“The goal of the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons has been essentially forgotten,” Mikhail Gorbachev wrote recently. “We must put the goal…back on the agenda, not in a distant future but as soon as possible.” But over the past 15 years, he pointed out in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece on Jan. 31, the [...]

Was it surprising to see a headline like this one in the Washington Post recently?: “Bush Addresses Income Inequality on Wall Street Executive Pay / Economic Speech Touches on Executive Pay as Senators Move to Rein It In”? Yes. Was it surprising that Bush did not address the subject in response to a reporter’s question? [...]

Reporters should press National Highway Traffic Safety Administrator Nicole Nason to address hard questions suggested by a predecessor in a Jan. 28 New York Times Op-Ed. The reason for asking the questions couldn’t be plainer: They bear heavily on whether many of us will be needlessly killed or injured every year. Joan Claybrook asked why [...]

Journalists who criticize the mainstream press in hopes of making it better do so in the belief that, as Bill Moyers once put it, “the quality of journalism and the quality of democracy are inseparable.” From that belief flows a corollary: Commentators and bloggers who attack the mainstream press malignly, carelessly, and, on commercial television [...]

Simply by installing “two digital cameras in every committee and subcommittee room,” the House could let citizens go on the Web to view all committee and subcommittee meetings–including oversight hearings–and thus erode “the power of K Street lobbyists who use ‘insider’ information gleaned from committee meetings to justify their fees.” The House could also easily [...]

Researchers believe a simple fact explains a startling 15 percent decline in breast-cancer rates in the 16 months ending in December 2003, the New York Times reported in a Dec. 15 story: “[M]illions of women abandoned hormone treatment for the symptoms of menopause after a large national study concluded that the hormones slightly increased breast [...]

“In contrast to the small-bore questions that American reporters posed to President Bush yesterday about his Iraq policy,” Dan Froomkin wrote in his White House Briefing column at washngtonpost.com, “two British journalists cut right to the central issue of the president’s credibility.” It is in hopes that British or other foreign reporters will ask President [...]

“Congress’s oversight function has atrophied in a unitary Republican landscape,” New York Times readers were told in an Op-Ed on Nov. 12. Surely the writer was impressively credentialed: He’s Stanley Brand, a former general counsel to the House of Representatives under Speaker Tip O’Neill. But like most such critics Brand omitted a major point: The [...]

When the famous die, news reports and commentary, no matter the length, do not always recall some of the most memorable things they’d said or advocated. Milton Friedman and Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist are cases in point. Consider what the famed economist said in a January 1970 article in The New York Times Magazine: [...]

In an article posted recently on this Web site, I suggested that the press do a better job reporting on profits, the oil industry and the news business being my cases in point. Only after the posting did I become aware of an outstanding — and unusual — article on profits done months ago by [...]