An interesting Glenn Beckian tidbit from the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank: “One day, he rhetorically asked his Fox News viewers: “Why did we buy Alaska in the 1950s?” As Milbank says, “a good question” seeing as how “we”, the U.S. of A., bought it from the Russians in 1867. It was known as Seward’s Folly [...]

Cleaning up in the wake of the 2010 Iowa State Fair will be daunting this year. In addition to the mess left by nearly 1 million visitors and thousands of farm animals, we have a continuing saga of news coverage that told of possible racial assaults and then, in Saturday Night Live fashion, appears to [...]

For the past nine years, the Nieman Foundation has honored journalistic fairness with the Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Newspapers. Our goal is to encourage fairness and ethical practices in enterprising news coverage by drawing public attention to exemplary work. The award is given in the name of the Taylor family whose stewardship of [...]

In all the media hoopla about Richard Blumenthal’s Vietnam military record, a major issue has been ignored. Democrat Blumenthal, Connecticut’s attorney general now running for the U.S. Senate, has been in the hot seat ever since the New York Times reported he erroneously stated that he had served in Vietnam. Among other speechifying moments he [...]

When the world simply does not make sense — or maybe even worse, when it does — who you gonna turn to? One of my better refuges is George Orwell, and here is why: Orwell’s “passion for liberty and intellectual honesty” is at least an opener. Geoffrey Wheatcroft offered that epitaph for Orwell in a [...]

When it comes to domestic violence, the Washington Post doesn’t get it. On Feb. 17, for example, it published a truly appalling piece of reporting about the killing of a Maryland woman by her estranged husband. The killer’s mother turns up in the article as the expert on domestic violence, being oh-so-sorry, for… whom? For [...]

Mindful of the awful winter besetting much of the nation and the political news frustrating all of us, here are 10 travel tips and trivia should you decide to escape Down Under to Australia and New Zealand. (Accommodations provided by our son-in-law’s family and friends not included.) 1. Qantas is an acronym: Queensland and Northern [...]

(This item originally appeared in The Huffington Post, where Froomkin is Washington Bureau Chief.) Senator Chris Dodd announced on Jan. 16 that he is relinquishing his office. He didn’t really have much choice — the voters of Connecticut were prepared to take it away from him in November even if he had tried to keep [...]

“Change comes slowly to the venerable [talk] shows that grip the attention of a small but committed segment of TV watchers every Sunday morning,” Michael Calderone wrote for Politico on Jan. 10. “And taking risks almost never happens.” He went on to quote an email to Politico from New York Times columnist Frank Rich, a [...]

Thanksgiving Day stuffing is a tradition in journalism, celebrated on front doorsteps across the nation as subscribers pick up their newspaper. With all the advertisements and inserts, the stuffed Thanksgiving Day paper could be the size of a small turkey. It’s the biggest newspaper of the year, has been so for 80 or more years. [...]