Edward Wasserman

When President Obama addressed the American Society of News Editors convention last month, the real news was what didn't happen. The watchdogs didn't bark. No discouraging word from the gathering of 1,000 of the country's top news people, facing a president whose administration has led a vigorous attack on journalism's...

Inside the nasty question of whether gratuitous mayhem is a strategic element of pro football is a question of a different kind. It involves former New Orleans Saints standout Steve Gleason and a filmmaker named Sean Pamphilon, who's making a documentary about Gleason's struggle with the degenerative disease that is...

The shadow of Watergate falls only lightly across the U.S. political landscape. Instead, the epic scandal is discernible mainly in the absence of the evils that engendered it. Even during the panicky post-9/11 era, when the temptation to ignore the law at times overwhelmed good judgment, never were even the...

In the news have been two unusual stories, both of them exposing outrageous abuse of innocents abroad, neither one broken by what we normally consider the news media. Instead they were launched by zealous outsiders from the edges of the informational ecosystem, and were fiercely embraced, until their claims were...

There's something quaint about the ruling last week from an appeals court in Indiana concerning an anonymous comment posted on the Indianapolis Star's website. The 2009 posting suggested a local notable had embezzled money from a troubled project, and he wanted to sue for defamation.

Trouble is, he didn't know...

Gaby Rodriguez was a 17-year-old high school honor student in Yakima, Wash., when she hit upon an imaginative senior project on teen pregnancy. She would declare she was pregnant. In the months that followed, as she bulked up with a home-made prosthesis, she would log the comments of friends, family...

Televised candidate debates have become the marquee spectacles of presidential campaigns. By the time Republicans voted in the Florida primary, candidates seeking the party's presidential nomination debated 19 times since May. That's 30-some hours of live national TV, plus untold hours of recap, recrimination, chatter and miscellaneous noise churned up...

The most squalid and anti-democratic element of the U.S. electoral system is its insatiable appetite for money -- vast rivers of money. It transforms our leaders into supplicants, required to contort themselves and their policies to please rich patrons.

Current spending forecasts for all candidates in the 2012 races

The U.S. war in Iraq ended just before Christmas, and if you blinked you probably missed it. TV news coaxed some seasonal sentiment out of the troops getting home for the holidays, but the Sunday morning talk shows -- where news of consequence is usually autopsied -- barely noticed. The...

The accounts of sexual predation involving coaches at Penn State and Syracuse haven't yet boiled over into a full-fledged moral panic, but there's good reason for the media to be mindful of that potential. It happened before, notably in the wave of hysteria -- and prosecutions -- in the 1980s...