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 [...]

Michael Moore’s documentary about the American health care non-system, “Sicko,” was barely into the theaters before some of our journalist brethren began an effort, with the silent thanks of insurance companies, to talk us out of the notion of universal, publicly financed heath care. For example, the Washington Post/CNN Media Critic Howard Kurtz, who keeps [...]

Cheers to the New York Times for assigning a 13-person team to screen nearly 250 hours of broadcasting of what it politely called “shock-talk radio,” but what could instead fairly be labeled broadcasting by hate-breeding motor-mouths who give vileness a bad name. I won’t recycle here the repugnancies the team found by listening five weekdays [...]

In the better-late-than-never department, use of the phrase “War on Terror” is now getting a little scrutiny. Not much, perhaps, but some. It’s about time for such a development and editors and reporters should encourage it. They should, for one thing, ask national leaders what they mean when they say “war on terror” or “global [...]

When is a news story done, played out, way past its expiration date? What is the shelf life of an American media tale? News events are radioactive entities with half-lives determined primarily by when the next item comes along to displace the last one. The relative importance of the tale hardly matters. A diaper-wearing astronaut [...]

Has anybody noticed how good we are getting at holding memorial services, candlelight vigils, prayer meetings and funerals for dead young Americans? We’ve had a lot of practice. Since Columbine in 1999, I count 22 fatal school shootings in the U.S., including Virginia Tech. The mourning ceremonies continue as I write. In four years, more [...]

That the New York Times Company, which owns the Boston Globe, would run a full-page ad in the Times saluting the Globe’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, Charlie Savage, was to be expected. But there’s cause not to salute the Times: It’s among the major news organizations at which commentators sometimes call [...]

It seems that apologies, regrets, saying I’m sorry, are in fashion. For actors, comedians and glorified disc jockeys who can’t control their racism and antisemitism, as well as flip-flopping politicians. Former Senator and Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards gets high marks for honesty when he admits he “made a mistake” in voting to authorize what [...]

Too many of us in journalism are still stuck in that stupid old rut: We won’t follow up on a good story broken by someone else, as if the reader cares who got it first. We are reluctant to acknowledge someone else’s scoop. And that’s especially true if the news was broken first in a [...]

Special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald has been widely reviled by a fair number of First-Amendment activists for dragging reporters into court to make his case against former vice presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby. Fitzgerald’s approach has been described by some of his critics as encouraging a full-bore government assault on reporters and their ability [...]