Every reporter and commentator who covered the recent Republican debate at the Ronald Reagan Library recorded how the candidates competed to wrap themselves in the Reagan legacy, without giving real thought to what it was. But most of the reporters knew or remembered little of the Reagan presidency. They should have done their homework, the [...]

Whatever happened to the second paragraph, or the third, the one in which the reporter explains what the story is really about? It’s not necessary, you know, to let a politician’s assertion or anyone’s quote go without comment, without saying what the facts are. In one Washington bureau where I spent my time, the bureau [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

As far as I can tell, President Bush first pronounced it as American policy on August 12, 2005, when he replied to an Israeli television interviewer who asked what the president would do if diplomacy didn’t turn Iran away from its nuclear ambitions. “Well, all options are on the table,” Bush said. “Including the use [...]

Where are those critics now, the right-wing know-nothings and the bloviating Bill Bennett who wanted to arrest the Washington Post’s Dana Priest for treason when she outed the CIA in November 2005 for hiding captives in “black sites”? She was a shill for the Democrats, one wingnut cried. Why are they not congratulating Priest and [...]

Here is one reason reporters too often don’t ask the right provocative questions of the president or his briefers: They bog themselves down in details and make it easy for the briefer to slip away, as Tony Snow did the other day when he was asked about proposed budget cuts for Medicare and Medicaid, on [...]

I came across this lead from a recent online issue of the English version of Al Jazeera, the Arab-based news service. And I wondered whether there was a lesson there for the U.S. press, which pussyfoots around such juxtaposition, for fear that it’s unfair or too pointed. The lead went as follows: “George Bush, the [...]

As a long, long time political reporter, I think it’s not too late to get in my few cents on the feeding frenzy over whether and when Sen. Barack Obama attended a Muslim school as a boy, and whether the Hillary Clinton campaign leaked the story. It was all nonsense, but it won’t be the [...]