If you want to take an accurate temperature of the state of journalism, it might be helpful to focus not on the major national publications, but rather on some smaller papers that serve local communities. Here you can find bald examples of what generally ails the news business. First, illiteracy. “The Delaware Wave” is one [...]

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 [...]

Carolyn Lewis joins the Watchdog Bloggers today. I love it when conventional wisdom flies out the window, don’t you? I love it when the experts are confounded, especially when it’s ordinary folks like voters who are doing the confounding. What I have been searching for in the wake of Super Tuesday is a sign that [...]

Veteran political reporter Myra MacPherson joins the Watchdog Bloggers, and shares her impressions of election coverage in the electronic age. The absurdity that accompanies the lightning speed of today’s instant election results reached a crescendo in the cable TV theatrics of Super Tuesday. Pie charts, whirling circles and statistics whisked on and off the screen [...]

For this election season, I would like to be a television pundit, commentator, consultant or whatever title seems appropriate (and pays well). I have the credentials: I do not have a steady day job. I have not covered or been involved in politics in a generation. I am white, generally liberal, and Jewish. I can [...]

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 [...]

Imagine this make-believe world: Each mistake you make adds to your credibility. Each misstep you take is further evidence of your infallibility. You’d enjoy an “Escape Hatch 22″ instead of a “Catch 22″ – a life of triumph, instead of a life of frustration. What brings this to mind are the reports of the “greatest [...]

I got this email today from somenone named Chris in Virginia, referring to my criticism last week of a Des Moines Register poll of prospective Democratic caucusgoers: “So, what do you say now about the DSM poll, which seems to have been right on the money? Is the Sussman column ‘inoperative,’ as Ron Ziegler would [...]

I often wonder why most of the mainstream reporters and editorialists don’t make the connection between the first two most basic guarantees in the First Amendment and their own responsibilities for making them whole: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of [...]

Just the title of the bill making its way through the Congress ought to frighten hell out of us or at least prompt a reporter worth his or her computer to find out more: “The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism and Prevention Act.” Yet so far no one in the Main Stream Media–newspapers, television or [...]