“[W]e have to control the rate of increase in health care costs,” the chief executive officer of Aetna Inc., told Judy Woodruff the other evening on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Woodruff didn’t mention a glaringly obvious way for Ronald A. Williams and his counterparts in the health-insurance industry to slow the rise in those [...]

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 [...]

Standard dictionary synonyms for “conservative”—cautious, constant, controlled, conventional, middle-of-the-road, not extreme, sober, stable, traditional—are a poor fit for the many public figures who claim to be conservatives but are in fact radicals or opportunists. Newt Gingrich is a prominent example. Look at what he said on Feb. 29: The New York Times this morning said, [...]

A Swedish man “convicted in the 1999 hate murder of a trade union worker…  was paroled after serving 6 1/2 years of an 11-year sentence,” the New York Times reported the other day. That was “a typical penalty for murder in Sweden.” Eleven years for murder? Surely a reasonably curious reader would want to know [...]

By ignoring a bill once endorsed by now-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Congress has blown a golden opportunity to do something truly creative and fair about excessive executive compensation. Instead, it passed a bill putting limitations on “golden parachutes” that not only can be dodged by executives, but can short-change shareholders as well, according to Graef [...]

George J. Esseff, Sr., who describes himself ” as one of the world’s most successful Titanium entrepreneurs,” bought a full-page ad in the New York Times to publicize his “sincere recommendation” to the heads of the three largest television networks. “If you truly want to restore the credibility of your News Bureaus by getting back [...]

Few questions Charlie Gibson may ask of Sarah Palin when he interviews the Republican vice presidential nominee for ABC News this week could be more fundamental than this one: Is the Office of the Vice President fully part of the Executive Branch? Palin’s answer—or non-answer—could tell voters whether she views the office she seeks in [...]

Nearly 35 years ago, the Washington Post front-paged an exposé of systematic and shabby — but then-legal — election-campaign financing by Leon Hess, chief executive officer of Amerada Hess Corp., the East Coast gasoline retailer. Just the other day, his son John, who succeeded him as CEO, loomed large in a new exposé of the [...]

A month after Nieman Watchdog posted my piece urging news organizations’ owners and managers to hold their talk-show hosts accountable, one of the most popular—and most awful—of those hosts demonstrated anew the need to bring accountability to these motor-mouths. Autism is “[a] fraud, a racket,” Michael Savage asserted on “The Savage Nation” on July 16. [...]

On the death of William F. Buckley, Jr., publisher of The National Review, Rush Limbaugh became the “elder statesman” of the conservative movement, the New York Times Sunday Magazine reported in its July 6 cover story. The writer, Zev Chafets, said he asked Limbaugh what his own presidential agenda would look like. Here is Limbaugh’s [...]