John McQuaid

The debate over news and new media is too often tribal. And though it may make for lively debate, tribalism impairs judgment. Yesterday, Jeff Bercovici blamed a 21-year-old stringer for the violent deaths of 24 people, including seven United Nations workers in riots in Afghanistan, after AFP published his...

Jared Lee Loughner's motives are obscure, but it's hard to disentangle the shooting of a congresswoman, the killing of a federal judge, a 9-year-old girl, and four other people from the political culture that it occurred in, an environment of exaggerated divisions, the demonization of opponents as socialists or traitors,...

Sometime in the mid-1990s, I went through a mandatory two-day course of diversity training. The newspaper management required it for all editorial employees after concerted lobbying by African-Americans on the staff who complained of a lot of casual racism in the newsroom. Lord knows, they were right: there was a...

This is a constant drumbeat, but think about it: Isn't it remarkable how transcendently awful BP's approach to the Gulf disaster has been? At each and every turn, with the stakes impossibly high, BP has always chosen to do the wrong thing. There's the substance -- having no emergency worst-case...

Last week, Israeli commandos boarded a relief ship attempting to break the blockade of the Gaza Strip and, during a clash with pro-Palestinian activists, shot nine people to death. It was an old-fashioned, bona fide "international incident," a fiasco that raised alarming questions about the current trajectory of Israel's security,...

The Deepwater Horizon disaster has put a renewed media and political focus on the significant government failures of Hurricane Katrina, including the collapsed, flawed floodwalls and levees that put most of New Orleans underwater. There's also an HBO drama now featuring John Goodman's impassioned, expletive-laden speeches on that man-made...

This week we've been treated to two unseemly corporate spectacles: the finger-pointing between BP, Transocean and Halliburton over responsibility on the Gulf oil spill, and the squirrelly changes in...

Is there any more beautiful, yet over-exploited, abused and benighted place in America than the Louisiana Gulf coast? Okay, maybe Appalachia. But today we've got to give this tragic distinction to the delta, where a massive, growing, seemingly unstoppable oil slick is now impinging on its vast, fragile...

An all-star lineup of GOP pols has gathered in New Orleans for the Southern Republican Leadership Conference. But do they have any idea where they are?

Here's what J.C. Watts told the...

I have forced myself to read the late flood of profiles, stories and columns about Rahm Emanuel and I can confidently pronounce: they are all deadly dull. Do not read them! While they offer some insight into the workings of the Obama presidency, they're simply not interesting. They reveal more...

What should President Obama do now? Most of the advice he's getting in the mediasphere, needless to say, is bad -- so I'm not going to add to it. But Scott Brown's win in the Massachusetts Senate race does raise a bigger question: is the system broken? I fear the answer...

...Is Avatar stupid? The standard rap is that James Cameron's movie turns the complex relationships between civilization and nature into a black-and-white, heroes-and-villains battle. It caricatures corporations (and, more generally, capitalism and Western civilization) as rapacious. Nature and indigenous populations, meanwhile,...

Obama, Verklempt
Not By MAUREEN DOWD

It was an indelible Obamamoment. Maybe even an Obamamiracle.

The president was sandwiched between Hillary and Michelle, like turkey on white and pumpernickel with a dollop of dijon, for a photo op with Hamid...

Vengeance -- experienced vicariously via movies or TV -- is one of the purest kinds of emotional satisfaction. And the revenge flick has had something of a renaissance recently, as Stanley Fish notes in this blog post, citing Liam Neeson's memorably-delivered statement...

"WaPost Publishes Palin OpEd on Climate Science, Michele Bachmann Piece on Quantum Mechanics to Follow" - Firedoglake headline.

(With apologies to Sarah Palin and her ghostwriter. And Michele Bachmann.)

No Solace in the Quantum

By Michele Bachmann

When a piece of bread dropped by a swallow can...

Thanksgiving is a time for taking a deep breath and appreciating the under-appreciated. So I thought I would challenge myself this year. Let's take a moment, reflect, and give thanks that Joe Lieberman is in the Senate.

Bear with me here. In the 1990s, I liked Lieberman. Most of his...

As Jon Stewart put it, "so when does 'hope' turn into 'change'?" As Arianna points out, we still don't know. To any outside observer it sure looks like Obama has lost his campaign mojo and gotten crushed in the whinging gears of Washington's political apparatus. But I'm not so...

Conservatives are still wandering stunned through the wreckage of the Bush presidency and have absented themselves from the policy debate. GOP politicians are hunkered down waiting for an anti-Obama backlash that may or may not materialize. Instead, as Rick Hertzberg wrote recently, the media personalities are running the show....

The ongoing debate about journalism, bias and objectivity erupted recently with the Washington Post's release of new rules for social media. The rules themselves were mostly commonsensical, but the way they were written and promulgated suggested that Washington Post journalists employ social media such as Twitter and Facebook at...

The George W. Bush presidency brought both the Republican Party and the conservative movement low, and it's distressing to watch the GOP base get whipped into a frenzy by cynical demagogues while its politicians do the only thing they know how to do -- pander to the people making the...