Individual words and phrases are determining public policy and life or death in America. This is both weird and terrifying and something for the press to take note of and deal with. I have in mind one word and one phrase. The word is “makaka” and the phrase is “the war on terror.” Saying “makaka” [...]

On the Veterans Administration Web site there’s a locator page for VA hospitals and outpatient clinics. I clicked on a few states; each had both hospitals and clinics. In Idaho, for example, there’s a VA medical center in Boise with what are referred to as 46 “authorized beds” and “an adjacent” nursing home with “an [...]

Talk about Congress cutting funding for the Iraq war has been moving from a mumble to what I expect will be a roar before long. It brings me back to a moment in the spring of 1973 when the House voted to block military aid for South Vietnam, the first step in a series of [...]

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 [...]

Some 2006 election questions and thoughts for reporters: What about voting machines? There wasn’t any way to hold a real recount in the Virginia Senate election, where the Democrat won by three-tenths of a percentage point; there could only have been a check on whether election officials correctly added up the numbers the machines gave [...]

Garry Wills, the cultural historian and longtime tracker of zealotry, lays out in the current New York Review of Books how America under George W. Bush, in a few short years, has become a country ruled by faith. “Bush promised his evangelical followers faith-based social services, which he called ‘compassionate conservatism,’” Wills writes. “He went [...]

Day to day in many news organizations there’s no real encouragement for reporters and editors to do the best job they can. Instead, it’s just the opposite: The message sent by cuts in staff, cuts in news hole and focus on easy features, not hard news, is loud and clear and very, very disheartening and [...]