(Editor’s note: The incidents described here have become part of a developing story, as this Google link shows.) The Des Moines Register’s reluctance to identify criminal suspects or victims by race has turned into an outright refusal to do so. The closing night of the Iowa State Fair was marked by an observance not exactly [...]

Let’s state the obvious at the outset: The Internet is a miraculous medium that makes it possible for people to communicate with each other from almost anywhere in the world, and it makes it possible for news organizations to report the latest news virtually as it happens to anyone who has a computer and Internet [...]

(Written with Herb Strentz) The Des Moines Register in 1991 won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for exemplary coverage of a rape, coverage that set a high standard for sensitivity and responsibility. On June 16 of this year the Register once more gave noteworthy coverage to a young woman raped multiple times that again [...]

For the past nine years, the Nieman Foundation has honored journalistic fairness with the Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Newspapers. Our goal is to encourage fairness and ethical practices in enterprising news coverage by drawing public attention to exemplary work. The award is given in the name of the Taylor family whose stewardship of [...]

Full disclosure up front. I have been a Helen Thomas friend ever since we stood on a tarmac, interviewing Jackie Kennedy through a crack in the window as The First Lady sat in a limo, waiting for her infant son, John, and three-year-old Caroline, to arrive in a plane and commence life in the White [...]

When I started out as a young reporter at the Times-Herald Record in Middletown, N.Y., I had the opportunity to cover a city-wide election. The incumbent mayor was a Democrat, unusual in a part of New York State that was decidedly Republican. After a few weeks of the campaign, the Republican candidate, who was doing [...]

A bit of magic happened at the Philadelphia Theater the other night that has a lot to do with American journalism. The whiskey voice of Molly Ivins – the satirist of all things worth assaulting in Texas and most of America – came alive again in the whiskey voice of actress Kathleen Turner. Molly’s voice [...]

Can’t Barack Obama do anything right? When he’s not being rebuked for being too much in the limelight (the New Yorker, Jan. 25), he’s being zapped by Frank Rich in the March 7 New York Times. Or was it Rich? The high-profile, hard-hitting lift-out quote in his column – “One year on, everyone is puzzling [...]

Diminished resources in newspaper and broadcast newsrooms are weakening the ability of journalists to report on the spread of disease as well as the dire consequences of poorly funded public health systems and corporate malfeasance. Also diminished is the capacity of news organizations to hold accountable those charged with delivering public and foundation money to [...]

Ask an American audience what it knows about Britain’s’ “Chilcott Inquiry” and chances are you will draw blank looks. That’s too bad. Americans ought to be intently interested in the Chilcott inquiry, named for its chairman, senior civil servant Sir John Chilcott, because it’s likely to provide the only authoritative account they will have into [...]