“In American politics today, there is almost no serious discussion of how to reconcile the goals of expanded cross-border commerce and Third World development with that of maintaining high and egalitarian living standards in the United States and the other countries with decent social compacts,” Robert Kuttner wrote in The Squandering of America. “The official [...]

On the same Sunday morning that a former Democratic presidential candidate’s spouse ripped into the press for failing the democracy that depends on it, a Democratic presidential candidate blew the opportunity to rip into a prime example of that failure. “For the last month, news media attention was focused on Pennsylvania and its Democratic primary,” [...]

Two one-word questions for presidential, House and Senate candidates are suggested by a Dec. 15 New York Times article. Here’s how David Cay Johnston began the piece, which deserved page A1 but ran on B3: “The increase in incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans from 2003 to 2005 exceeded the total income of [...]

David Carr’s elegant New York Times dissection of the editorial agreement between the News Corporation and the Wall Street Journal revealed that Paul A. Gigot, the Journal’s editorial-page editor, helped to write it. This could generate a momentary surge of sympathy for Rupert Murdoch. Historically, Carr pointed out in his piece on Aug. 6th, the [...]

I love “Oklahoma!” but have no ties to Oklahoma. I have no relatives there, no friends, no special interest. In 1986, yes, I did have what could be called a connection. I went to Oklahoma City, for the Washington Post, to cover a failed lawsuit brought by the mother of a man who had begun [...]

What is “[p]ossibly the world’s most unrecognized form of child abuse”? It’s child soldiering, “[t]his horrifying new face of armed conflict.” Does the United States oppose or aid and abet it? And are there reporters out there who will ask questions about what has “become a defining feature of modern warfare”? The answers to the [...]

Cheers to the New York Times for assigning a 13-person team to screen nearly 250 hours of broadcasting of what it politely called “shock-talk radio,” but what could instead fairly be labeled broadcasting by hate-breeding motor-mouths who give vileness a bad name. I won’t recycle here the repugnancies the team found by listening five weekdays [...]

Is there a connection between legislation the press has pretty much ignored and why so many poor people have become obese? Why our children eat bad school lunches? Why huge amounts of private land are farmed and sprayed with chemicals that run off into our waters, rather than being left wild? Why two million Mexican [...]

That the New York Times Company, which owns the Boston Globe, would run a full-page ad in the Times saluting the Globe’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, Charlie Savage, was to be expected. But there’s cause not to salute the Times: It’s among the major news organizations at which commentators sometimes call [...]

In the better-late-than-never department, David S. Broder has condemned congressional Republicans for their sustained non-oversight of the Executive branch. “It was a fundamental dereliction of duty by Congress, and it probably did more to encourage bad decisions and harmful actions by executive-branch political appointees than the much-touted lobbying influence,” Broder wrote in the Washington Post [...]