February 27, 2010
Is waterboarding torture? Of course it is, say Attorney General Eric Holder and many others who have confidently declared that the Bush administration's lawyers were clearly wrong to approve as legal the CIA's proposed use of waterboarding and nine other brutal interrogation methods.
I agree that waterboarding is torture as colloquially understood by many of us and that it should be banned.
But...
July 21, 2009
The media consensus about the recently completed hearings on Judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination seems to be that it was a waste of everybody's time, with Republican senators asking "gotcha" questions and the nominee sticking to cautious bromides of the I-just-apply-the-law variety.
"While her confirmation hearings drew plenty of coverage last week," wrote Howard Kurtz in the...
June 16, 2009
(This analysis updates my July 12, 2008, column.)
We in the media habitually describe the Supreme Court as made up of four conservatives, four liberals and one swing-voting centrist, Anthony Kennedy. These labels serve reasonably well to situate the justices on the ideological spectrum compared with one another.
But while the court is sometimes called "conservative," it looks pretty...
February 14, 2009
After many months of adoring media coverage and Democratic triumphalism, President Obama is now getting pasted by carnivorous columnists, angry activists, and House hotheads for every bow to bipartisanship, every deviation from liberal orthodoxy, and every tax-deficient nominee.
The problem is not that Obama is doing a bad job. For a new president beset with the most daunting combination of...
April 26, 2008
"Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."
So said British statesman Edmund Burke in his famous 1774 speech to the electors of Bristol. Similarly, James Madison wrote in Federalist 57 that voters should choose the candidates "who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue...
June 24, 2006
Back in 1998, when I was excoriating President Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice, I had plenty of Republican company. This, my Republican friends and I agreed, was serious business.
But some Clinton-bashing conservatives have reacted rather differently to the alleged grand jury perjuries, lies to the FBI, and obstruction of justice for which I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Vice President...
May 27, 2006
Comes now Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a man not known for legal acuity, with a threat to prosecute The New York Times and other news media for publishing leaks of classified information.
Gonzales, who launched a major investigation late last year into such leaks, claimed in a May 21 ABC News interview that Congress has made a "policy judgment" that in some circumstances...
April 29, 2006
The trashing of Duke's lacrosse team by many in the media may be shifting gears as the Durham, N.C., district attorney's case against two players indicted for gang rape falls apart and evidence of gross prosecutorial misconduct mounts. I can't rule out the possibility that there may be some horrible truth in the shifting claims by an African-American "exotic dancer" that the two...
February 25, 2006
The news media's ability to use leaks to keep the White House honest is threatened as never before by the unanticipated consequences of the investigation into the White House's own leaks of classified information to discredit a critic.
Some government officials are itching to exploit that investigation as a precedent for using the threat of long jail terms and massive fines to force reporters to...
December 10, 2005
A sometimes subtle but unmistakable pattern has emerged in major news organizations' coverage of Judge Samuel Alito's Supreme Court nomination.
Through various mixes of factual distortions, tendentious wording, and uncritical parroting of misleading attacks by liberal critics, some (but not all) reporters insinuate that Alito is a slippery character who will say whatever senators want to hear,...
October 30, 2004
My last column explored some reasons for the bitter liberal-conservative polarization of our political class, which has helped spawn the anger, mendacity, and emotionalism that make our politics so ugly. Here I explain how the Supreme Court and the media have made this polarization worse, and sketch possible remedies.
October 16, 2004
This headline might seem to load the dice, in favor of creating a special privilege for us journalists to defy grand jury subpoenas demanding the names of our sources. But it really is that simple: Judith Miller, of The New York Times, and Matthew Cooper, of Time, will go to jail for contempt of court for as long as 18 months for refusing to betray their sources unless they win what look like...
February 14, 2004
"The reporter's constitutional right to a confidential relationship with his source stems from the broad societal interest in a full and free flow of information to the public. It is this basic concern that underlies the Constitution's protection of a free press, ... because the guarantee is not for the benefit of the press so much as for the benefit of all of us."
October 20, 2001
This war will severely test the inherently uneasy relationship between the government-especially the military-and the media. The chafing has already begun. While the Bush Administration so far seems largely to have avoided the outright deceptions practiced by its predecessors, it has exhibited an unhealthy impulse to control the news by leaning on the media not to publish enemy "propaganda....
March 11, 2000
When big companies threaten lawsuits to suppress the timely reporting of newsworthy information, media organizations often rush to the barricades waving the First Amendment as their banner.
January 1, 2000
The uncritical enthusiasm of most media organizations for abolishing "soft money" and restricting issue advertising by "special interests" prompts this thought: How would the networks and The New York Times like a law imposing strict limits on their own rights to editorialize about candidates? After all, if some of their favored proposals were to be enacted, the media would be...
March 10, 1997
In what may be the most dramatic clash of free press and fair trial values in the nation's history, The Dallas Morning News has taken a position very like that adopted in a very different context by Vice President Al Gore.
Both are proud of what they did-and promise not to do it again.
On March 3, Gore said he would not make any more fund-raising calls from the White House. That same day, The...
December 23, 1996
In the spirit of the season, and in the hope of a fresh start-with malice toward none, with charity for all-in the new year, I hereby purge myself of various vexations left over from the old year.
LEFT-WING CLAPTRAP
• President Bill Clinton's bold transcendence of all previous standards of shamelessness in his virtual auctioning off of prizes-nights in the White House's Lincoln Bedroom,...
September 16, 1996
At first blush, accused Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh's pending motion for permission to give media interviews-including one with a famous TV journalist, to be chosen from a gaggle of eager applicants who have already auditioned for the opportunity-might seem an occasion for revulsion.
Here's how the prosecution characterized the motion in a seething Aug. 29 court response filed with Chief...
November 20, 1995
"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose," as Janis Joplin sang it most memorably in "Bobby McGee." With billions of dollars to lose, big news organizations don't seem to feel so free anymore, at least when it comes to exposing corporate misconduct. On the other hand, some of these mega-businesses seem all too free about taking advantage of their sources....
April 1, 1995
There are three ways of trying to make sense of the Federal Communications Commission's much-publicized probe into whether Rupert Murdoch's Fox television network gulled the FCC, for nearly nine years, into overlooking the fact that 99 percent of Fox's equity was foreign-owned, possibly in violation of federal law:
(1) The multi-lawyered Murdoch team cleverly (or perhaps unwittingly) has hidden...
December 26, 1994
In the spirit of the season, and in the hope of a fresh start-with malice toward none, with charity for all-in the new year, I hereby purge myself of various vexations left over from the old year.
LEFT-WING CLALAP
• The dangerous demagoguing of the Medicare issue by President Bill Clinton and other Democrats, who seek profit from big lie that the Republicans would destroy the program-when,...
December 26, 1994
In the spirit of the season, and in the hope of a fresh start-with malice toward none, with charity for all-in the new year, I hereby purge myself of various vexations of the old year:
LEFT-WING CLAPTRAP
• The hypocrisy of feminists who airily dismissed former clerical worker Paula Corbin Jones' claim of sexual harassment against President Bill Clinton this year (Pat Schroeder "It just...
November 30, 1992
Republican partisans have been spewing vitriol for so long at Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel investigating the Iran-Contra affair, that it's tempting to brush off the current claims that Walsh played a dirty election-eve trick on President George Bush as more right-wing ranting.
But this time Walsh's critics have a point, though a more modest one than they claim: It was only natural (if...
November 1, 1992
Remember Iraqgate? It may seem ancient and obscure. But just two years ago, it was big. Very big.
This was the "scandal" that hounded George Bush as he slumped toward the 1992 election. Thousands of newspaper articles and a gaggle or television specials turned his greatest triumph-his victory over Iraq's Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Persian Gulf war-into a political liability, by...
November 18, 1991
Richard Allen. Robert Bauman. James Beggs. Peter Bourne. Tony Coelho. Tai Collins. Daniel Crane. Deborah Gore Dean. Raymond Donovan. Fanne Foxe. Newt Gingrich. Stephen Gobie. Thereza Imanishi-Kari. Rita Jenrette. Tim Kraft. Bert Lance. Rita Lavelle. Donald Lukens. Robert McFarlane.
Edwin Meese III. Ozzie Myers. Lyn Nofziger. Oliver North. Theodore Olson. Tom Pappas. Paula Parkinson. Elizabeth Ray...
October 21, 1991
''They have the whole country blanketed, trying to dig up dirt...These are the smartest attorneys from the best law schools in the land. All paid for at public-interest expense. It's what's ruining our country in large measure. Because some of these groups...are vicious."
-Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah)
What's so bad about trying to dig up dirt? In their furious attacks on the excesses of a...
April 1, 1991
The press has made a sorry spectacle of itself at the Supreme Court this year and may soon take a drubbing for it.
In two big pending cases, many of the nation' largest news organizations have contended that the First Amendment licenses journalists to engage in grossly unethical conduct.
Here' hoping that these wrongheaded and myopic claims do not provoke the justices-some of whom have been...
January 21, 1991
"Journalists doctor quotes and add colorful language to them all the time to spice up stories," H. Bartow Farr III told the Supreme Court on Jan. 14. "They have every right to do it. That's what the First Amendment is for."
Outside on the courthouse steps, Farr's client, New Yorker magazine writer Janet Malcolm, added this: "So I fiddled a bit with Jeffrey Masson's quotes...
November 19, 1990
The 1971 Pentagon Papers case tested the right of the press to expose government duplicity about important public business without submitting to prior censorship.
Now comes the Noriega tapes case, which tests (among other things) the right of a news organization to thumb its nose at the judiciary-to flout a temporary restraining order by rushing onto the air a leaked tape almost devoid of serious...
August 14, 1989
This has been a big year for Janet Malcolm, who writes for The New Yorker about psychoanalysts, journalists, murderers, and other interesting folks.
First she touched off a cyclone of journalistic indignation and soul-searching by asserting in a widely discussed article that "every journalist... is a kind of confidence man," seducing his subjects to gain their trust and then "...
