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Bigger isn't better | Challenging corporate mythology COMMENTARY Large multinational corporations, unlike small businesses, are run on a 'lifeless model,' writes Sam Smith, who argues that journalists and policymakers should be focusing their attention on small business needs instead. 
Deception on the campaign trail | When candidates lie, what's a political reporter to do? COMMENTARY| November 334, 2011 How journalists respond to intentional deception will be a defining feature of 2012 political coverage. Will they allow themselves to become accessories to deceptive politicians? Or will they aggressively and repeatedly expose misinformation and the people who traffic in it?
Frank Luntz as Billy Graham | There’ll be one less GOP candidates' debate in Iowa COMMENTARY The Des Moines Register, a sponsor of presidential candidate debates for many years, won’t get a chance this time around to improve on its much-ridiculed 2008 effort, which the Wall Street Journal, in one of the kinder critiques, called 'infamous.' All isn’t lost; the Register will be a (junior) cosponsor of another, earlier debate.
| It's easy to blame debt on the debtors -- but that's missing the real story COMMENTARY American working families borrowed money not simply to buy luxuries, but because their wages were flat and going into debt was the only way they could afford basic public goods like first homes, education, and health care. So whose fault is that?
Pre-publication review | Another front in the battle over intelligence-agency secrecy COMMENTARY It's not just leaks, writes Steven Aftergood --- the Obama administration is also taking an uncompromising approach to pre-publication review of books by former intelligence agency employees.
| Separating artists from their art COMMENTARY Author-agent Ronald Goldfarb takes on the age-old issue of whether artists should be judged by standards having nothing to do their work. His answer is, judge them by both criteria, and he cites a conductor who said, “Wagner’s ideology and anti-Semitism was terrible, but he was a great composer. The aim in 2011 is to distinguish between the person and his art.”
Depression, stress, low esteem | The hidden toll of underemployment COMMENTARY Part-time work and jobs below a person’s skill level may not be as bad as having no job at all but they are serious societal problems in their own right, as Mike Alberti of Remapping Debate reports.
Alternate views | Public affairs blogs meet a need, fill a gap COMMENTARY An academic study of public affairs blogs sheds light on how useful they can be to journalists looking for insight into communities, alternative views, and information on topics that are often overlooked by the mainstream media.
Proposals to follow | In DC, an 'Occupied Supercommittee' outdoor public hearing COMMENTARY Freedom Plaza occupiers, planning economic fixes, have scheduled open-air hearings with some noted experts. Subjects include job creation, taxes, concentration of wealth, poverty, military policy, Social Security, Medicare for all. The protesters, nothing if not modern, will live-stream the event.
Moyers speaks | 'Our politicians are little more than money launderers in the trafficking of power and policy' COMMENTARY Bill Moyers traces the history of the 40-year crusade by the rich against the institutions, ideas, and laws that helped create America’s iconic middle class – and delivers a powerful broadside against the corrupt political system that has allowed itself to be bought off. Why protesters are occupying Wall Street is no mystery, he says. They are occupying Wall Street because Wall Street has occupied the country.
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