CCJ Commentary

What journalists don't know about the past jeopardizes their ability to put the present in context. And if voters don't fully understand the present, what kind of decisions will we make about the future?

The New York Times is the story after running a front-page article in which anonymous sources allege some top advisers to John McCain became 'convinced' during his 2000 presidential campaign that the candidate’s relationship with a much younger female lobbyist 'had become romantic.' Do they 'have it?'

Everybody likes a good story, the kind with a beginning, a middle, and a satisfying end. To be satisfying, the end need not be happy. But it has to mean something. Not that every story needs a moral, as such. But it should have a coherent theme, so that it isn’t just a hodge-podge of unrelated incidents.

In the frenzy to reinvent journalism, a couple of fundamental realities about the production and consumption of news seem to be getting lost amid all the commotion of our blogging, tweeting, linking-in, facebooking, and more recently, going mobile. The first is that mainstream media, particularly the institution formerly known as print, supplies virtually all the reportorial journalism of civic decision-making. The other is that local TV – and its visual story telling – remains the most popular way to consume news and information.

Like many periodicals, The New York Review of Books covered last month’s Tea Party Convention in Nashville. Considering that what the computer nerds would call NYRB’s default political position is decidedly left of center, some readers might have been surprised at the result.

Timing may not be as vital in journalism as it is in comedy, but prominent pundits David Broder and Joe Klein might have been at least a tad embarrassed by the concurrence of their recent columns on Sarah Palin and the latest poll about her.

Nobody ever said it was easy, being in this news biz. One blankety-blank thing happens right after another, or worse, now that there's this 24-hour-a-day cable/talk radio/blog domination-the next thing happens even before the first thing has stopped happening. They're yelling at you from the right side, scoffing at you from the left, lying to you from both sides, and, well hell you know how it is...a fella (and we're talking here about fellas of both genders) can get confused.

Anybody who’s been in this business for a week or more has heard the gripe of someone who lost all faith in news coverage the first time there was a story in the neighborhood

Are we all forgetting something? Or, more precisely, ignoring something? Well, not entirely, at least not any more. Not since Maureen Dowd’s column in Sunday’s New York Times declared that one reason for the current political tumult