To give us some perspective on this day: Beethoven in 1825, very late in his life, wrote the third movement, molto adagio, of his string quartet opus 132, offering thanks for being alive, despite having gone completely deaf, the worst possible fate for a composer and musician.

Music lovers around...

Forty-four years ago this week, I attended my first rock concert. Many others naturally followed, from Blind Faith to Springsteen, Elvis Costello, U2, Lucinda Williams, and the Swell Season, along with about eight years as the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. But that first concert remains vivid, and historic,...

A new Public Policy Polling survey finds that 52% of all Republicans believe that the group ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, with another 21% saying they are not sure. And 35% of all those in the survey over the age of 65, from both parties, agreed...

It was amusing -- if appalling -- to watch David Brooks on the TV yesterday declare that Sarah Palin is a "joke" and only qualified to be a TV "talk show host." Last year, during the 2008 campaign, he believed exactly the same thing but refused to put it in...

With the publication of an interview with Sgt. Mark Todd, the actual cop who gunned down the killer at Fort Hood -- following its account of an unnamed eyewitness last night -- the New York Times finally underlined what some of us noticed from nearly the start:...

Early this week, President Obama -- perhaps under new pressure as a Nobel Peace Prize winner -- said he would like to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki during his presidency. If he does, he will become the first sitting U.S. president to make that trip.

Yesterday, Veterans Day arrived, so...

It's nothing new for aggrieved authors to write letters to the highly influential New York Times Book Review, protesting a negative review, or one rife with errors. Sometimes the protest relates to the unfair choice of reviewer. What's unusual about Mark Danner's letter to the Times concerning the Oct. 18...

Yes, Barack Obama ended up beating John McCain rather easily one year ago, but Stephen Colbert didn't stay in the race for the White House or Obama could have really been in trouble (for a minute or two, anyway). So on this anniversary day, allow me to recall Colbert's tentative...

Like everyone who covered extensively the CIA leak case, Judy Miller and the Scooter Libby trial, I am anxiously awaiting, with appropriate skepticism, the pending release of the first Hollywood treatment, which has the wonderful title, if you remember the scandal, Fair Game.

Casting seems swell: Naomi Watts as...

Last month, I posted here for the first time on the growing popularity of Web comedy and dramatic series, suggesting they were a growing threat, down the road a bit, to network TV series. This was inspired by noting that The New York Times had just featured for the...

The New York Times carried a rare Postscript in Saturday's paper in the space where Corrections and Editors Notes run, raising questions about whether it is, between the lines, charging the top Washington Post editor, Marcus Brauchli, with not telling the truth. Brauchli, in the same letter cited by the...

Tragic story or hoax? TV media and the press for hours today covered the saga of a 6-year-old boy who allegedly climbed into a homemade balloon aircraft in Colorado and floated away. Live TV showed the balloon coming down miles away and rescuers rushing there, expecting the worst. Instead, no...

Last night, I was pleased to see that the widely-hailed documentary on the Chandler family and the Los Angeles Times airing on PBS stations spent about five minutes on the American political campaign closest to my heart (and expertise). "Inventing L.A." even showed snippets of historic newsreels--the first use of...

Back when I was a youngster, "TV series" (then on only three networks) meant a full run of originals from September to June, often 39 in number. Now we get little more than half of that -- or act grateful when a series like Mad Men returns, once a year,...

I have no quarrel with TIME magazine devoting a cover to Glenn Beck -- so long as the accompanying story sticks to hard facts and harsh truths. The issue coming tomorrow, online today, sadly fails to do so in an apparent effort to woo the rightwing with a ludicrously...

In a widely-read posting here last weekend (nearly 3000 comments), I chronicled the controversy over a photograph shot in Afghanistan in mid-August by Associated Press staffer Julie Jacobson. From a distance, it captured the moments after a U.S. Marine, Lance Corp. Joshua Bernard, was mortally wounded by a grenade,...

Last November, David Rohde was kidnapped in Afghanistan and held for several months, before managing to escape with his interpreter. Media around the world, at the request of the Times, kept silent about the kidnapping, and later drew criticism for this from some quarters. It has just happened again --...

Going back to 2002, I have been writing about the shameful reluctance, even refusal, of U.S. media outlets to carry graphic images of the true cost of our wars, to Americans, in Iraq and Afghanistan -- fatally wounded U.S. soldiers and Marines.

Earlier today, the Associated Press --...

Talk about flip flops! It was exactly one year ago today that Peggy Noonan suffered her infamous "open-mic" disaster at MSNBC during coverage of the GOP convention, in which Noonan, chatting with Mike Murphy and Chuck Todd, referred to the "bullshit" narrative around Sarah Palin after she was picked as...

It was exactly one year ago this week that there was a true turning point in the 2008 race for the White House. And it had little to do with Barack Obama. One might even say that it boiled down to the media helping to elect him -- but not...