Reporters should press National Highway Traffic Safety Administrator Nicole Nason to address hard questions suggested by a predecessor in a Jan. 28 New York Times Op-Ed. The reason for asking the questions couldn’t be plainer: They bear heavily on whether many of us will be needlessly killed or injured every year. Joan Claybrook asked why [...]

How good a job are newspapers doing with online corrections? Occasional and highly informal surfing among the usual suspects of newspapers suggests newspapers are doing a better job of at least providing access to corrections of mistakes, errors, misstatements, etc. That lengthy wording of corrections is necessary; several months to a year ago, looking for [...]

I doubt if many of our colleagues in the press have noticed that the Bush administration, with the aid of the last Republican congress, began on January 1 an unprecedented invasion of the privacy of some 43 million older and disabled Americans, beneficiaries of Medicare. That most of the press did not notice is understandable. [...]

Lost in the examination of political candidates for high office – perhaps understandably – are clues to their freedom of information record or philosophy. How they stand on access to government information takes second or third fiddle at best to concerns about Iraq, Social Security, about how to lessen the rancor and divisiveness in the [...]

Journalists who criticize the mainstream press in hopes of making it better do so in the belief that, as Bill Moyers once put it, “the quality of journalism and the quality of democracy are inseparable.” From that belief flows a corollary: Commentators and bloggers who attack the mainstream press malignly, carelessly, and, on commercial television [...]

Researchers believe a simple fact explains a startling 15 percent decline in breast-cancer rates in the 16 months ending in December 2003, the New York Times reported in a Dec. 15 story: “[M]illions of women abandoned hormone treatment for the symptoms of menopause after a large national study concluded that the hormones slightly increased breast [...]

Departing Maryland governor Robert Ehrlich held a luncheon the other day at the State House in Annapolis where those invited, according to an account in the Washington Post, were “limited to reporters from newspapers that had endorsed his candidacy.” The Post, being such a paper, had a reporter in attendance, there to note first-hand such [...]

As far as I can tell, among all the briefings, press conferences and punditry, only the liberal Center for American Progress made the connection between the Iraq Study Group and the primary reason for its existence. On the day the group made its report, the center noted, 10 more Americans met violent deaths in Iraq. [...]

There is at least one more important matter that reporters with too little memory ought to know about before they cover the hearings for Robert Gates, the nominee for Defense Secretary: He almost cost us the end of the cold war. That may be a bit of hyperbole, but it’s not far wrong. Gates, for [...]

Mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, or even Comedy Central. The threat comes from inside. It comes from journalists being afraid to do what journalists were put on this green earth to do. What is it about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert that makes them [...]