I spent yesterday touring the fifth largest city in Jordan. It's named Zaatari, its population is over 120,000, most of the people who live there are children, and it was founded less than ten months ago. It's a Syrian refugee camp.

What's going on in the desert just south of...

The Associated Press is outraged that the Justice Department has been secretly rummaging through its telephone records, and who can blame it? But what really matters is what it means for all the rest of us. And if we don't watch out, it will mean that the government keeps more...

There's an old adage that half of all money spent on advertising is wasted, we just don't know which half. You might say the same about some of the breaking news reporting coming out of Boston last week: We knew half of it was wrong, we just didn't know which...

Living under Margaret Thatcher's rule in the early 1980s could be unsettling, exciting, and sometimes just plain baffling for an American. Britain in many ways was a total mess -- its economy in the doldrums, unemployment high, constant labor strife, terrorist attacks in central London, and people sensing that their...

The Supreme Court has two extremely important cases before it on same-sex marriage, and I don't have a clue what it's going to do. Despite what a horde of commentators might have you believe, they don't know either. However it all comes out, we can be pretty sure that the...

A wise Washington lawyer once told me that "you don't win cases by making friends out of judges."

The same thing goes for journalists covering the government. You can't do your job as a Washington reporter by making friends of government officials. If nothing else, Bob Woodward's...

Is it possible to have too much of a good thing? Or to have too much TV coverage of a good story? Some people took after CNN for just this: spending too much time last week covering "The Triumph" Carnival Cruise ship being towed back into port in Mobile after...

Today President Obama awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor to retired Army Staff Sargent Clint Romesha, making him only the fourth living recipient of the nation's highest military honor earned during the 12 long years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Romesha's story is a great one. Even on...

Peter Jennings would have loved it. A former vice president is going into business with the Emir of Qatar to bring us a cable news channel focused on the Arab world. In one bold stroke we have lots of money going into news, disruption of the old order, and the...

The long, hot election of 2012 is over and the voters have spoken: We pretty much want the same people leading us as we had before. The Washington gridlock will continue because we're more polarized than we've ever been before.

Or that's the party line in much of...

It didn't take long for the reviews to start pouring in on Martha Raddatz and the job she was doing moderating the vice presidential debate. It started almost as soon as the debate did, it kept on coming, and it was overwhelmingly favorable.

"I vote for Martha Raddatz to moderate...

Now the fun part starts -- at least for those of us in the audience. We're into the quadrennial round of presidential debates. The time when we all get to gather around our television sets (or laptops) and see the two gladiators who would be our next President go one...

The New York Times has spoken: Executive Editor Jill Abramson has issued a new policy that forbids "after-the-fact quote approval" -- except when it's OK. And, she's right on both counts (even if they're on two sides of the issue).

Journalists take justifiable pride in their independence. They...

Considering that facts are always true, it's surprising how often they can deceive us.

That's why all the fighting between the presidential campaigns over the facts and whether they're being manipulated to mislead is much, much more than just petty politics. Thankfully, at least for the moment, we've come...

The following letter is my response to the members of the Congressional Media Fairness Caucus, who have criticized ABC News' upcoming special on President Obama's health care plan (see below).

June 23, 2009

The Honorable Lamar S. Smith
Chairman, Media Fairness Caucus
Congress of the United States