Dan Kennedy

Tomorrow I'll be part of a panel on e-books being organized in Boston by the Association of College and Research Libraries. We're supposed to talk about what we like and don't like about them, and I can do that. But what I really hope to discuss is the place...

In late 1997 I heard that Mike Wallace, the legendary 60 Minutes reporter, had been in town to do a critical story on the Boston Globe's reporting about Ray Flynn's relationship with alcohol. So I called him up.

Flynn, the former Boston mayor who was by this time the...

The general-election campaign finally, definitively got under way on Tuesday, when Mitt Romney won Republican primaries in Wisconsin, Maryland and the District of Columbia, and all but snuffed out Rick Santorum's increasingly outlandish hopes.

With seven months of charges and countercharges from Romney and President Obama to look forward...

Will Republican Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts win re-election this November? Or will he be defeated by his Democratic rival, Elizabeth Warren? The answer, clearly, is "yes."

I've been thinking about writing this post for a while. Frank Phillips' story in today's Boston Globe on Democrats who are panicking...

Kudos to David Carr of the New York Times for shining a light on an issue that doesn't attract nearly the attention that it should: the Obama administration's abuse of the Espionage Act, which in turn has led to a virtual war on journalism and free expression.

As Carr...

With his narrow victory over Ron Paul in the Maine caucuses, Mitt Romney may have re-established himself once again as the fragile front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination.

But after losing three states to Rick Santorum and falling behind him by a 38 percent to 23 percent margin in...

Is it over?

A better way of putting it: Do the media want it to be over?

The Florida Republican primary ended last night with dual scenes reminiscent of campaigns past. The winner, hoping to consolidate his gains and close out a divisive intraparty battle, devoted most of his...

The media are having no problem decoding the not-so-secret message from last night's State of the Union address. More than anything, Barack Obama wants us to know that Mitt Romney is what the president's new role model, Theodore Roosevelt, would have called a "malefactor of great wealth."

"President...

January has not been a good month for media ombudsmen, as the in-house press analysts at our two leading newspapers have both come under attack for writing lazy, ill-considered commentaries that seemed to confirm the views of their most strident critics.

First up was Patrick Pexton of the Washington Post,...

Last night's victory speech by Mitt Romney was so deeply cynical and fundamentally dishonest that it's hard to know where to begin.

There was his usual bombast about the "European-style entitlement society" that Barack Obama allegedly wants to create, a trope that lets Romney sound like a right-wing bomb-thrower...

The conservative commentariat today is grumpy. And perhaps none is grumpier than Red State's Erick Erickson, who's unhappy not only with the Republicans' eight-vote front-runner, Mitt Romney, but with his newly elevated conservative challenger, Rick Santorum.

Complaining that Santorum is a "big government conservative" in the tradition of George W....

It didn't even seem like a good idea at the time.

In June 1993, the New York Times Co. paid a staggering $1.1 billion to acquire the Boston Globe -- half the company's stock-market valuation. Wall Street was dubious. Within days, the Times Co.'s stock price had

You may have heard that Mitt Romney called Newt Gingrich "zany" in an interview with the New York Times -- a rather incendiary charge that's now burning its way through the political Web. A quick sampling:

• "A sharper knife came out Wednesday, with Romney expanding his personal attacks...

PolitiFact, launched by the St. Petersburg Times four years ago with the aim of separating truth-telling from spin, is taking it from both sides these days.

Liberals are upset that the website has identified Democratic claims that Republicans want to abolish Medicare as one of its contenders for...

You may have heard that a Montana blogger must pay a $2.5 million libel judgment because a federal judge ruled she was not a journalist, and was thus not entitled to protect her anonymous sources.

In fact, that's not quite what happened. The case actually had little to do...

I come neither to bury Mitt Romney nor to praise him. Instead, I hope to persuade you that you should be rooting for Romney to win the Republican nomination for president. And yes, by "you" I mean liberals who are planning to vote for Barack Obama in 2012.

Now, I...

Jim Romenesko chose to take the high road in explaining the events that led to his November 10 resignation from the Poynter Institute. But though his post -- the first for his new site, JimRomenesko.com -- is understated, it is nevertheless devastating in its...