At the height of the recent budget impasse, Republican cries of “Shut it down! Shut it down!” filled the air. Call them the voices of the anarchist wing of the GOP. Anarchism: the doctrine urging the abolition of government. If that sounds extreme, it is, but none other than than the patron saint of the [...]

Segments of the freedom-of-information community are critical of President Obama for not releasing what are acknowledged to be gruesome photos of the corpse of Osama bin Laden. The public, the argument goes, under the federal FOI Act has a “right to know” about the man’s shattered skull, and the rest of the remains, too. The [...]

Frank Rich’s column in the March 12 New York Times explaining why it is his last Sunday piece for the paper confirms my conviction that regular columnists have among the toughest assignments in journalism. Rich cited William Safire who compared column writing to standing under a windmill: “No sooner did you feel relief that you’d [...]

Jane Mayer’s piece in the Aug. 30 New Yorker, “Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama,” has continued to generate an unusual amount of buzz. It turned the under-the radar bothers, Charles and David Koch, and their privately held conglomerate, Koch Industries, into familiar names synonymous with how super-rich ideologues [...]

I was preparing to put Peter Turnley’s celebratory photos of Tahrir Square on this site when word came that Lara Logan of CBS had been brutally assaulted even as he was taking the pictures. The photos are ones of marvelous triumph. A 2001 Nieman Fellow, Turnley is an expert at this kind of thing: when [...]

Unless they are diehard supporters or detractors, the first thing some people say when they talk of Julian Assange—which seems curious to me—is that he is creepy or weird looking, and then there is a quiet murmur of dissent: “What if he releases something that could damage someone or get people killed? My answer is: [...]

It was all over the news when Federal Judge Henry E. Hudson of Richmond, Va., ruled unconstitutional a key part of the recently-enacted federal health care law. The mainstream press was a lot less diligent in reporting Judge Hudson’s connection to an outfit, Campaign Solutions, whose favored candidates worked to defeat the law. The multiple [...]

How excellent it is that Media Matters for America devotes so much space to ridiculing Fox News. No group is more deserving. The individual stories are juicy, the news endless. Putting it all in one place is a public service. It won’t stop Murdoch and Ailes as they go about dumbing down America, but – [...]

DES MOINES–The convoluted policy of the Des Moines Register that allows readers to post often scurrilous or racist comments on line — under the cover of anonymity — took still another odd turn on Sunday. Columnist Rekha Basu wrote that, henceforth, people who want to comment on her writing will have to do so by [...]

In an email to Meet the Press on Oct. 26 and in a snail-mail letter the next day, I wrote: “For an article I am doing for niemanwatchdog.org, I want to ask: “Why has Newt Gingrich been the most-booked guest on Meet the Press during the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency? “Why has Speaker [...]