A Jeopardy answer and question: Answer: You’re not a good liberal if you ask hard questions about this late Senator. Question: Who is Ted Kennedy, the liberal lion? Roger Mudd as far as I know has never claimed to be a liberal, but if people ever thought of him that way – after all, he [...]

One of the riddles of news coverage of Iowa politics, at least for me, is why the Iowa Republican Party is not reported for what it is: Not a political party, but a driven assembly that wants to force feed its perspective on Christian beliefs down the throats of the rest of us. More than [...]

“The president is a socialist ideologue trying to change America into something it will never be: a socialist state,” William Parker, of Selma, Cal., wrote in a letter published on the Feb. 15 Newsweek’s “Feedback” page. Let’s take a quick look at the validity of the accusation and then at a broader question: Why publish [...]

What would I do if I were in charge of a dozen highly skilled investigative reporters? Where would I sic them? What marching orders would I give them? (Dan Froomkin, deputy editor of Nieman Watchdog, put those questions to me recently.) The number of registered Washington lobbyists increased nearly 45 percent between 1998 and 2008, [...]

Item: The New York Times reported Friday afternoon that “two more Democratic senators” said they would vote against a second term for Fed Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. From there, the Times said this made it unclear “whether there were the 60 votes necessary to confirm Mr. Bernanke.” Excuse me? Sixty votes are not necessary to [...]

“Change comes slowly to the venerable [talk] shows that grip the attention of a small but committed segment of TV watchers every Sunday morning,” Michael Calderone wrote for Politico on Jan. 10. “And taking risks almost never happens.” He went on to quote an email to Politico from New York Times columnist Frank Rich, a [...]

There’s a paragraph in a column by E.J. Dionne in the Nov. 19th Washington Post that jumped out at me. The column was about Republican delaying tactics in Congress. It included this thought: “Republicans know one other thing: Practically nobody is noticing their delay-to-kill strategy. Who wants to discuss legislative procedure when there’s so much [...]

During Watergate William Safire, then working for President Nixon, told the Washington Post’s editorial page editor that Nixon could handle all the attacks on himself but that the Post was hitting below the belt when it tied his appointments secretary, Dwight Chapin, to aspects of the scandal. Chapin was like a son to Nixon, Safire [...]

What is it about the culture of our elite newsrooms that led the nation’s major newspapers and television networks to fall so short in the run-up to the war in Iraq? Why were the spurious claims from the Bush administration greeted with credulousness rather than the appropriate skepticism? Michael Getler – who was Washington Post [...]

This column first appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of Nieman Reports. Three years ago, the Nieman Foundation convened a first-of-its-kind conference for journalists, experts in infectious diseases and world, national and local public health officials to explore how to cover a potential pandemic. Then the concern was avian flu, and the gathering’s purpose was [...]