Now and then I hear George W. Bush praised for the eloquence of his remarks in a prepared speech. I do not usually want to embarrass or disillusion the listener by explaining the facts of life about White House speechmaking. However, anyone who reads Matthew Scully’s tell-all takeout in the September Atlantic on his days [...]

David Yepsen, the Des Moines Register’s chief political writer, lately has described how some of the presidential candidates stack up in terms of their presidential personas. To Yepsen, Barack Obama “looked presidential” in a recent debate, and Fred Thompson “looks the part of a president and carries himself that way. His slow talk and deep [...]

I think I understand at least one reason why so many readers now look to media critics and blogs, like this one, to provide the rest of the story, and maybe some truth. For it seems to me that too many straight reporters have been unable or unwilling to confront and challenge official lies. And [...]

Those who want to quit Iraq in a hurry and those who believe we should stay have a lot in common: both purport to be able to foretell the future. The predictions are poles apart: the exit-now camp envisions Iraq calming down when the irritant of the U.S. occupation ends; the stay-longer faction foresees that [...]

David Carr’s elegant New York Times dissection of the editorial agreement between the News Corporation and the Wall Street Journal revealed that Paul A. Gigot, the Journal’s editorial-page editor, helped to write it. This could generate a momentary surge of sympathy for Rupert Murdoch. Historically, Carr pointed out in his piece on Aug. 6th, the [...]

So far, of all the top officials in the Bush administration, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has gotten away relatively unscathed in the main stream press. Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, George Tenet, the Joint Chiefs and President Bush himself have taken punishment, at least in the polls. But except for her shoe buying during the [...]

I love “Oklahoma!” but have no ties to Oklahoma. I have no relatives there, no friends, no special interest. In 1986, yes, I did have what could be called a connection. I went to Oklahoma City, for the Washington Post, to cover a failed lawsuit brought by the mother of a man who had begun [...]

Amid concern about the credibility of the press and the future of the printed newspaper, fairness continues to resonate as an important journalistic value. The Nieman Foundation recently recognized three newspapers for “exemplary examples of fairness.” Each of the entries presented stories that dealt with different dimensions of fairness. Together, they demonstrate the complexity of [...]

The July 3 New York Times editorial on the Scooter Libby commutation contained a concluding paragraph that should have been beneath the Times. The paper said: “Presidents have the power to grant clemency and pardons. But in this case, Mr. Bush did not sound like a leader making tough decisions about justice. He sounded like [...]

Now can we get back to what most Americans consider the most important issue facing the country–the war and the killing in Iraq? Sure, the president’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence was, and is, a good and important story. And it was fun to poke fun at puppeteer Dick Cheney’s effort to declare himself [...]