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Ifill Hits Jackpot as VP Debate Moderator

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Ex-Newsday Pulitzer Winner Plans All-Africa Paper

Palin Interviews, Parodies Ratchet Up Interest

"Being selected the moderator for a vice presidential debate is something like opening a suitcase on ‘Deal or No Deal’ and finding $1,000. Nice prize, but it’s no jackpot," David Bauder wrote for the Associated Press.

"Not this year. The Oct. 2 showdown between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin will likely put Gwen Ifill before the biggest TV audience of her life.

"Given the extraordinary attention paid to the campaign and Palin’s surprise selection as John McCain‘s running mate, it stands a strong chance of becoming the most-watched vice presidential debate ever. The standard was the 56.7 million viewers in 1984, when Geraldine Ferraro was the first woman ever selected for a major party ticket."

Bauder wrote those words a week ago, before Palin, the Republican nominee for vice president, sat down with Katie Couric on the "CBS Evening News" for a performance in which Palin came across as so unprepared for the office that the interview was parodied on NBC’s "Saturday Night Live" — using her own words.

On Monday, Couric, whose stock rose after the interview, spoke again with both the Alaska governor and her running mate, John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, in Ohio.

"Governor Palin, since our last interview, you’ve gotten a lot of flak," Couric said. "Some Republicans have said you’re not prepared; you’re not ready for prime-time. People have questioned your readiness since that interview. And I’m curious," she said.

"Yeah," Palin replied.

"To hear your reaction," Couric continued.

"Well," Palin said, "not only am I ready but willing and able to serve as vice president with Senator McCain if Americans so bless us and privilege us with the opportunity of serving them, ready with my executive experience as a city mayor and manager, as a governor, as a commissioner, a regulator of oil and gas."

McCain and Palin accused Couric of "gotcha journalism" when Couric asked why Palin had publicly told a voter that the United States should launch cross-border attacks from Afghanistan into Pakistan, a position McCain had said should not be articulated out loud.

On Fox News on Monday, Nancy Pfotenhauer, senior strategist for the McCain campaign, urged "the moderator" of the vice presidential debate not to lean heavily on foreign policy, which she said would give Biden an unfair advantage.

"I’m not joking about this," James Fallows wrote for the Atlantic on Sunday. "In the wake of her catastrophic performance in the Katie Couric interview, Sarah Palin has set expectations so low that she is very likely to do ‘surprisingly’ well against Joe Biden on October 2."

The AP’s Bauder continued, "The format offers Ifill great freedom. Questions on domestic or international issues are allowed, and it’s up to her to decide the mix.

"Colleagues suggest questions. So do viewers, people at her gym or folks she meets on the street. She politely takes them all, recognizing she has no monopoly on wisdom, but it doesn’t necessarily mean she’ll use them. Her goal is to help viewers learn something about the candidates they didn’t know.

"People sometimes forget it’s a debate, not an inquisition, Ifill said.

"’People who watch these debates are incredibly engaged,’ she said. ‘I don’t have to chase the candidates around the table to make them answer questions. The people will know whether a question has been answered or not.’

"One competitor said he expects Ifill to do well. Bob Schieffer, CBS News chief Washington correspondent, said Ifill would be one of the people he recommends to succeed him as ‘Face the Nation’ host.

"’Gwen knows what she’s doing,’ Schieffer said. ‘It’s pretty hard to slip one past her. I think she’ll do a great job.’"

 

McCain Said to Win "Spin War" With Reporters

"Obama may have won the insta-polls after Friday’s debate here at the University of Mississippi, but the McCain team won the spin war, a postgame ritual that quickly seeps into the punditry enveloping such events," the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz wrote from Oxford, Miss., on Monday, speaking of Sens. Barack Obama, the Democrat, and John McCain, the Republican.

"What was equally striking, inside the massive media tent, was that some of the journalists who profess to want an elevated debate on the issues — which is precisely what they got, courtesy of moderator Jim Lehrer — seemed unusually interested in style points."

Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher magazine, had a different take:

"It often happens that the pundit ‘scoring’ of a presidential debate ends up quite at odds from the polls of viewers that soon follow," Mitchell wrote on Saturday.

". . . here’s the key to the viewer/pundit disparity. It took awhile for McCain to build up to it but then he hammered it home near the end: Obama, he charged, lacked the ‘knowledge and experience’ to be president.

"Pundits highlighted that and said it was the key to McCain gaining at least a tie. But I didn’t hear a single person on TV point out: McCain just picked Palin for vice president! How, then, could he make such a charge against Obama?"

On CNN’s "Reliable Sources" on Sunday, Chris Cillizza said the candidates made it difficult for the media to pick a winner. "They were trying to do different things in this debate," Cillizza said. "I think Barack Obama was intentionally trying not to sort of get the zinger off, or, you know, go for the swing — because the problem with swinging big is if you miss, you’re off balance. And I think Barack Obama wanted to stay on balance, show that he was sober and serious.

"His goal in some ways was to make this hard for us to cover. His goal was to be substantive, policy-oriented, and not attack John McCain in these ad hominem attacks. So it complicated the way that we typically score this . . . you know, check box here, check box here, and add them up at the end."

AP Writers Explore Detroit’s Racial Divide

"How can it be that in 2008 — 143 years after slavery was abolished, decades after the civil rights movement — an AP-Yahoo News poll could find that racial misgivings could cost Sen. Barack Obama the election?" read an Associated Press story by Ron Fournier, the Washington Bureau chief, who is white, and Errin Haines, an AP reporter who is African American.

"In search of explanations, two Associated Press reporters ‚Äî one black, one white ‚Äî listened to people of both races along Detroit’s divides: Alter Road, which separates the city from the tony Grosse Pointes near Lake St. Clair, and 8 Mile Road, the vast northern border between a mostly black Detroit and its mostly white suburbs.

"They found people of both races living just blocks apart who nonetheless spoke of each other like strangers. There was suspicion, contempt ‚Äî and yet, for many, a desperate hope that Obama’s candidacy might be the final step in America’s long path to racial equality. For whites, their support of Democratic economic policies forces them to confront their racial prejudices."

Who Missed Wall Street Crisis — Writers or Readers?

"Oy vey," began Steven Pearlstein, Pulitzer Prize-winning business columnist at the Washington Post, writing for Tuesday’s newspaper.

"That is the technical economic term that best sums up a day in which the House of Representatives refuses to pass a $700 billion rescue plan pushed by the White House and congressional leaders from both parties, Wachovia is taken over in a deal that will have the government potentially owning 10 percent of Citigroup, a few European banks fail, the Federal Reserve and other central banks are forced to inject an additional $300 billion into the global banking system, the Dow Jones industrial average plunges 777 points, and investors everywhere rush to the safety of gold and short-term Treasury bills.

"The basic problem here is that too many people don’t understand."

Including, some have been charging, the news media.

"It was immediately assumed that there really is a crisis," David Cay Johnston, a former New York Times reporter, said Sunday on CNN’s "Reliable Sources." "And that because the president said so, this must be the fact. And the coverage went to questioning around the edges of the plan instead of the premise." Johnston is author of "Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense and Stick You with the Bill."

"Reporters who cover business matters start to absorb the values of the people they’re covering," added David Brancaccio, host of the "Now" newsmagazine show on PBS. "Business reporters were not inclined to ask the tough questions."

On public radio’s "On the Media," Andy Serwer, managing editor of Fortune magazine, disagreed.

"If you go back and you look at our magazine and the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, we’ve all done stories that say this company or that company or this financial product is a ticking time bomb," he said.

"The problem with those stories is that unless the bomb goes off, people forget about them and say, oh, that’s not true. You know, we wrote a story, for instance [laughs], going all the way back to 1994, saying that derivatives were this hidden time bomb that had the potential to undermine our entire financial system. Gee, did it really take 14 years to happen? Well yeah, it did.

"There are stories like that. I think that we’re guilty of not doing enough of them, but I think also people are guilty maybe of not paying enough attention a little bit."

David Carr wrote on Monday in the New York Times, "After large-scale financial disasters, the press is usually criticized ‚Äî often justly ‚Äî for ignoring the problem, but it’s hard to make that case with the subprime mess. If no one saw this coming, they were not looking."

In his online chat, Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz told a reader on Monday, "Read Steve Pearlstein’s columns in The Post. Not only is he a sharp-eyed analyst who punctures a lot of the hype, but he was out there a year ago warning that the financial system was getting overextended. He won a Pulitzer for those columns."

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB_ijz2I9VI]

An Al-Jazeera documentary tells the story of cameraman Sami Al-Haj while he was in U.S. custody in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. What will the presidential candidates do?

Cameraman Survives 6¬? Years in Guantanamo

"Both John McCain and Barack Obama have said they would shut the U.S. military detention facility at Guant?°namo Bay, where about 250 men remain behind bars ‚Äî some in their eighth year of captivity," Vivienne Walt wrote Thursday for Time magazine. "But neither presidential candidate has outlined when and how they plan to do it.

"One man ready to offer them some free advice on the problem of Guant?°namo is Sami Al-Hajj, an al-Jazeera TV cameraman recently freed, without facing charges, after six and a half years at Guant?°namo. ‘It’s worse than the fire of Hell,’ he wrote two years ago from his cell to his British attorney, Clive Stafford Smith. ‘It makes people lose their senses. Death may come at any time.’

"Al-Hajj survived Guant?°namo, although he wrote his son a farewell letter from the prison camp and says he nearly went insane. Like almost all of the approximately 770 detainees who have been held there, Al-Hajj ‚Äî the only journalist known to have been detained at Guant?°namo ‚Äî never had the opportunity to answer charges against him in any legal proceeding. . . .

"Although Al-Hajj is still trying to comprehend how his life was so drastically transformed, he says he believes he was targeted simply because he worked for Al Jazeera."

Ex-Newsday Pulitzer Winner Plans All-Africa Paper

Dele Olojede, a former Newsday foreign editor who was named co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 after he took a reporter’s look at the effects of the Rwanda genocide 10 years afterward, is in Africa planning a continent-wide daily newspaper, according to the New Times newspaper in Kigali, Rwanda.

"Olojede plans to launch a continental daily newspaper called ‘Next’ that would be distributed across the entire African continent from early next year," Eugene Kwibuka reported for the paper on Monday.

"He said that the paper will be first launched in Nigeria in January and then open offices in Nairobi, Johannesburg, Accra, Cairo, and Kigali.

"The paper will be covering issues that range from politics, business, to the continent’s development achievements."

Olojede, the first African-born journalist to win a Pulitzer, took a buyout from Newsday in 2003 and moved to South Africa. Interviewed in Rwanda, the Nigerian native told Kwibuka, "I love this place, I love coming back, I have many friends here. We want to be able to build a home here so that we come more frequently and spend more time with our friends."

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