During a Thursday evening panel discussion as part of URI's Journalism Day, Marc Genest saved his biggest salvo for last.

Genest, a professor at the Naval War College in Newport, spent most of his speaking time excoriating what he called an overwhelming media bias in favor of Barack Obama during the presidential campaign.

Lots of chances to discuss the just-past presidential race. Besides David Gergen at RWU this evening, and a panel tonight at URI, NPR's Mara Liasson is headed our way.

National Public Radio’s Mara Liasson will deliver the fifth Darrell West lecture on “The Impact of Race, Religion, and Gender on the Presidential Election”.

It's tough competing with David Gergen, but yours truly will be among the panelists offering a look-back this Thursday at media coverage of the 2008 presidential election. It's part of two events scheduled for Journalism Day at the University of Rhode Island.

The morning program is "Maintaining Journalistic Standards in a 24-hour News Cycle," and will begin at 11 a.

Kos today takes some justifiable pride in the accuracy of his own presidential forecast:

R2K Actual

Presidential vote: 51-46 52.6-46.1
Congressional vote: D+9 D+8.38

As much as people complained that R2K was too Obama-friendly, turned out it wasn't Obama friendly enough. It got McCain's total while undercounting Obama's support.

As someone who has been a high-level aide to both Republican and Democratic presidents, David Gergen should have lively insights on election 2008 and the future of the two major parties.

Mr. Gergen will visit [Roger Williams] University as part of its Civil Discourse lecture series on Thursday, Nov.

In the aftermath of Obama's victory on Tuesday, let's consider some of the dramatic changes in recent American life.

A little more than 30 years ago, the following photo epitomized the violence, hostility, and bitter sense of racial division that was tearing Boston apart, an era masterfully captured in J. Anthony Lukas's classic Common Ground

As we know, there's nothing like a watershed election to renew interest in dead-tree newspapers.

So take a gander at the alt-weekly covers assembled by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies.

Whether Sarah Palin will emerge as a future contender or remain just a part of the 2008 campaign will take some time to shake out. For now, an unflattering campaign post-mortem in Newsweek is getting a lot of mileage.

Dan Kennedy:

If nothing else, I hope Sarah Palin's partisans come to realize that her supposed enemies in the media were a bunch of wimps compared to her supposed friends in the McCain campaign.

Rhode Island, with its mighty four electoral votes, is typically on the margins of presidential politics. Yet with our own New Hampshire-style presidential primary this year, and with scores of Rhode Islanders assisting Obama's campaign in various ways (traveling to New Hampshire, phone-banking, making contributions, etc.

From an editorial in this week's Phoenix:

Democrat Barack Obama's decisive win over Republican John McCain in Tuesday's election is truly a triumph of hope. For some voters, McCain was no doubt more horrifying than Obama was appealing. But for legions of Obama supporters, his victory offers the transcendent promise of a new national beginning.

How to momentarily revive the flagging newspaper industry? Have a presidential election for the ages!

From the NYT's City Room blog (the same thing is playing out in many other cities):

Updated, 2:50 p.m. | If you were an early bird who likes news the old-fashioned way, you probably got your election results served up properly, with ink on newsprint — but if you slept late Wednesday morning, the news at many newsstands was that there was no News.

Ray Rickman, the book-lover and former state rep, sent along the following thoughts, which touch on the special importance of this election for African-Americans:

Events of world-historic significance may be understood through the application of intellectual rigor. But often the only way one can gain an emotional perspective on such complex, confounding occurrences is by viewing them through unashamedly personal prisms.

WJAR-TV's Jim Taricani made a memorable comment on this post, so I thought I'd break it out here for wider consideration.

For this generation, some thoughts from an aging boomer.

I remember vividly standing on a tarmac at RAF Lankenheath Air Base in England in the late spring of 1968. I and 11 other airman stood at the bottom of a stairway that led to the door of an C-141 Starlifter air transport.

Shortly before 9:30 pm last night, a huge roar went up among the Democratic crowd packing the 17th floor ballroom at the Providence Biltmore. Obama had been projected as the winner of Ohio -- a state that Republicans have almost always had to win to gain the presidency -- and the steady optimism among the assembled turned into something more ecstatic.