The new story is that the ludicrous Republican impeachment investigation has now been exposed as a Russian intelligence op. | Continue reading
New ownership, with a powerful sense of public service, could take advantage of the huge opportunity to become the world leader in U.S. political and government news presented by the abysmal failure of the industry-leading New York Times to adjust to the asymmetry of the current … | Continue reading
In a front-page story on Sunday ostensibly about how "fears of democracy" are playing out in real-world Wisconsin, New York Times reporter Jonathan Weisman instead equated legitimate fears with illegitimate ones, and used man-on-the-street interviews to make a mockery of the deep … | Continue reading
It's hard to imagine a more fundamental misreading of the freedom of speech - or an organization whose credibility depends more on understanding it correctly - than today's lead editorial from the New York Times editorial board. The First Amendment asserts a right to free speech. … | Continue reading
The way a news organization sets the agenda is not through editorials and opinion pieces. It's by deciding what to cover. | Continue reading
Despite the Republican Party's attempt to steal a presidential election, our elite media can't bring itself to say that the party has crossed the line. | Continue reading
The abrupt departure gave reality-based journalists license to stop the lame euphemisms and call Fox what it is: a propaganda and disinformation operation. | Continue reading
Mitch McConnell is getting exactly the kind of coverage he had hoped for -- and had every reason to expect -- from a press corps that is incapable of holding the Republican Party accountable for anything. | Continue reading
Every news organizations should have a “straightforward protocol” for responding to “targeted campaigns that seek to undermine the legitimacy of news organizations and obscure the facts around conflicts.” Just fill in the blanks. | Continue reading
For political journalists, democracy reform is far too earnest to be sexy. But they should be writing about H.R. 1 every day because the wounds it aims to heal are the underlying cause of the political dysfunction they report on every day. | Continue reading
The key for the Times opinion section going forward should be quality control, not opinion control. There should be a near-zero tolerance for bad-faith arguments. And if Republicans refuse, they haven't been canceled, they've opted out. | Continue reading
Jay Rosen says political reporters will never change, so we should just have fewer of them, and have more subject-matter reporters instead. I like the idea, but I think it's the editors who really need to go. | Continue reading
The press corps will soon have a chance to push Biden past the scripted talking points and get him to reveal more about what's really going on inside his head -- and his White House. (But they'll probably blow it.) | Continue reading
The Washington Post, like other elite news organizations, has long resisted constructive criticism from within as well as from without. And in his victory lap, Marty Baron unwittingly explained why: Because the leaders don’t listen. | Continue reading
Steven Sund, the former Capitol Police chief, was explicitly warned in a Jan. 3 memo that thousands of desperate, violence-prone Trump supporters were planning to target Congress on Jan. 6, encouraged by the president himself. But he waved it off. Ask yourself why. | Continue reading
You're very talented, but you have deeply screwed things up. So say goodbye to failed, anachronistic notions of objectivity, recognize and reject your establishment whiteness, and find dramatically more effective ways to create an informed electorate. Go! | Continue reading
You're very talented, but you have deeply screwed things up. So say goodbye to failed, anachronistic notions of objectivity, recognize and reject your establishment whiteness, and find dramatically more effective ways to create an informed electorate. Go! | Continue reading
Reporters should be aggressively pursuing this story, and operating under the assumption that Capitol Police leaders either were too racist to see the threat posed by Trump supporters, or looked the other way on purpose. | Continue reading
In a post-Trump world, the press needs to immediately start holding the president to the highest possible standards of transparency, logic, and clarity. | Continue reading
The nation's political journalists face a moment of reckoning: Will they continue to treat this like a normal election, acting as if both sides have equally compelling claims on the American voter? Or will they sound the alarm, and make it clear in every story precisely what is a … | Continue reading
Trump's election campaign has been reduced to a blatant appeal to racists and know-nothings. So there are really only two questions reporters should be focusing on: Can Trump and his dead-enders steal the election? And what is going on in these people's heads? | Continue reading
Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, considers journalistic "objectivity" -- as his newsroom currently practices it -- a “core value” that he intends to guard as long as he remains in charge. So be prepared for more credulous, both-sides stenography. | Continue reading
With the news cycle spinning with so many other, juicier stories, the Hong Kong news has gone largely unnoticed by the Washington media. But Trump’s political contortions and confabulations have now taken their toll not just at home, but abroad. | Continue reading
The millions of protesters expressing their rage and suffering in the wake of the agonizing videotaped police killing of George Floyd have made something almost magical happen in this country. They’ve reminded a super-majority of Americans that we are better than this. | Continue reading
After sounding off on the dismal federal response to the coronavirus on CNN, McNeil didn't deserve to be scolded by the Times for going “too far in expressing his personal views.” He did exactly what more journalist desperately need to be doing right now. He expressed himself wit … | Continue reading
New projections of mass death in the United States should be prompting the country’s major news organizations to abandon any complacency in their government coverage and instead use every opportunity to sound the alarm about the extraordinary threat to the nation posed by Donald … | Continue reading
One of the many ways the public is ill-served by the White House chokehold on information about the coronavirus crisis is that it gives way too big a role to the White House press corps, which sees everything through a political lens – and a warped political lens, at that. But th … | Continue reading
The only thing that a lot of the Washington journalism crowd could talk and write about after Thursday night’s Democratic president debate was the fighting. It's like they've learned nothing from the 2016 campaign. | Continue reading
The New York Times’s three-year struggle to sustain its reporting algorithms, built for two political parties that have comparable relationships to reality, collapsed into sordid heap of nonsense over the weekend. | Continue reading
The complete inability of the political press corps to respond properly to even the most obvious deceptions emerging from the Trump White House has never been more evident than this weekend, when Trump was rushed to Walter Reed Hospital, his press office provided an explanation t … | Continue reading
The clearly misogynistic nature of Trump’s attacks on Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch is hard to miss -- but isn't likely to be a major factor in the news reports produced by our major news organizations. That’s because political reporters don’t write from the heart. And calling out … | Continue reading