When a couple of colleagues and I wrote a book several years ago about the mistake newspaper companies made when they sold stock to the public and listed it on stock exchanges (Taking Stock: Journalism and the Publicly Traded Newspaper Company; Iowa State University Press), we pointedly did not recommend that the companies rectify the [...]

Confession can be good not only for the soul but also for the bottom line. The New York Times reported recently that physicians and hospitals increasingly admit to patients when they make mistakes and are being rewarded with fewer malpractice suits and less costly settlements. The Times cited the recent two-year experience at the University [...]

Longboat Key, FL–If the government announced, “Sorry folks, no presidential election this year,” Americans would take to the streets and blood would spill. But deny a substantial chunk of voters a chance to participate in a key part of that election, the nominating process, and the reaction is muted at best. In the months I’ve [...]

I fired William F. Buckley, Jr. He did not take it well. When I canceled his column in the Des Moines Tribune in the 1970s he made an unpleasant fuss and misrepresented why we parted company. Buckley and I had had a running back-and-forth about an issue of journalism ethics. I told him he had [...]

The New York Times has taken a lot of guff for its Feb. 21 story about Senator John McCain and a female lobbyist, Vicki Iseman; even the paper’s public editor, Clark Hoyt, chided it: “…if a paper is going to suggest an improper sexual affair…it owes readers more proof than The Times was able to [...]

News organizations are so busy giving their own take on the presidential nominating contests they apparently can’t be bothered to let readers in on the facts they need to draw their own conclusions. Take the recent voting in Louisiana, Nebraska, Kansas and Washington state. Reading the accounts online in the Washington Post and both online [...]

In a staff-bylined story in the Feb. 3 New York Times, the suspect in the slaying of five women in a mall in the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park, Ill., was described only “as wearing a waist-length winter coat, jeans and a knit cap.” Not altogether true. The Chicago Tribune reported the same day that [...]

DES MOINES–Did Hillary Clinton make a mistake by not skipping Iowa’s caucuses? She was advised last May to pass them up by campaign aide Mike Henry. He wrote in a memo that Clinton should quit wasting time and money on Iowa and go “where the delegates are.” Henry argued that the New York Democrat would [...]

Who gets the last word? Editors can always claim it, but should they? Consider this: Fred B. Walters of Harrisburg, PA., wrote to complain in the September/October Columbia Journalism Review about a couple of recent pieces by contributing editor Michael Massing critical of press coverage of the annual auto show in Detroit and of the [...]

After the Bush administration denied that it manhandles prisoners, it was revealed that it does. Since turnabout is fair play, it would be appropriate for the White House press corps to try its hand at enhanced interrogation techniques to pry information out of its high-value source, George W. Bush. No rough stuff, of course, no [...]