Irving H. Feiner was no household name, but on Feb. 3 the New York Times gave him a 27-inch obituary worthy of a celebrity. Why the big spread? Feiner was arrested in 1949 for a high-decibel harangue in inner-city Syracuse, N.Y., while he was a student at Syracuse University. His prosecution and conviction for disorderly [...]

The elevator opened on the penthouse floor of the Statler Hilton and I dashed into the hall, late for the press conference, so late that it was all over. Two burly guards halted me with a not too friendly stiff arm on the shoulder. “Where ya goin’ kid?” said one while the other yelled back [...]

Post-racial America. It became a familiar term in the last year, and why not? It sounds wonderful. Barack Obama is president-elect of the United States. An African American, his wife and two little girls are planning a move into the White House. Time to turn the page on the country’s tangled history of racial conflict [...]

As the Nieman Foundation’s Advisory Board met in early November on the eve of the convocation celebrating 70 years of Nieman Fellowships, two questions dominated the discussions: • Should the foundation reconsider its mission of midcareer education in response to the dramatic and disruptive technological and economic changes affecting journalism? • How can the foundation [...]

Reasonably alert readers of the Des Moines Register may have noticed something missing from their Sunday paper – book reviews. The six-page Opinion section shrank to four pages, and out went the full page devoted to books. So what else is new? Newspapers all across the country have been axing book reviews, either cutting space [...]

Several years ago a caller to my talk-radio program insisted that, when it came to abortion, God told her what was right and the rest of the country should obey His dictates. I replied that whenever anybody claimed to know exactly what God has in mind, I was inclined to count the silver. Since the [...]

Remember President Gerald Ford’s 1974 pardon of Richard Nixon? The disgraced Nixon was pardoned although he faced no charges at the time. Ford said he acted because “serious allegations and accusations hang like a sword over our former president’s head.” As George W. Bush prepares to exit the White House, are more preemptive pardons on [...]

Campaign reporters are watching the McCain-Palin campaign implode in an unseemly orgy of fearmongering. But many of these reporters appear to be holding back their honest assessments, restrained by their sense of fairness and objectivity (not to mention their deep-seated need for a close election to make them feel consequential). What to do? When fact-checking, [...]

In true Halloween spirit, the latest message from the McCain campaign to voters is this: The goblins will get you if you don’t watch out. And the biggest goblin of all is socialism. What in blazes is socialism, and why should we be afraid of it? In its extreme form, socialism means total government control [...]

Every time I hear somebody say that John McCain has more “experience” than Barack Obama, I think of a couple who used to live next door. The pair were good neighbors, friendly folks, but they had one shortcoming. They liked to travel around the world, and when they came back, they insisted that their friends [...]