For all the brickbats tossed NBC’s way for its tape-delayed coverage of Olympic highlights, there certainly were a few gold medals for the network to deservedly sink its teeth into — in the cliché shot that photographers demand . This assessment comes with some caveats and idiosyncrasies in that (a) I did not faithfully attend [...]

In the wake of the killings at the Sikh temple near Milwaukee, Bob Schieffer on the CBS evening news wondered what the killer’s motive possibly could be. And in today’s Des Moines Register, a headline over a front-page column said we had to stop this cycle of “retribution.” Motive? Retribution? Is the press that clueless? [...]

The New York Times reminded its readers recently of the enormous part played by guilty pleas in the criminal justice system – 97 percent of federal cases and 94 percent of state cases are decided by pleas rather than trials. The Times called the statistics “stunning.” The Times and its readers might be even more [...]

DES MOINES–An ongoing sex-riddled saga and scandal in Central Iowa and its attendant news coverage call to mind the tagline for the 1963 Billy Wilder comedy “Irma La Douce” – “ A story of passion, bloodshed, desire and death…everything, in fact, that makes life worth living.” Only in the Des Moines area, it might be: [...]

Any day now the Roberts court will release its Affordable Care Act ruling. It could be 5-4 against all or some of Obamacare, or as much as 6-3 in favor. Some people see Anthony Kennedy as the swing vote and that of course is possible. I’d look to Chief Justice John Roberts instead. I think [...]

Colin Powell’s latest book, clumsily titled, It Worked For Me: In Life and Leadership, confesses to “one of my momentous failures.” The failure: his Feb. 5, 2003, speech to the United Nations urging war against Iraq. That speech, he belatedly admits, was heavily larded with falsehoods. Public opinion was divided about the advisability of war [...]

The Pulitzer judges who decided that no work of fiction was worthy of a prize this year generated a torrent of comment about the snub. The judges also deemed that no entry for editorial writing met its standard, but the lack of an award in that category drew no comparable reaction, perhaps because editorial writers, [...]

The idealistic view of the Supreme Court as a disinterested institution above politics took a hit during the recent oral argument over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Paul Krugman expressed the disquiet many Americans who idealize the court must have felt when he wrote, “The second day of hearings suggested that the justices [...]

Ira Glass, host of the public radio show “This American Life,” recently devoted an hour to correcting and apologizing for a program in January featuring monologist Mike Daisy in which he supposedly exposed brutal working conditions by Apple suppliers in China. Daisy’s claims about the suppliers subsequently were convincingly debunked. Daisy participated in the correction, [...]

Those of us who lived in the dark ages of the 1960’s and 1970’s sexual revolution remember Grand Slammer Billie Jean King’s 1973 famous whipping of men’s tennis champ Bobby Riggs as an athletic moment of joy. The year before, in June of 1972, Title 9–a landmark civil rights law barring gender discrimination of education [...]