Day: October 26, 2007

A University of North Carolina professor said Friday that John Edwards’ campaign demanded that he pull a student reporter’s television story that focused on the upscale location of the campaign’s headquarters.

C.A. “Charlie” Tuggle, an associate professor at the school, said the Edwards campaign contacted the reporter, second-year master’s degree student Carla Babb, asking for a video of her report to be removed from the Internet. When that failed, the campaign demanded in three calls to Tuggle that the TV story be killed, he said.

It had to happen. Blogs have become so much a part of the information mainstream that mainstream news providers had to get into the act.

Just about every newspaper, from the smallest weeklies to the mighty New York Times, has jumped into the blogging game and, as with the non-mainstream “blogosphere,” politics dominates the topics.

Which means political campaigns will be using newspaper and magazine bloggers to serve their interests.

The second shoe fell last week when the Christian-conservative “Values Voters” met in Washington. Out of 5,775 opinion votes cast, national front-runner Rudolph Giuliani finished next to last, with only 2 percent, in a field of six contenders.

The Christian right is far from reaching consensus. Meanwhile, Latino evangelicals, a crucial swing bloc, have quietly left Republican hopefuls to fend for themselves.

The first shoe to drop came the day before, when Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida announced he was resigning as general chairman of the Republican National Committee.

There was a big, imaginary bull’s-eye covering the media section at former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s town-hall meeting in Davenport, Iowa.

For once, his attacks on Democrats were relatively mild compared with the incessant derision he aimed at a monster called “the liberal media.”

During the gathering Wednesday night at the Mississippi Valley Fairgrounds in Davenport, Giuliani cited an alleged media bias at least nine times, blaming it for everything from the struggles in the Iraq war to higher taxes.

With the 2008 presidential election still more than a year away, 15 out of 22 Democratic Latino members in the House have picked their candidates. Of the two Democratic senators, only Robert Menendez of New Jersey has stated his selection, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

Clinton has also garnered support of seven Hispanic House members, four of them women. Three of the latter are from California and one from New York.