It's no shame to admit that sports can be confusing. Some baseball fans don't know what the infield fly rule is. Some basketball fans may not recognize the difference between a blocking foul and a charge. At least there are game officials and broadcasters who can help to clarify matters...

At the end of the week before the Boston Marathon bombing, a little story started making waves out of Albany, NY. Under normal circumstances, the story would have provided lots of raw material for the cable news noise factory.

The story about a high school writing assignment then dropped out...

The National Rifle Association (NRA), aka the Gun Manufacturers Association, should be feeling pretty good about itself. It blocked approval in the Senate of a provision for expanded background checks that overwhelming numbers of people support -- even in those states of Senate Democrats who voted against the modest bill.

Once the Senate gets back from its much-needed break to deal with little issues like the economic security of the country, it really should turn to one of the reasons the once-grand institution exists as exalted only in the minds of its members.

That reason, of course, is the filibuster,...

Congratulations, CBS. You have earned yourself a place in the curriculum of journalism classes for the next couple of decades. And not in a good way. CBS will be studied for as blatant a violation of journalism ethics as you can imagine.

Of course, ethics can be an ethereal, subjective...

Remember last fall when the National Football League (NFL) began its regular-season schedule? Even if you weren't a football fan, it would have been hard to avoid the public wailing and gnashing of teeth at the dreadful performance of the "replacement" officials stepping in for the game officials who were...

Kudos to Fox News for its vigilance in monitoring the War on Christmas. Kudos, too, to Jon Stewart and the Daily Show for monitoring the monitors.

To its credit, Fox has kept a close eye on the small skirmishes which make up the War on Christmas....

Holiday shopping season is just around the corner, and e-books and e-book readers will be high on many people's wish lists. But public libraries don't share in the joy, and the people who use libraries will look in vain for e-books that aren't available from any library. They are missing,...

It's about a three-hour drive on the highway from the port town of Warnemunde in the old East Germany to Berlin. There's not much to see, with mostly flat, rural countryside and non-descript buildings. Cars zoomed past our little bus at speeds highly illegal in the U.S. The only exception...

The Internet Defense League (IDL) had its formal coming-out parties the other night. To be sure, the individual members and supporters who would respond to the "Catsignal," like my day-job employer Public Knowledge, would be around anyway. And some members agree on some issues but...

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island is a Democratic torch-bearer.  He is a stalwart progressive, a reliable vote for an economic agenda aimed at helping people.  But at the recent Netroots Nation, it was what he didn't talk about that was more important.

On Saturday night (June 9) in Providence...

It's hard to believe these days, but there was once upon a time when TV executives didn't mind consumers taking control over TV sets. There were no lawsuits, like the ones recently filed by the TV networks against Dish for its new commercial-skipping DVR. (A court has ruled for Dish...

There probably was no great need for Comcast toraise the usage caps on its broadband service, as it did last week from 250 gigabytes (GB) to 300 GB per month. If the company thought for an instant that the modest increase bought it any good will from...

You have to hand it to the Dutch.  On one hand, they crack down on their biggest tourist attraction -- the ability of tourists to toke up legally in the famous cannabis cafes.  That's a big business over there and of course there are protests developing, mellow ones...

The entertainment industry today is caught in a kind of purgatory, somewhere between Zero Mostel and Franklin Roosevelt. It's an odd place to be, and not sustainable to be there for much longer.

From Mostel, comes the line, "Without our traditions, our lives would be as...

It's hard not to feel sorry for Al Perry these days.  As Paramount Picture's VP for worldwide content protection and outreach, he has been on the road a lot, mostly to law schools. The past few weeks, he's been to the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina,

On any given day, on any given cable or satellite system, subscribers will see a message telling them that a favorite channel which had been in one spot on the channel lineup has been shifted to another.  It happens all the time as channels are added, subtracted or moved around. ...

My friend Jeff Sherman is a Los Angeles writer and producer. He's also a fine documentarian, putting together with his cousin Greg a film about his father, Robert Sherman, and uncle, Richard Sherman. If their names aren't familiar, their music is. They wrote the music for Mary Poppins...

It has only been a couple of months back that AT&T gave up on its attempt to take over T-Mobile, in what would have been quite a coup for the second-largest wireless carrier to take over the fourth largest. It took all of the gumption of the Justice Department and...

Earlier today (Feb. 6), a most extraordinary group of people sent a letter to Capitol Hill, in the latest round of the fight over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), telling Congress it was time to reject the well-worn lobbying...