When it comes to rhetoric National Sunshine Week is alive and well. Programs and news articles on freedom of information — understood to mean access to government information and to meetings of public agencies — are flourishing this week. The practice of freedom of information — the time and resources journalists devote to hounding government [...]

There are journalists and then there are so-called journalists. In the latter camp is Anthony Martin, featured in a hour-long program on Fox news recently, in which he was presented as a journalist. Martin is an obsessive critic of Barack Obama (he says Obama once trained to overthrow the government) and is the source of [...]

Anyone think there are too many commercials on network television, and that some of them cross the line of decency and good taste? It wasn’t always that way. Or do you think that all those commercials for this drug or that one are unseemly and possibly dangerous? That wasn’t always permitted. Are you as confident [...]

Bloggers and other citizen journalists have a new and exciting opportunity to find and shed light on stories the mainstream media are missing – by combing through transcripts of recent Congressional oversight hearings. Without any fanfare, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has started posting preliminary transcripts of many of its hearings on its [...]

Americans like to believe that the majority rules in this country. They are mistaken. The truth is that nothing of substance can be enacted by Congress without a super-majority in the Senate. So routine is it for the minority to rule that the New York Times reported matter-of-factly, buried far down in a story the [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Was it surprising to see a headline like this one in the Washington Post recently?: “Bush Addresses Income Inequality on Wall Street Executive Pay / Economic Speech Touches on Executive Pay as Senators Move to Rein It In”? Yes. Was it surprising that Bush did not address the subject in response to a reporter’s question? [...]

Reporters should press National Highway Traffic Safety Administrator Nicole Nason to address hard questions suggested by a predecessor in a Jan. 28 New York Times Op-Ed. The reason for asking the questions couldn’t be plainer: They bear heavily on whether many of us will be needlessly killed or injured every year. Joan Claybrook asked why [...]

How good a job are newspapers doing with online corrections? Occasional and highly informal surfing among the usual suspects of newspapers suggests newspapers are doing a better job of at least providing access to corrections of mistakes, errors, misstatements, etc. That lengthy wording of corrections is necessary; several months to a year ago, looking for [...]