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‘Is there a question in there somewhere?' | Goodbye to Mike Wallace and the news era he led
COMMENTARY
Danny Schechter’s recollections of lessons learned by watching Wallace at work. Wallace’s success, he writes, “often lay in the questions he hurled, not the answers he received.”

Minority opinion | Is lack of diversity a factor in our failure in Afghanistan?
COMMENTARY
A black man spends 11 months working for USAID in Afghanistan, sees white men flailing around, and wonders if their lack of diversity and inability to achieve their goals may be related.

Looking ahead | What’s lost if the Supreme Court kills the health care reform act?
COMMENTARY
Medicare advocate Judith Stein, dealing with the substance of the Affordable Care Act and not the politics, describes how millions of Americans of all ages already have benefited from health care reform. She urges the press to do a better job telling this part of the story – now and after the court decision. (Editor’s note: John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy, please read.)

An ‘A’ student on an empty stomach | First feed the face and then talk higher ed
COMMENTARY
Students’ Dickensian hunger and poverty are everyday features and concerns for educator Wick Sloane at his community college – and by extension, in many places like it. He proposes paying students to study, cash incentives for going to the library.

Blunder insurance | Whatever happened to talking about a war before launching it?
COMMENTARY
A former CIA station chief calls for a national discussion about the efficacy of foreign intervention -- and its parameters -- before we blunder into another war without pausing to think things through.

Who’s the fact-challenged one? | The Wall St. Journal, Karl Rove, and true-but-false journalism
COMMENTARY
Karl Rove, no surprise, twisted a statement of Bill Clinton's so badly in a Wall Street Journal column that the paper issued ‘a clarification.’ But as Gil Cranberg points out, calling something a clarification doesn’t make it one.

From Nieman Reports | Global health: a story rarely told
COMMENTARY
‘Today while billions of dollars [in aid] are lost to corruption and dysfunction — and billions more save many lives — both traditional and new media are too often missing this important story altogether.’ (From the Spring 2012 issue of Nieman Reports.)

'A bigger platform' | A writer's appeal to the UN: Treat the global financial crisis as a human rights crisis
COMMENTARY
Danny Schechter, a man of many journalistic talents, discusses being asked by an NGO in Geneva to testify about his findings – in this case, findings that issue a challenge to the U.N.

What's the cure? | What if prison is the disease, not the cure?
COMMENTARY
If reporters were to look at mass incarceration as a problem rather than a solution, that would lead to a lot of different questions, says public health expert Ernest Drucker. Among those questions: How do you reduce it? How can you mitigate the harm?

A propagandist with a bent toward hate speech | Should Fluke sue Limbaugh for defamation?
COMMENTARY
Gil Cranberg, an expert on libel law and no fan of defamation suits, would give the go-ahead. He says Limbaugh, by attacking the Georgetown Law student three days in a row, “intended to damage her and her reputation" and that "his actions were aggravated and egregious.”


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