Magazine

If all this seems a funny political sideshow, it isn’t. Ventura’s election carries important implications for politics in Minnesota and the nation as a whole. His triumph seems so beyond the pale that a lot must be happening in our politics to cause it. And a lot is. Jesse’s ascendancy underscores the great and growing […]

One of the most enduring visual images of the news business is the “zipper” – the electronic display belt (most famously in Times Square) that relays breaking news to passersby. “Pearl Harbor attacked,” “FDR dead” “Space shuttle launched” – the zipper has always been concise, clear, and as “objective” as it is possible to be. […]

is a senior editor of The New Republic, a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and author of Beside Still Waters: Searching for Meaning in an Age of Doubt. In a bid to curry favor with powerful insiders, Gregg Easterbrook today sent Charles Peters an article telling him what he wanted to hear about trends […]

The problem the Monthly‘s getting at is not confined to news stories with loaded lead-ins. (“Dogged by criticism of his role in the Lewinsky case, President Clinton today raised a man from the dead with the slightest touch of his hand.”) It’s just as common, and has an even longer history, in the portentous-sounding but […]

It is endearing of Charlie Peters to sponsor a symposium calling for more objective, less opinion-laden journalism. Can this be the same beloved, raccoon-eyed editor who used to hector his editors when they offered up an overly fact-laden piece: “Where’s the gospel?” The same man who infuriated dozens of America’s leading journalists by writing his […]

All magazines aspire to be factually accurate. Beyond that, their goals vary. Some claim and even actually try to be totally “objective,” eschewing all opinion or, as Newsweek used to claim years ago, separating fact from opinion. This is a futile goal (are you going to be objective and avoid any opinion about child molesting?), […]

Start with the Sunday morning barking heads, the high church that certifies each week what the political class is and ought to be talking about, issuing self-fulfilling prophecies for inside dopesters. Consider especially ABC’s “This Week,” where Cokie Roberts declared, on Jan. 25, 1998, with the Lewinsky story four days old, “There’s only one real […]

Livingston’s collegial approach to governing, however, is unlikely to change the GOP’s policies of the last four years. Livingston and Gingrich may differ in style, but on political issues they see eye-to-eye: Both are pro-business, pro-defense, and anti-abortion southern Republicans. And if Gingrich often seemed a man at odds with himself, Livingston has his own […]

That’s a hard thing for me to admit, and a difficult word for me to use. But over the last few months, I’ve been horrified to hear a soprano chorus of “lipstick feminists” crow over the exploits of Monica the Power Babe. In one recent New York Times op-ed, headlined “Monica Lewinsky, Career Woman,” Katie […]

In the early ’90s, American foreign service officers could not get enough of Mexican President Carlos Salinas. They marveled at his free-market economic reforms and vigorous promotion of the North American Free Trade Agreement. They were pleased he had done away with the Yanqu-go-home rhetoric that had long been a staple of Mexican politics. When […]