Just how private is the closed-door talk of the powerful? And if the unguarded comments of politicians who assume they're speaking in confidence are captured on tape, is it okay to make those tapes public?

That question came up during the 2012 campaign. GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney told...

Word that the Washington Post was doing away with the job of ombudsman after 43 years was greeted, by and large, with a shrug and a yawn by news habitués.

As Reuters' redoubtable press critic Jack Shafer observed: "If there has been any protest -- organized or piecemeal...

People who make their living by writing for publication had good reason to follow the recent hoo-hah over publishers who think paying writers for their work is optional.

What happened was that the Atlantic, a marquee name in the world of words, approached a well-established freelancer named Nate Thayer...

In media mythology, the years from the mid-'60s to the mid-'70s were the classical age, a heroic time of moral clarity.

Mainstream journalism marinated in adversarialism. Little Southern newspapers infuriated their own readers by staring down segregation. Foreign correspondents forced upon an unwilling public the realities of a brutal...

Media throughout the country carried news recently that a half-dozen email accounts belonging to ex-President George W. Bush and several of his friends and relatives had been hacked. The words and images that were pilfered weren't all that interesting, so all in all it wasn't a huge story.

But to...

Even while some media organizations roll out new online subscription plans, the Internet continues its steady drift toward a business model built overwhelmingly on money not from readers, but from advertisers. It's advertising that's emerging as the revenue source that everybody, from Facebook and Google to newspaper websites and gadfly...

Great news photos often come with a moral taint. Maybe it's the gaze they enable, the way they distill misery, desperation, injury, sorrow into mere spectacle. We look, but we're torn by contradictory impulses: To witness, and to avert our eyes. Both, paradoxically, are testimony to our humanity. Neither offers...

For all our cultural kinship, Britain and the United States approach expressive freedom in ways that are often sharply different.

The Brits have no constitutional free-speech guarantee comparable to the First Amendment. Their government muzzles the press even without court approval. Official oversight of news media isn't unthinkable, as it...

I like the campaign debates. I watched most of the Republican primary matchups, even after they got repetitive, and I find the current flight of televised faceoffs riveting.

Yes, I realize the candidates are drilled relentlessly to suppress whatever capacity they retain for spontaneity and to make...

News media that rely on ads have always had a problem covering their own advertisers. It's rare to find a reporter who doesn't have a story, sometimes well-founded, of an employer whose newsroom pulled its punches or looked the other way to avoid rattling the worthies who paid the bills.

It's rare that a story so fully exemplifies the worst tendencies of the news media as the coverage of the protest in Muslim countries over a U.S.-made video ridiculing the founder of Islam.

The coverage is knit together by primordial bigotry and vile stereotypes. In Muslim countries,...

One of the first things I learned in my first newsroom job was how to use a thick, black pencil to transform an official press release into a news story. You crossed out the letterhead and contact information, made a few style fixes, put ## where you wanted it to...

I'm badly out of step with my media brethren, since I find the fate of Wikileaks and its besieged founder, Julian Assange, a truly compelling story. Other media don't agree. The pressure on Assange, who has taken sanctuary in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, is to them fringe stuff, a...

The media seem to move on from mass killings more quickly nowadays than they used to, and within three days of the Aurora, Colo., cinema massacre the killer's first appearance in court didn't make the front of The New York Times. Denying him notoriety was fine with me, but once...

As a reporter, I was taught that people you interview give up control of their words the moment they're spoken. This was the trapdoor model: The lid slammed shut, and even if moments later the source had speaker's remorse, the words belonged to me. I exaggerate, but not much.

Jonah Lehrer is a science writer who at age 30 is at the top of his game. He has written three books, two of them bestsellers, his articles and columns run in the country's best newspapers and magazines, and he has parlayed his publishing success into online celebrity and star...

To the mainstream news business, social media are both an opportunity and an irritant. They enable reporters to learn more and learn it more quickly, and furnish them with spiffy new channels to people they wouldn't otherwise reach. New media accelerate the creation and spread of news, and enrich the...

The idea of "regulating" the news media plays quite differently on the two sides of the Atlantic. In the U.S. it's unthinkable: Press regulation of any sort would inevitably trample sacred freedoms and unleash state apparatchiks to badger and stifle the media.

But in Britain the notion that news media...

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...