Magazine

Yet how much did all this hurt the tobacco industry’s ability to sell cigarettes? On November 20, the day the attorneys general announced the settlement, the stock of the leading tobacco companies soared. After all, the Big Four tobacco makers will pay only 1 percent of the damages (at most) directly; the rest will be […]

The problem with the more subjective elements in journalism today, in my view, is not inventiveness per se but cynicism. During the ’80s it became extremely unfashionable to believe in anything or anyone who had anything to do with political life. It was as if the slightest taint of hope or admiration, or of in […]

Washington, December 7, 1941 – Ever since last week’s disclosure of wheelchair-bound President Roosevelt’s dalliance with social secretary Lucy Mercer, the President has been seeking to keep the country’s attention on the mounting threat to America’s overseas allies. Today was no exception to this public relations strategy, advisers say. Even though it was a Sunday, […]

At the major outlets that shape public discussion – The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the big three network news shows, say – the interesting issue may not be “objectivity,” but the simple fact that picking which stories to lead with or put on page 1 is an exercise of enormous and unaccountable […]

Two imperatives in contemporary journalism are at war with one another. One imperative says: Be smart! Be analytic! Be like The Washington Monthly or The New Republic or The Weekly Standard! The other imperative says: Don’t say anything that will make your readers – or, more important, your sources – mad! Don’t lose significant leaks […]

To my mind, the big problem with American journalism is not so much that it is snarky, or that opinions have crept into news stories, or that it is more often about attitude and showing off than about facts – though all of that strikes me as plainly true. Rather, it is that journalism – […]

The problem is not just smart-alecky journalists who grind their axes on the front page. The tendentious numb-brained quality of much American journalism today is largely a product of its forms. Daily journalism is frozen in a set of rituals and conventions that preclude nuance and provide formalistic cover for lazy thinking and reporting. Ditch […]

As an occasional participant in big-think conferences bemoaning the downward drift of contemporary journalism from its former Olympian heights, I can furrow my brow, sadly shake my head and invoke the sainted memory of Walter Lippmann and Edward R. Murrow with the best of them. But as adept as I am at the public rituals […]

It’s progress that most of us no longer view journalism as simply the gathering of facts. Some facts are more important than others. We know that what readers should get isn’t the facts but the story. A newspaper should help us decide what events mean, and to do this, writers and editors have to interpret, […]