The compromise announced by the Boy Scouts of America on Thursday is untenable. And that is precisely why it's good news.

More than 60 percent of the organization's national leadership voted to approve a policy ending discrimination against openly gay scouts while keeping in place the ban against gay...

Outrage over the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of Tea Party and other right-wing groups continues to boil -- yet a potentially more consequential IRS practice has scarcely gained any attention.

Over the past few years the IRS has virtually stopped approving 501(c)(3) status for nonprofit news organizations. Given the...

The state of the union may or may not be strong, but the State of the Union was liberal.

That was the view of media commentators from the left, right and center the morning after President Barack Obama delivered his fourth State of the Union address. The president called...

The suicide of Internet activist Aaron Swartz has prompted a wave of revulsion directed at U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, who was seeking to put him in prison for 35 years on charges that he illegally downloaded millions of academic articles.

Swartz, 26, who helped develop the RSS standard and was a...

At 10 a.m. on Wednesday, Jim Braude and Margery Eagan signed off for the last time from the morning talk show they had hosted on Boston's WTKK Radio. A few minutes later, the station reemerged as Power 96.9, a faceless entity blasting out robo-music of some sort. And Boston found...

One day in the summer of 2003 I found myself in a hotel lobby, engaged in an intense conversation with Andrew Solomon. His book on depression, The Noonday Demon, had won the National Book Award. Now he was working on a new project -- about families with children...

President Barack Obama's commanding performance in the third and final debate mattered to the viewers at home, of course. But as we will see in the days ahead, it will matter even more in setting the tone for how the media will cover the campaign in the final run-up...

Who won? Other than Martha Raddatz? My takeaway is no different from what you'll see from just about any left-of-center opinion-monger today: Joe Biden crushed Paul Ryan on substance, but his mugging and smirking resulted in a less impressive win than he might otherwise have been able to claim. But...

Just a few days ago, conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer was whining about Mitt Romney.

"He's gone small ball," Krauthammer told Fox News host Bill O'Reilly on Monday, calling the Republican presidential candidate's campaign "extremely small and tactical and not strategic."

So what did Krauthammer think of Romney's performance in...

The media -- all 15,000-plus reporters, photographers, editors, producers and assorted hangers-on who've descended on this unlovely, brutally humid old city -- are having a nervous breakdown. And you're invited to watch.

With the Republican National Convention making no news, and with the Democratic convention destined to be similarly vacuous,...

Godwin's law came to New Hampshire earlier this year. And Speaker of the House Bill O'Brien is retaliating against the Concord Monitor in a manner that may violate the First Amendment.

For those unfamiliar with the phrase, Godwin's law -- first espoused by Mike Godwin, a lawyer and veteran Internet...

What we were talking about, in case Sen. Scott Brown's diversionary tactics led you astray, was a televised debate, to be held before a neutral audience, moderated by Tom Brokaw.

Everything else is baloney.

As you no doubt already know, Brown made two demands that had to be met...

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...