Media Monitor: March 21

Clinton Responds to “1984″ Spot: As Barack Obama denies his campaign had anything to do with the reworked Macintosh “1984″ commercial that features Hillary Rodham Clinton lecturing gray-faced workers, Clinton speaks about it for the first time: “I haven’t seen it but I’m pleased that it seems to be taking attention away from what used to be on YouTube and getting a lot of hits, namely me singing ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’ I thank heavens for small favors and the attention has shifted, and now maybe people won’t have to tune in and hear me screeching…”

Performance Appraisal: A month into his job as City Pages’ new editor, Kevin Hoffman gets an early review from MNSpeak readers, from site editor Matt Bartel’s stance that Hoffman’s first two bylines “appear to be targeted toward the FARK.com crowd” to a series of comments attacking Hoffman’s alliterative headlines and former hometown of Cleveland. Tame, compared to AltWeeklyDeathwatch’s assessment.

Liberals’ “Free Ride”? Conservative columnist and former Reagan adviser Bruce Bartlett says left-wing media bias is dead. He says even the New York Times’ reporting is “even-handed,” but points out that “the idea that the media now tilt toward conservatives is absurd.” He says liberals had a “free ride” when media were more favorable to their position and “got lazy.” Now that things are more balanced, he writes, liberals  should “stop whining” and “Get used to it, and learn how to use the media.”

Doomsayers Debunked: Citing the “Pulitzer-worthy work” done on the Web by the Times-Picayune staff after Hurricane Katrina and the investigative work coming from blogs like TalkingPointsMemo and even Powerline, MediaShift’s Mark Glaser writes, “What might save newspapers (from themselves and old thinking) is to get out of the doomsday mentality and actually look around at the ways that serious journalism, even investigative journalism, are happening online, and consider how they can make that work in their newsroom.”