What is “[p]ossibly the world’s most unrecognized form of child abuse”? It’s child soldiering, “[t]his horrifying new face of armed conflict.” Does the United States oppose or aid and abet it? And are there reporters out there who will ask questions about what has “become a defining feature of modern warfare”? The answers to the [...]

Ten more young Americans died in Iraq on Mother’s Day weekend (not counting the three who were captured by insurgents), bringing the total dead so far to a new mark, 3,400. It was grim grim news for moms, and dads and the dozens of folks who were touched by these lives and their deaths. The [...]

Every reporter and commentator who covered the recent Republican debate at the Ronald Reagan Library recorded how the candidates competed to wrap themselves in the Reagan legacy, without giving real thought to what it was. But most of the reporters knew or remembered little of the Reagan presidency. They should have done their homework, the [...]

It was one of those extraordinary moments we’ve come to expect. Public figures play out private dramas in front of cameras and microphones. Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer has returned. The breast cancer she discovered in 2004 has recurred, this time in her bones. She faces a lifetime of treatment as she fights the disease. John Edwards [...]

Too many of us in journalism are still stuck in that stupid old rut: We won’t follow up on a good story broken by someone else, as if the reader cares who got it first. We are reluctant to acknowledge someone else’s scoop. And that’s especially true if the news was broken first in a [...]

On the Veterans Administration Web site there’s a locator page for VA hospitals and outpatient clinics. I clicked on a few states; each had both hospitals and clinics. In Idaho, for example, there’s a VA medical center in Boise with what are referred to as 46 “authorized beds” and “an adjacent” nursing home with “an [...]

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 [...]

The new No. 1 issue for Roman Catholic bishops in Charlotte and Raleigh is embryonic stem cell research. In last fall’s national election, Michael J. Fox’s poignant endorsement of embryonic stem cell research set off dueling television ads that argued the point. Now, the bishops are urging parishioners to fight any efforts by the North [...]

I have not read a line of President Jimmy Carter’s book, only the title, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” Nor can I vouch for his analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; critics say he gets some things wrong and that may be. But with the press standing idly by, Carter is generally criticized and accused of anti-Semitism [...]

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: [...]