In a stunning turnabout, the U.S. Supreme Court on the final day of its term agreed to review a case it had rejected in April. The action was one of the most consequential of the term, involving as it did a determination by the justices to reject the administration’s advice and to decide the legality [...]

Who is being more humiliated? Rupert Murdoch, who is so reviled that the property he covets has to be protected from him, or the Bancroft family, whose obvious distaste for Murdoch is being overcome by their apparent appetite for his money? If this were a political cartoon, it would show a grinning Murdoch carrying Bancrofts [...]

You read all about it in Romenesko or the trade press when news organizations cut staff. Sometimes the general public hears about it from the news organization itself. Economize, though, by canceling a supplemental wire service, say the New York Times News Service or Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service, and seldom is attention called [...]

Snip, snip, snip….That’s my scissors clipping more evidence of my daily paper’s service to its non-paying online readers. One of the clips calls attention to ideas for Mother’s Day, another to a Harry Potter blog, another to a column on postage changes, another to new businesses in town, and still another to fallout from higher [...]

In 1964 Congress made the terrible mistake of approving the Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorizing then-President Lyndon Johnson to take “all necessary steps” to prevent aggression in Southeast Asia. Given the green light by the resolution to escalate the war in Vietnam, Johnson did it with a vengeance. Tens of thousands of deaths later, in [...]

Growing up, my contemporaries and I had dinned into us the belief that ends do not justify the means. The principle seemed to us as ingrained and natural as breathing. Not so nowadays, where the precept seems to have been turned on its head. Does a law stand in the way of achieving an objective? [...]

Vice president Cheney became especially testy during a recent interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer when the subject turned to the pregnancy of Cheney’s unmarried daughter, Mary. Twice Cheney bluntly told Blitzer, “You’re out of line” when Blitzer asked the vice president to respond to conservative critics of Mary Cheney‘s decision to “conceive a child outside [...]

To put in perspective the sale of the Minneapolis Star Tribune by McClatchy to an investment firm it helps to recall that the Strib was a sister paper of the Des Moines Register when both were owned by members of the Cowles family. The fate of the Register, sold to the highest bidder (Gannett) in [...]

It was no surprise that Illinois Supreme Court chief justice Robert Thomas won a $7 million jury verdict in a libel suit against a small Illinois daily, the Kane County Chronicle. Most libel actions are tossed out of court without going to trial, but once jurors get their hands on a case they usually favor [...]

As he headed out the door for Los Angeles to take over as editor of the LA Times after a stint as managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, Jim O’Shea complained to the Wall Street Journal about how the “whole damn [newspaper] industry is focusing on the wrong thing. We’re all worried about how many [...]