Here is one reason reporters too often don’t ask the right provocative questions of the president or his briefers: They bog themselves down in details and make it easy for the briefer to slip away, as Tony Snow did the other day when he was asked about proposed budget cuts for Medicare and Medicaid, on [...]

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? [...]

Vice president Cheney became especially testy during a recent interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer when the subject turned to the pregnancy of Cheney’s unmarried daughter, Mary. Twice Cheney bluntly told Blitzer, “You’re out of line” when Blitzer asked the vice president to respond to conservative critics of Mary Cheney‘s decision to “conceive a child outside [...]

I doubt if many of our colleagues in the press have noticed that the Bush administration, with the aid of the last Republican congress, began on January 1 an unprecedented invasion of the privacy of some 43 million older and disabled Americans, beneficiaries of Medicare. That most of the press did not notice is understandable. [...]

“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 [...]

As far as I can tell, among all the briefings, press conferences and punditry, only the liberal Center for American Progress made the connection between the Iraq Study Group and the primary reason for its existence. On the day the group made its report, the center noted, 10 more Americans met violent deaths in Iraq. [...]

There is at least one more important matter that reporters with too little memory ought to know about before they cover the hearings for Robert Gates, the nominee for Defense Secretary: He almost cost us the end of the cold war. That may be a bit of hyperbole, but it’s not far wrong. Gates, for [...]

As a former White House correspondent, I know there is an understanding among reporters that questions and stories about the president’s children are out of bounds. But this is wartime, Americans are getting killed and maimed along with the innocents in Iraq, so I think it is not out of line to note that the [...]

The “relentless GOP attack” on the federal bureaucracy “amounts to an assault on the very idea of professional government,” Dan Zegart writes in The Nation (subscription required) after an eight-month investigation. “It would alter a cornerstone belief of American governance, dating to the Pendleton Act of 1883, that it is essential to insulate public servants [...]

“On the rare occasions when officials have been pressed, usually in congressional hearings that garner little attention, Bush aides insist there are ‘no plans’ to build permanent bases,” Spencer Ackerman writes in The American Prospect. This is “a nondenial-denial that focuses attention on unprovable administration intent. But beyond intent is actual construction. That is, the [...]