About a week ago, Republican incumbent Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina wrote an op-ed in the Washington Examiner titled, “Let NPR fend for itself on the market.” Well, let’s discuss. In a time of reckless deficit spending, should government money for public broadcasting, however small, get the ...

Around the same time that Senator DeMint wrote his op-ed, New America Foundation president Steve Coll wrote one in the Washington Post. In it, he argued that the U.S. should rethink much of its media policy, starting with an increase in funding for public media, which, Coll says, ...

A good portion of 21st-century news consumers no longer believe in objectivity. They know it isn't possible. And yet the public expects reporters to always play it down the middle, delivering the facts and only the facts, unencumbered by bias. But to what lengths should reporters go? Can they report ...

Just two weeks after Wikileaks' latest 400,000 page release of classified documents, it seems that the American media has already moved on. Gavin McFadyen, director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism at City University of London, talks about international response to the release, while Clint Hendler of the ...

TV pundits celebrated the midterm elections last Tuesday in the usual style: a parade of punditry, prognostication and pointless speculation. Because polls close late and election results trickle in slowly, there’s a lot of dead air to fill, and it mostly gets filled with unedifying coverage. Slate’s Jack Shafer has ...

This week, one of our favorite and most longstanding contributors, John Solomon, died after a long illness. Back in 2004 John convinced us to do a piece about how our show, and public radio, is edited. "Pulling Back the Curtain" remains one of the most popular, enduring and defining pieces ...