Segments of the freedom-of-information community are critical of President Obama for not releasing what are acknowledged to be gruesome photos of the corpse of Osama bin Laden. The public, the argument goes, under the federal FOI Act has a “right to know” about the man’s shattered skull, and the rest of the remains, too. The [...]

I’ve got a solution to a main issue in the National Football League lockout. It’s a simple idea but the owners and players could struggle for ten years and hire some of the highest priced legal talent around, as they’ve done, and never come up with it. At issue is some $2.4 billion that the [...]


If you’re a fan of Hans Christian Andersen and his fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes, you’ll feel right at home with the Iowa Republican caucuses this time around. It’s all a fairy tale in which the likes of expert bankruptcy tycoon Donald Trump and Rep. Dingaling, aka Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), are viewed as [...]

Frank Rich’s column in the March 12 New York Times explaining why it is his last Sunday piece for the paper confirms my conviction that regular columnists have among the toughest assignments in journalism. Rich cited William Safire who compared column writing to standing under a windmill: “No sooner did you feel relief that you’d [...]

Jane Mayer’s piece in the Aug. 30 New Yorker, “Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama,” has continued to generate an unusual amount of buzz. It turned the under-the radar bothers, Charles and David Koch, and their privately held conglomerate, Koch Industries, into familiar names synonymous with how super-rich ideologues [...]

Forget about judicial activism in the courts; consider instead its place in newspaper headlines and broadcast commentary. Too often, according to the headlines, judges are picking sides in a dispute, rather than interpreting the constitution or reviewing legislation Those thoughts came to mind as I took in news coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court decision [...]

If Harry S. Truman were with us today, would his opinions of commentators such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh be printable? I was led to wonder about that on reading a letter he sent to his good friend Dean Acheson, the former Secretary of State, after leaving the White House. “Well, I have the [...]

I don’t like to criticize any Nieman Fellows but one of them, Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post, a 1988 Fellow, is just asking for it. In an open letter to Daniel Snyder, the owner of the Washington Redskins, Gene said he supports Snyder fully in a suit he filed against the Washingon City Paper. [...]

Here we are marking the 50th anniversary of John F, Kennedy’s inaugural address and his challenge, “And so, my fellows Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” The “Ask not” line will be subject to more replays on our TVs and in our newspapers [...]

Unless they are diehard supporters or detractors, the first thing some people say when they talk of Julian Assange—which seems curious to me—is that he is creepy or weird looking, and then there is a quiet murmur of dissent: “What if he releases something that could damage someone or get people killed? My answer is: [...]