For me, the most intriguing item in the July 20 New York Times was tacked on to the end of Ross Douthat’s op-ed column. It said: “Paul Krugman is off today.” “Off” in the sense that what Krugman turned in was not up to his or the Times’s standard? Newspapers are seldom that candid. Or [...]

Dan Froomkin, deputy editor for Nieman Watchdog, has just been fired from his main job as writer of the online White House Watch column for the Washington Post. Dan will do just fine. He is talented, immensely productive, has sharp insight, good ideas and is a total self-starter. The unanswered question is, why was he [...]

A veteran journalist and Washington insider has completed an empirical study of the elite press’s performance in the run-up to and early days of the Iraq war and – big surprise – has found it badly wanting. Leslie H. Gelb, writing in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, concludes that American’s finest journalists failed to even [...]

The stenographic, invasion-enabling reporting of the run-up to the U.S. war in Iraq had a precedent of sorts in World War I. The story emerges in “A Farewell to Arms,” a review in the June 11th New York Review of Books of British author Mark Thompson’s The White War: Life and Death on the Italian [...]

As a former reporter and journalism professor I am naturally inclined to think highly of the right of free speech. Still, I can’t help applauding what the British government did when it slammed the door on Michael Savage and his ilk. Savage is an American radio host who spouts some of the ugliest and most [...]

Reporting facts as facts is heartening in these times The headline over the Associated Press article in the Des Moines Register Tuesday was straightforward: “Auschwitz letter/is found in wall.” But I was surprised by one graph and even more so by my reaction to it. The story told how a construction crew in Poland found [...]

President Obama holds a prime-time press conference tomorrow night to mark his 100th day in office, and if the major news organizations really want to make it interesting, they won’t send their White House corrrespondents. No, I’m not suggesting a boycott. What I’m proposing is that, depending on what they want to probe, news organizations [...]

Let’s say that Bernard Madoff duped not only investors but also the press and that, having heard about his celebrity customers, the financial press publicized the ostensibly generous returns that caused even savvy investors to flock to him. Naturally, the attention would be good for Madoff’s business. Question: When Madoff’s swindle was revealed, would the [...]

CURATOR’S CORNER Attached to the personal statement in the file of a Nieman Fellowship applicant for the class of 2010 is this note of explanation concerning his “evolving situation.” He had been offered a buyout from his company, he said, and had decided to accept it. He and his family would be moving back to [...]

Some reporters covering President Obama’s first high-tech town hall yesterday apparently found it boring. Which raises the question: What excites the press corps? Well, top of the list would be itself, of course. We’ll start with Frank James, who liveblogged the town hall for Tribune’s Washington bureau. Ten minutes in, he wrote: “The second question [...]