducted after the debate (Sept 27-29) shows that John McCain has picked up 5 points on Barack Obama during the last week, moving from a nine-point deficit to trailing by four: Obama 50 (-2 vs. last poll Sept 19-22) McCain 46 (+3) Obama leads by 4.8% in the RCP National Average. According to the poll, McCain has regained the lead among key swing groups: Independents favor McCain by 3 (48-45), white women by 11 (54-43), and white Catholics by one (47-46). McCain is still holding on to 20% of Democrats who voted for Hillary...

JOHN McCAIN selected Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate 23 days ago. Since then, Ms. Palin has not held a single news conference with the national media. She has answered only a handful of questions from voters and reporters. She sat down for a lengthy discussion with one nonpartisan interviewer, ABC's Charles Gibson, and granted another interview to conservative Sean Hannity of Fox News, as well as a sit-down with People magazine and some interviews with Alaska media. Where Dick Cheney made the rounds of five news shows the weekend after he was tapped by George W....

Katie Paul at Newsweek alerted me that Newsweek printed a correction to their story claiming that Palin cut funding for teen mothers and the state WIC program. I blogged about it here and had extensive conversations with Alaska officials about the claims. Ms. Paul was also diligent to work with Alaska officials to correct the story once I made her aware of the facts. Here is the correction (at the end of page 2): Clarification (updated Sept. 11, 2008) : A number of readers have challenged the assertion in this story that Gov. Palin “cut by 20 percent the funding...

Washington Post Co. (WPO) Chief Executive Don Graham on Tuesday reported the sale of $2.9 million in company stock. According to a regulatory filing, 4,664 shares of Class B stock were sold through trusts of Graham's siblings. snip

You’ve got to give liberals one thing: If they’re nothing else, they’re consistent about spewing garbage, thereby proving that those who make a religion of politics and gods of politicians will lie any lie, hiss any hypocrisy, sell out any mother, and Sister Souljah any principle if they believe doing so might earn them a scrap of political power. That thought comes to mind because no sooner had I finished writing that Governor Palin must prepare herself to bear “the worst slings and arrows of outrageous presidential politics” than, like everyone else, I found myself up to my nose in...

Though it was high in shock value, the Palin pick left bruised feelings among the short-list contenders who were not picked -- and infuriated some Republican officials who privately said McCain had gone out on a limb, unnecessarily, without laying the groundwork for such an unknown. Two senior Republican officials close to Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty said they had both been rudely strung along and now "feel manipulated." "They now know that they were used as decoys, well after McCain had decided not to pick them," one Republican involved in the process said. Democrats quickly absorbed the Obama talking...

Remember when McCain said that he had visited all 57 States during his campaign? Then there was the time that McCain said "Well let me be absolutely clear. Israel is a strong friend of Israel's." Oh, and what about the time that McCain said "10,000 people died" in the Kansas tornadoes (death toll really 12). Crazy stuff, eh? Wait, let's not forget when McCain said that Arkansas was a "nearby" state to Kentucky. Man was that a major flub showing a complete lack of knowledge of simple geography. Hmm, wait a minute. I might be making a flub myself, here....

Welcome to the party boys. Maybe next they'll be calling for a grown-up like Hillary to take the helm.

Greg Osberg, Newsweek’s president and worldwide publisher, is leaving the Washington Post Company, FOLIO: has learned. Osberg told FOLIO: Tuesday that he plans to stay on at Newsweek until early fall. No successor has been named, though Jon Meacham, the magazine’s editor, would figure to be a prime candidate. A Washington Post Company spokesperson said the decision would be made by Newsweek. A spokesperson for Newsweek did not immediately return a request seeking comment. Osberg joined Newsweek in 1990 as associate advertising director, then vice president/associate publisher. He left Newsweek in 1997 to become president of sales and marketing at...

The Washington Post runs a devastating editorial against Obama's current position on Iraq: Barack Obama yesterday accused President Bush and Sen. John McCain of rigidity on Iraq: "They said we couldn't leave when violence was up, they say we can't leave when violence is down." Mr. Obama then confirmed his own foolish consistency. Early last year, when the war was at its peak, the Democratic candidate proposed a timetable for withdrawing all U.S. combat forces in slightly more than a year. Yesterday, with bloodshed at its lowest level since the war began, Mr. Obama endorsed the same plan. After hinting...

Signaling a generational change at one of the nation’s most influential newspapers, the new publisher of The Washington Post on Monday selected an outsider as the paper’s top editor. Marcus W. Brauchli, a former top editor of The Wall Street Journal, will become the executive editor of The Post on Sept. 8, at a time of great upheaval in the industry. At age 47, he is young enough to remain in place in for many years, working alongside the publisher, Katharine Weymouth, who is 42 and has been in her job for five months. He will succeed Leonard Downie...

The Washington Post published a June 28th piece geared to protect Barack Obama from the nagging rumors that he is a secret Muslim, rumors that have been circulating since 2004. The Post's Matthew Mosk penned an attack on Free Republic, based on an Obama flak who claims she has somehow discovered that Freepers are to blame, if not initially responsible, for floating the Barack-is-a-Muslim chain email that so many millions of Americans have found in their email boxes over the last four years. But, the Washington Post's article is so filled with assumptions and a singular desire not to...

In her Sunday column this week, Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell responds to charges of improper money-making from special-interest groups against two of the newspaper's stars, David Broder and Bob Woodward. The allegations were carried in the current issue of Harper's by Ken Silverstein, the magazine's Washington editor. Both Broder and Woodward recently took buyouts from the paper but remain as contract workers. The Post Stylebook's ethics and standards section says only: "We freelance for no one and accept no speaking engagements without permission from department heads." Howell observes: "Broder and Woodward did not check with editors on the appearances...

Antoin Rezko, a Chicago businessman and longtime fundraiser for Sen. Barack Obama, (D-Ill.), was convicted of 16 felony charges Wednesday... ... The 16 counts included fraud, money laundering and abetting bribery ...

Publisher Peter Osnos, who admits to personally working with former Bush White House press secretary Scott McClellan on his new book, What Happened, began his career as an assistant to I.F. Stone, the pro-communist "journalist" named as a Soviet agent of influence who was the uncle of Weather Underground communist terrorist Kathy Boudin. But the connections don't end there. Boudin's son Chesa was raised by Barack Obama associates Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who were Boudin's comrades in the communist terrorist group, after Kathy Boudin went to prison for her involvement in an armed robbery and assault that took the...

When Howard Kurtz invited Kimberly Dozier, the CBS journalist wounded in Iraq, onto his program, “Reliable Sources,” on CNN on Sunday, he was not a disinterested interviewer. Mr. Kurtz’s wife, Sheri Annis, had been paid to serve as a publicist for Ms. Dozier’s memoir, “Breathing the Fire,” which Ms. Dozier had come on the program to discuss. After the interview, in which he also read aloud from the book, Mr. Kurtz told his viewers that he considered Ms. Dozier “a remarkable woman.” He then added, “I should mention that my wife has done some promotion work for Kim Dozier’s book.”...

Let's not bury the lead: This is a rough time for the newspaper business, a rough time for The Washington Post and a rough time for me. No one need shed any tears for the people leaving this building. The more than 100 journalists who have just taken early-retirement packages are voluntarily accepting a generous offer as the company trims its payroll -- a situation far better than at newspapers that have resorted to layoffs. But it is painful to watch from the inside. The talented reporters, editors and photographers walking out the door are part of the heart and...

As Washington Post staffers reached the deadline to decide whether they would take buyouts, newsroom sources confirmed that WaPo Executive editor Leonard Downie will retire no later than inauguration day, 2009. An announcement could come as early as today. Former International Tribune editor David Ignatius and post managing editor Phil Bennett are the leading inside candidates to succeed Downie, who has been paper's top editor since 1991, when he succeeded Ben Bradlee. Many of Bennett's colleagues described him as "moody," and he may have suffered from backing Susan Glasser to become the assistant managing editor for national news. Glasser was...

This is a lengthy, comprehensive review of McCain's angry behavior. Note, that it is a serious effort and tries to be fair; however, the author makes some common errors in respect to emotions and human behavior. The only quote I will post is the below. The article is at least 5 pages long on my computer, so 300 words would not be an adequate review. ...Since the beginning of McCain's public life, the many witnesses to his temper have had strikingly different reactions to it. Some depict McCain, now the presumptive Republican nominee for president, as an erratic hothead incapable...

NEW YORK - The Washington Post won six Pulitzer Prizes on Monday, including the public service medal for exposing shoddy treatment of America's war wounded at Walter Reed hospital, and the breaking-news award for coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre. The New York Times received two Pulitzers: one for investigative reporting, for stories on toxic ingredients in medicine and other products imported from China, and one for explanatory reporting, for examining the ethical issues surrounding DNA testing. The Post's other awards were for: • National reporting, for its exploration of Vice President Dick Cheney's backstage influence; • International reporting, for...

Washington Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth today announced what everybody had long feared: That the Post would be offering employees buyout packages. As you know, we announced on February 7 that, in light of the difficult business climate we face, we plan to offer Voluntary Retirement Incentive Programs (VRIPs) to help us reduce costs and gain efficiency as we restructure for the future. While business conditions have regrettably brought us again to this point, these VRIPs will allow us to offer eligible employees the opportunity to retire with enhanced benefits and, at the same time, provide us with an important opportunity...

The managing editor of one of the country’s biggest newspapers thinks news organizations ought to hire more Muslim reporters. Philip Bennett, the Washington Post’s managing editor, said reporters often struggle with understanding Islam during a speech Monday at UCI about the difficulties of covering the religion. Bennett’s speech focused on the media’s need to cover issues concerning Islam in an in-depth, long-term manner. To illustrate this point he drew mainly from quotes of notable colleagues and statistical polls, rarely giving his own opinion directly. “Six of 10 Americans, according to a 2007 ABC Poll, don’t understand the basic tenets of...

NEW YORK, Feb 27 (Reuters) - Washington Post Co (WPO.N: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Wednesday its quarterly profit fell, amid declines in print advertising revenue and one-time charges to restructure some of its Kaplan education units. The publisher reported a fourth-quarter net profit of $82.9 million, or $8.71 per share, compared with $95.5 million, or $9.97 per share, a year before. Revenue rose 8 percent to $1.13 billion.

This morning, staffers at the Washington Post are meeting with Publisher and CEO Bo Jones. The get-together is being called an “expanded staff meeting,” and agenda item No. 1 is a rumored round of early retirement offers. Several well-placed Post sources say that Jones is likely to announce that the buyouts are on their way, the better to bring the Post’s newsroom in line with ever-shrinking ad revenues. Details at this point are scarce. In recent weeks, Posties have pressed their managers for particulars on what’s to come, but with little success. Queries sent yesterday to Managing Editor Phil Bennett...

A usual round of media self-criticism turned into a schoolyard brawl last week, as editors, reporters and bloggers traded insults over a front-page article in The Washington Post, all at the very online water cooler where they usually get their news about the industry. The Post article, which ran on Nov. 29, was about rumors of Barack Obama’s ties to the Muslim world. snip Then things got really ugly. On Dec. 10, Chris Daly, a Boston University journalism professor, posted an entry on his blog that turned the debate over the merits of the article’s reporting into a debate over...

The Pew Research Center finds there has been a dramatic, double-digit jump in the percentage of Americans who believe that the military effort in Iraq is going well. You are the Washington Post. How do you play the story?: a. You run a front-page story headlined "Study Finds Surge in Positive Public View of War Effort"; or b. You run a story on page A10 headlined "Military Progress Doesn't Make War More Popular."

Washington Post 3rd-Quarter Profit Dips in Part on Higher Operating Expenses WASHINGTON (AP) -- Newspaper publisher Washington Post Co. said Thursday its third-quarter profit edged down 1 percent, partly on higher operating expenses and soft revenues from newspaper publishing and television broadcasting. Earnings after preferred dividends slipped to $72.2 million, or $7.60 per share, compared with $73.1 million, or $7.60 per share, in the prior year. Per share results reflected fewer outstanding shares in the latest quarter. The current quarter's results included a $5.9 million, or 62 cents per share, gain on the sale of property at its television station...

It's time for a TGIF edition of one of our favorite games: WIARHSI. For you beginners, that's "What If A Republican Had Said It?" What if a Republican had said, in explaining why schools in Iowa are performing better than those in Washington: "There's less than one percent of the population of Iowa that is African American. There is probably less than four of five percent that are minorities. What is in Washington? So look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you're dealing with."

It's deemed a member of the liberal media establishment by free marketeers on Wall Street, but unlike New York Times (NYT) and other so-called nattering nabobs of negativity in the newspaper industry, Washington Post Co. (WPO) has yet to be fingered by investors as a dinosauric enterprise in need of a restructuring. The Beltway publisher has diversified successfully away from publishing, with a for-profit education arm responsible for the bulk of its revenue and profits, as well as broadcast TV properties and a cable business. Still, the stock is down 18% since early 2005, and its publishing assets are dragging...

WASHINGTON -- -- Just after 9 a.m. on Aug. 29, a group of U.S. airmen entered a sod-covered bunker on North Dakota's Minot Air Force Base with orders to collect a set of unarmed cruise missiles bound for a weapons graveyard. They quickly pulled out a dozen cylinders, all of which appeared identical from a cursory glance, and hauled them along Bomber Boulevard to a waiting B-52 bomber. The airmen attached the gray missiles to the plane's wings, six on each side. After eyeballing the missiles on the right side, a flight officer signed a manifest that listed a dozen...

In a frontpage article in the Outlook section of Sunday's Washington Post entitled "Drinking. Brawling. Hurting.", a leftist anti-Bush Yale anthropologist graduate, Sarah Stillman, paints a picture of wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center abusing alcohol at Washington, D.C. area nightclubs to indict the Bush administration and the war on terror.Readers would not know Stillman is a Bush-hating leftist by reading The Post's description of her: Sarah Stillman, a 2006 Yale graduate, is a Marshall Scholar writing a doctoral thesis on gender, violence and the media.However, her 2005 Huffington Post profile describers her thusly: Sarah Stillman is a...

The Washington Post specializes in detecting racism undetectable even by the most vigilant politically correct police — then self-righteously denouncing the perpetrator. Let a Southerner cite the principle of states rights to defend a Confederate battle flag atop a state building and the Post's editorial board promptly denounces the pathetic yahoo for "employing sanitized abstractions to obscure the violence, inequity and immorality" represented by that flag. Let a sports team owner defend his team's name (Redskins) and the Post pounces again: "Redskins is not a term fashioned by American Indians," tutored a Washington Post editorial. "The nickname was assigned to...

The brave news/talk experiment involving a storied newspaper newsroom and radio operator Bonneville lasted 17 months and only occasionally reached its potential - of a seasoned reporter sharing insights and details that didn't make it in the morning paper, and in a compelling way. The ratings were low and and the venture lost money, and it will be replaced (says the Post's Paul Farhi) by a mostly syndicated talk lineup that could include Neal Boortz and Glenn Beck, as well as David Burd's local morning show. The Post's Marc Fisher has his own narrative of the history and demise of...

Kerry Film Controversy Jon Leiberman Former Washington Bureau Chief, Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. Thursday, October 21, 2004; 2:30 PM On Tuesday, under mounting political, legal and financial pressure, Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. decided not to air a film attacking John Kerry's Vietnam war service and said it would only air portions of the documentary in an hour-long special, "A POW Story: Politics, Pressure and the Media," on Friday. Jon Leiberman, the company's Washington bureau chief, was fired on Monday for criticizing original plans to air the movie. Leiberman was online Thursday, Oct. 21, at 2:30 p.m. ET to discuss the...

Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the moderate Republican in line to head the Senate Judiciary Committee, pledged Sunday to move quickly on White House judicial nominees if he becomes chairman. And White House political advisor Karl Rove said he believed that President Bush's nominees would receive prompt and fair hearings if Specter were chairman. Still, some conservative activists complained about Specter's views on abortion, urging Senate Republicans not to confirm him. In a news conference Wednesday, the day after the election, Specter predicted that judicial nominees who opposed abortion rights would have a difficult time getting Senate approval. His comments...

Not that they're worried or anything. But the White House evidently leaves little to chance when it comes to protests within eyesight of the president. As in, it doesn't want any. A White House manual that came to light recently gives presidential advance staffers extensive instructions in the art of "deterring potential protestors" from President Bush's public appearances around the country. Among other things, any event must be open only to those with tickets tightly controlled by organizers. Those entering must be screened in case they are hiding secret signs. Any anti-Bush demonstrators who manage to get in anyway should...

WASHINGTON--Washington Post political cartoonist Tom Toles seems to think the events of United flight 93 were funny.In a cartoon dated August 8, and syndicated nationally, Toles depicted a group of harried airline passengers, frustrated by poor service, sitting on a plane and plotting to attack the pilots.The drawing, reproduced here shows a fat white man in a business suit telling his fellow travelers: "Okay, we'll rush down the aisle, break through the cockpit door, and force the pilot to fly us to the destination printed on our tickets."In response, and in contravention to all that is decent and in good...

Media Washington Post Profits Slide By Nat Worden TheStreet.com Staff Reporter 8/3/2007 10:18 AM EDT URL: http://www.thestreet.com/newsanalysis/mediaentertainment/10372203.html Washington Post (WPO) reported a 13% decline in second-quarter earnings on Friday, with its results dragged down by higher taxes and weakness at its publishing divisions. The newspaper publisher and education company reported net income of $68.8 million, or $7.19 a share, down from the $78.7 million, or $8.17 a share, it recorded for last year's second quarter. The results included a one-time $9.2 million spike in tax expense, mostly related to a minority stake in a Canadian paper company. The year-ago quarter...

WASHINGTON POST-WATCH: The Post Looks at Islam, and Blinks The Washington Post's Sunday, July 22 "Outlook" section gave four of its eight pages to six opinion pieces under the banner "One Islam, Many Circles." Their headlines - and continuation headlines for the first four articles - suggest how imbalanced the section was:"Roots of Rage: 'Why Do They Hate Us?' - America Has Forgotten Its Meddling ... but the Muslim World Has Not";"Muslims on Main St.: As American As You Are - We Feel Right at Home, Thanks";"What Went Wrong: Bush Still Doesn't Get It - A Divided Faith, a...

Newspapers are dying. At the Washington Post Co., CEO Donald Graham is banking on the Internet to save serious journalism. If he can't figure this out, nobody can. Barry Svrluga, a 36-year-old baseball writer for TheWashington Post, was on his way to the barber when an e-mail pinged his BlackBerry telling him that the Washington Nationals had sent two struggling pitchers to the minor leagues. Svrluga detoured to Starbucks, wrote a 572-word commentary on his laptop and posted it to his blog, Nationals Journal at washingtonpost.com. After his haircut he swung by the Post's newsroom to do a live question-and-answer...

As Washington Post Radio often says: “There’s always more to the story.” What it won’t say is why the Post’s attempt to expand its brand to the airwaves seems to be failing. Word around the Post newsroom is that listener ratings are so low that the newspaper will close down its radio operation this fall at the end of the Washington Nationals baseball season. Post Watch could not confirm the rumors. “No hard decisions have been made yet,” says Jim Farley, head of news and programming for Washington Post Radio and sibling station WTOP. Both are owned by Bonneville International,...

...Nevertheless, China has been portrayed as a nation blind to hygiene and blissfully unconcerned about recent reports of food contamination. That's troubling, because it reinforces the notion that befouled food is the consequence of a foul culture. Chef and gustatory adventurer Anthony Bourdain may have said it best in a 2006 Salon interview in which he noted that there's "something kind of racist" about culinary xenophobia: "Fear of dirt is often indistinguishable from the fear of unnamed dirty people." And this, in turn, spells danger. What one might call "food libel" has long been an aspect of a larger fear...

Faced with continuing financial losses and stubbornly low ratings for Washington Post Radio, Bonneville International Corp. and The Washington Post are reassessing programming on the station, which the two companies launched 14 months ago. WTWP (107.7 FM, 1500 AM) primarily airs news and talk programs, much of it featuring reporters and editors from The Post. The newspaper-on-the-radio format is unique in the radio industry. WTWP has struggled to attract listeners since its inception. Although its ratings have begun to improve, the station has never exceeded a 1 percent share of the local radio audience in any of the quarterly audience...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Washington Post Co. (NYSE:WPO - News) said on Friday that its quarterly profit fell from a year before, hurt by a decline in results from its Kaplan education and test preparation service. The Post reported first-quarter net income of $64.4 million, down from $76.9 million a year earlier. Net income available to common stockholders fell to $6.70 a share from $7.95 a share a year before. Revenue rose 4 percent to $985.6 million.

SEVERAL MONTHS ago the Bush administration abruptly embraced a new strategy in the Middle East based on aligning "mainstream" Sunni Arab states against Iran and its "extremist" allies, coupled with a renewal of the Arab-Israeli peace process. Last week it began to run up against the predictable limits of that poorly conceived policy. At an Arab summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia orchestrated the reissuance of a five-year-old initiative offering Israel normal relations if it retreated to its 1967 borders and settled with its neighbors, but the Saudis refused either to amend the plan or to embrace the idea of participating...

In today's Washington Post, Dana Milbank strikes a blow for objective journalism in his "Taking One for the Team, When He Could Remember." Kyle Sampson, former aide to Attorney General Gonzales, testified Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Cutting to what genuinely matters, Milbank writes: "Sampson was indeed a bit pudgy and jowly, and he spoke in a nerdy voice that sounded strange coming from a man whose combative e-mails had been released by the Justice Department in recent weeks." This isn't the first time Milbank felt the urge to call a Republican a nerd. He said U.S. Supreme Court...

The Stiletto had a lot on her plate these past few days – the Libby case, global warming, Ann Coulter, the appeals court ruling that gun ownership does not require militia membership – so this irrational and insensitive WaPo op-ed piece on H.R. 106 by columnist Jackson Diehl got back burnered. If revenge is a dish best eaten cold, The Stiletto is now ready to dig in.A nonbinding resolution, H.R. 106, was introduced by Adam Schiff (D-CA) on January 30, 2007 ("Affitrmation of the United States Record on the Armenian Genocide Resolution"). The resolution: calls upon the President to ensure...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Washington Post Co. reported a 7 percent drop in fourth-quarter earnings Wednesday as increased expenses in its education division offset higher revenues. The company earned $95.5 million, or $9.97 per share, for the three months ended Dec. 31 compared to a $102.4 million profit in the year-ago quarter. The drop in profits occurred despite a 10 percent increase in quarterly revenue to $1.04 billion from $948 million. But expenses increased even more -- 17 percent to $865 million from $740 million a year ago. The big fluctuations occurred in the company's education division, which includes Kaplan...

Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan's room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses. This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed...