The Committee to Protect Journalists and other groups are issuing urgent appeals for the release of more than 40 journalists who have been arrested and are being held in Iran. Scant information about the arrests has been released. One of those being held is Iason Athanasiadis, a 2008 Nieman fellow who is said to have [...]

Dan Froomkin, deputy editor for Nieman Watchdog, has just been fired from his main job as writer of the online White House Watch column for the Washington Post. Dan will do just fine. He is talented, immensely productive, has sharp insight, good ideas and is a total self-starter. The unanswered question is, why was he [...]

A veteran journalist and Washington insider has completed an empirical study of the elite press’s performance in the run-up to and early days of the Iraq war and – big surprise – has found it badly wanting. Leslie H. Gelb, writing in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, concludes that American’s finest journalists failed to even [...]

In good time for consideration of President Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the May 25 issue of The New Yorker magazine offers a detailed report on John Roberts, the Chief Justice appointed by George W. Bush. The article is written by staff writer Jeffrey Toobin, author of “The Nine: Inside the [...]

What would you do if you — and your 32 camera crews — were granted unparalleled access to the White House for a day? And then you had two full hours of prime-time TV to fill? There are many mysteries you might try to explore. How does President Obama actually make decisions? What if anything [...]