Posts Tagged ‘Jake Tapper’

Arianna Huffington will be part of a roundtable discussion on Sunday’s installment of ABC News’ This Week with Christiane Amanpour.

The subject is the Egyptian revolution, the role of social media, and what Egypt means for the rest of the Middle East, but it wouldn’t be a surprise if a certain transaction found its way into the discussion.

The other seats at the roundtable will be filled by Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution, ABC News senior White House correspondent Jake Tapper, and ABC News’ George Will.

Three weeks following its fifth anniversary, ABC News political blog Political Punch, written by senior White House correspondent Jake Tapper, introduced a weekly Webcast, which Tapper said “will set the table for the week ahead in politics and launch an honest and witty discussion on the stories making news in Washington.”

The Webcast, also called Political Punch, will offer interviews and recurring features such as DC Ticker, an analysis of who is trending up and down in our nation’s capital, with contributions from Mother Jones Washington bureau chief and Politics Daily columnist David Corn; and Truth-O-Meter, in which PolitiFact editor Bill Adair “will set the record straight each week.”

Animated sketches by Tapper will also be featured.

ABC News blog Political Punch is celebrating its fifth birthday Wednesday, having started out under the title Down and Dirty, and senior White House correspondent Jake Tapper marked the milestone with a blog post reflecting 60 months and more than 7,600 posts later. Highlights:

“Today it begins …” was that first post’s title. And it began: “Yo. Today begins the grand abc news blog experiment. Blogs being built on spontaneity and opinion — neither of which big mainstream news organizations are particularly known for — but we’ll see how it goes … ”

Since then, “Down and Dirty” (as the blog was then called) became “Political Punch,” and a host of co-contributors joined in — Sunlen Miller, Karen Travers, Ann Compton, and many others. We’ve posted more than 7,600 items. For the first several years, the readership was so sparse I could post a picture of my cat as a lark and few would notice.

There have been some misfires, to be sure (all of which were my fault), but for the most part, I think (I hope) Political Punch has worked pretty well in allowing us to enhance our TV reporting with greater context and more information, to report news as it happens and break stories as soon as we have them confirmed (rather than waiting until the next show up), and to share with you information and observations that don’t rise to the level of needing to be reported on TV but may interest you nonetheless. (From that first week: the smell of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, for example, or the process of reporting a World News piece.)

Read more

Well, we know at least one person who is in the Jake Tapper camp.

Senator John McCain took to Twitter Monday afternoon to weigh in on Christiane Amanpour‘s debut on ABC’s “This Week.”

His critique was short and to the point:

“Anyone else miss @jaketapper yesterday?”

Ouch. Tapper, ABC News’ White House correspondent, ably filled in as interim host of the program until Amanpour debuted.

Tapper brought some new features like fact-checking and live tweeting to the program, but kept the focus on U.S. politics, which is in line with “This Week’s” history and what the other Sunday public affairs shows put on the air.

Amanpour has indicated she would like to bring a more international take on the week’s news to the show, while still discussing U.S. politics.

McCain, who is a U.S. Senator, seems more inclined to favor Tapper’s inside the beltway style.

Of course, one of the biggest reasons for bringing Amanpour to “This Week” was to differentiate the program from its competition. As for McCain’s criticism, it probably won’t stop him from appearing on the program. Foreign policy is, after all, his specialty.

Read more

The Sunday morning fact-check story is getting interesting. A few weeks ago, ABC’s Jake Tapper, who’s hosting “This Week” until Christiane Amanpour joins later this summer, is now having Bill Adair of the group Politifact fact-check his guests on any given Sunday.

A few days later, David Gregory, the moderator of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” responded saying he thought fact-checking is an “interesting idea” but that his program will not follow ABC’s lead.

“People can fact-check Meet the Press every week on their own terms,” he told Howard Kurtz.

Well now comes “Meet the Facts.” Launched this morning, Meet the Facts is a website that describes itself as, “a non-partisan grassroots effort to encourage the NBC television program ‘Meet The Press’ to incorporate a formal fact checking procedure for all statements made on air by its guests. That analysis would then be released to the public, preferably within several days of the broadcast.”

Sawhorse Media, the guys behind the Shorty Awards, launched a new site this afternoon called Muck Rack, which follows leading journalists’ Twitter feeds.

Asking the question, “What if you could get tomorrow’s newspaper today?” the site simply aggregates the Tweets of popular journalists including ABC’s Jake Tapper, NBC’s David Gregory, The Chicago Tribune’s Eric Zorn and AirAmerica’s Ana Marie Cox.

The thinking goes, what these journalists are Tweeting right now, is the news that will appear in their online piece or broadcast story. Or maybe you’ll just learn what they had for lunch.

The site separates the journalists into the companies they work for, allows you to reply and retweet and has adds links to their Websites. You can also recommend reporters that should be followed on the site.

So far, in it’s two-hour old life, there’s no advertising, but if you read into Sawhorse Media CEO Greg Galant‘s Tweet – “Thanks! We hope to get rich slowly doing it” – that could soon come.

TVNewser’s Steve Krakauer talks with ABC’s senior White House correspondent Jake Tapper for this week’s “So What Do You Do?” feature.

Krakauer: A lot of TV news personalities now have a blog, but you’ve really been blogging on the Political Punch for a longer time and more frequently than pretty much anyone else in the field. What draws you to the medium?

Tapper: I am at heart a print reporter, and I think that that’s where it comes from. A lot of the stuff I blog is either stuff I’m reporting anyway for ABC News internally and figure I might as well put it up on the blog. Or it’s stuff I’m just interested in, or I read about it, or I hear about it, and I’m just curious. In trying to satisfy that curiosity, I end up writing something, and I put it on the blog. So it’s time-consuming, but a lot of it I would be doing anyway.