An associate of Erica Garner created a firestorm by doing something editors and producers do every day: use race to help decide who gets to tell an important story. It’s just that the Garner request was blunt while race and … Read more
Two things keep happening and probably will continue in 2018: News outlets will continue producing in-depth Trumpland stories; critics will keep slamming them for it. Some of that criticism is warranted, given that the media have decided that a small … Read more
A much-discussed Nazi-next-door piece in The New York Times went wrong for one reason: It treated the reporter’s discovery of the normalcy of white supremacy as news. There is nothing new nor abnormal about white supremacy, just … Read more
When Cam Newton, one of the biggest names in the NFL, said, “It’s funny to hear a female talk about routes; like, it’s funny” while responding to a question from Carolina Panthers beat reporter Jourdan Rodrigue of … Read more
CNN has the right to change its mind. It can reasonably believe it is unnecessary—right now—to name a man at the center of a controversy sparked by President Donald Trump’s tweeting of … Read more
I was thinking about dedicating this column to what happened in New York, with the decision by the Times to jettison its public editor position. But what happened in Denver deserves just as much attention. What … Read more
The media, along with former FBI Director James Comey, helped Donald Trump become president. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com has detailed why. But it doesn’t take a mathematician to understand that critical reporting in the final days … Read more
The federal government implemented a policy that helped reduce the deficit and how much senior citizens had to pay for drug prescriptions they otherwise couldn’t afford. The policy made it easier for everyday Americans to make ends … Read more
It wasn’t all that long ago that top U.S. journalists seemed most concerned with explaining why the decision by tens of millions of Americans to vote for Donald Trump made them neither racists nor bigots, despite Trump’s penchant for open … Read more
James Comey’s reputation may never recover from a few decisions he made during the 2016 election cycle, and maybe it shouldn’t. His choices, though, weren’t materially different from the thinking used by most major media outlets to write stories based … Read more