The predictable reaction to a story reporting that New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse had expressed personal opinions in a speech at Harvard last June raises intriguing thoughts about the meaning of journalistic objectivity. Her comments raised questions over the paper’s ethical guidelines, which discourage news staffers from “expressing views beyond what they [...]

I know the White House press and the press secretary are busy with other subjects, like nukes in North Korea, and the Foley Follies. And as Walter Lippmann observed, the press too often can shine its light on only one thing at a time. But as someone who attended many a White House and State [...]

Maybe journalists shouldn’t be concerned that Sen. Kit Bond, R-MO, has introduced a bill to criminalize the disclosure of classified information. After all, the incumbent Leaker-in-Chief lamented the other day that “there’s no such thing as classification anymore, hardly,” even as he was leaking portions of one the nation’s most highly protected documents, the National [...]

Is it fair to ask the president who named Jesus as his favorite philosopher, “What would Jesus do when interrogating terrorist suspects?” I think so. It’s not a trick question or a frivolous one. It’s an attempt to figure out how compassionate conservatism applies in the real world of foreign policy, congressional corruption and displaced [...]

Tribune Company CEO Dennis FitzSimons announced recently that a deal had been struck with Chandler family interests that frees the company to pursue alternatives “to further enhance shareholder value.” Additionally, FitzSimons said an independent committee had been created to oversee other steps, perhaps sale of papers and/or TV stations, or taking the company private, to [...]

Please, ladies and gentlemen of the media. Be very careful during this campaign cycle of using the word “reform,” even if it’s in quotes. I checked wth Google and there are 510,000 hits on “medicare reform,” and 1.7 million on on “social security reform,” and I’ll bet most of them are incorrect or misleading. Reform [...]

Eric Boehlert, Michael Massing, Frank Rich and other critics have rightly raised hell over the mainstream media’s coverage and non-coverage of issues related to the war in Iraq. There was what Boehlert called the “lapdog” reporting of the run-up to the invasion. Then came the burial of devastating post-invasion revelations such as the Downing Street [...]

Day to day in many news organizations there’s no real encouragement for reporters and editors to do the best job they can. Instead, it’s just the opposite: The message sent by cuts in staff, cuts in news hole and focus on easy features, not hard news, is loud and clear and very, very disheartening and [...]