podpolia

Ouch. Kerry's favourability (36%) puts him below Putin (38% in 2003), tied with Martha Stewart (36% in 2004), and beating Joseph McCarthy by only one percent (35% in 1954).
He's also behind Dukakis' 47% in 1988 and Herbert Hoover's 43% in 1944.

Interesting summary.

This is an interesting abstract (you can download and view the paper as well) about news bias as it pertains to economic news.

This is more or less the last word on consistency of types in the Killian memo incident. Not to mention the problems with who vouched for their authenticity.

This is the last on this for tonight.
And just think, I'm only posting the ones that are interesting.

Humor.

Well, my prediction was wrong. Dan Rather addressed the weakest criticisms of the forgery claim, but left the more damning elements (such as the kerning issue and the fact that it definitely was not written according to Air Force style guidelines) behind. Dismissing “partisan” criticism and essentially claiming that anyone who would criticize this was lying, Rather may have made a BIG mistake, depending on how eagerly other news sources decide to follow the story.

Another good article about the Killian Memos and the Barnes story — including new information on Barnes.

Correction: email from DNC was sent out last night at 22.29. Still after even the slower mainstream media was covering it in primetime.

Edwards isn't the only one trying to make hay before the metaphorical sun of the new Bush National Guard documents goes supernova. This was apparently sent out today, and even major media outlets like ABCnews were saying last night in primetime that the documents might well be forgeries. There is some suspicion in some factions of CBS that the DNC and the Kerry campaign were the ones that supplied the documents to CBS. It would be quite interesting if all of the history of this comes out, which may actually happen. There's currently an investigation going on inside CBS that is going to try to find out exactly what happened with all of this. They say, rightly, that “The reputation and integrity of the entire news division is at stake…” If it comes out that the documents truly ARE forged, then CBS is going to be mighty embarassed. This episode will have reinforced the opinion of many that the news is biased, and may even reflect negatively on Kerry's camp, if it turns out the documents came from there.
This is really a fascinating study of the media in an election: a story comes out one evening making one candidate look bad, doubts circulate on the internet about the authenticity of the source material, less than 24 hours later other news carriers have said it's likely to have been a fraud… my guess is that CBS will announce tonight that even they have doubts, and start a public investigation tonight to see just where the documents came from, in an effort to prove that they're respectable afterall, really. At the moment Drudge is saying that Rather is going to discuss the topic tonight on the evening news, and my guess is that it will be a retraction, or at least saying that it's very possible they were wrong.
We'll see.