Local TV news is the number one source of news for Americans. Seventy-eight percent of the country turns to it to find out what's going on. The Internet may be growing as a news source, and some people still read the paper, but for most people, what's on...

If Democrats decide to use the procedural move that Congress calls "reconciliation" to pass health care reform, get ready for a war of words. It will be won not by the biggest guns, but the biggest mouths. What's true won't matter; what's loudest, what's catchiest, will. That's democracy in the...

Why would Pfizer spend $100 million on two-minute TV ads that use a minute of that time admitting that their drug Chantix can cause "changes in behavior, hostility, agitation, depressed mood," "weird, unusual or strange dreams," and "suicidal thoughts or actions"?

Because they have to, and because it doesn't matter....

Democrats make lousy narrators.

If you're a movement conservative -- the only kind of Republican in the media, which means the only kind of Republican who exists -- then everything that happens can be explained by the same simple story:

Once upon a time, there was a free market....

It's just about perfect that the week that LA Gang Tours launches is also the tenth anniversary of the start of the Norman Lear Center.

At $65 a head, lunch included, the LA Gang Tours bus trip through South Central is cheaper than...

Now that we're about to entrust health reform to the tender mercies of the insurance industry, it's sobering to see the skullduggery that one of California's largest auto insurers is trying to pull on the state's drivers.

If you want a preview of what health insurers may do to premiums...

Barack Obama is a traitor.

That's what Dick Cheney said. Too bad Tiger Woods stepped on the story.

The decision to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in New York, Cheney said on the eve of Obama's speech on Afghanistan, is "likely to give encouragement -- aid and comfort --...

Now that our nation has observed "Kick a Ginger Day" and "Kick a Jew Day," can "Kick a Liberal Day" be far behind?

In case you've been taking a tryptophan nap, a Los Angeles County sheriff's investigation has found that at least four redheaded girls and three redheaded boys...

Now that CNN has put Lou Dobbs out to pasture, you'd think that The Most Trusted Name in News would make the reporting of facts -- you know, the practice formerly known as journalism -- the hallmark of its brand. Dream on.

This past Saturday, morning hosts Betty Nguyen and...

If you're depressed by the way the national debate about health care has been playing out, just wait until the rubber hits the road on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Israel. If you're enraged by the way Wall Street's rescue has made us hostages to their recklessness, get ready for how...

It's my own fault, I know, for watching Showbiz Tonight over the weekend, but I couldn't find the news on any other channel, and I'd forgotten that HLN, better known as CNN's Headline News, had turned its definition of journalism over to Nancy Grace, host of "television's only justice themed/interview/debate...

While the left despairs of Barack Obama's capitulation to K Street and Wall Street, the right continues to insist that he's a Marxist, socialist, communist enemy of capitalism. What could possibly convince the right that it's wrong -- about that, or anything else?

Not the press. The right gets its...

Something's going to happen next week, or next year, that will completely change the story.

Maybe it'll be an earthquake -- a literal one, the 7.8 that seismologists are urgently warning Californians to get ready for, and a figurative Big One that divides millions of people's lives into Before and...

"Curiosity: The Questions of Our Life" is the name of a new 60-episode five-year "landmark" series just announced with much fanfare by the Discovery Channel.

So what are those 60 "fundamental questions and underlying mysteries of our time"? They're looking for nominations.

Princeton, Georgetown and Syracuse...

I don't know which is more dispiriting: the New York Times' failure to call Betsy McCaughey a liar, or Barack Obama's failure to call Chuck Grassley a liar. It's tempting to think of both failures as cowardice, a mortal fear of being branded "liberal." But ironically it's liberalism itself that...

I keep hoping that the health care "debate" we're having this summer will turn out to be just a plot point in the 2009 version of The Truman Show, the movie where Jim Carrey's character, Truman Burbank, discovers that what he thought was reality is actually a reality television show.

There's a direct line connecting the khaki-wearing "citizen" mob sent from Washington by the GOP to stop the 2000 recount in Florida, to the teabaggers dispatched by the corporate front group FreedomWorks to disrupt congressional town halls.

Whether at the beginning of the decade or its end,...

Elie Wiesel wagged a bony finger at me. "History will be watching you, young man," he warned. We were on the tarmac at Geneva International Airport, and yes, I was a young man, not yet 29, though after the week I'd just been through, I felt the age I am...

By the way, have I mentioned that my 19-year-old daughter's novel is a bestseller? Hancock Park by Isabel Kaplan has now made it onto the Los Angeles Times hardback fiction bestseller list for two weeks running.

If I haven't already buttonholed you - or emailed, Facebooked, Twittered, phoned...

It's grasping at straws, I know, but I'm looking for a benign explanation of the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush administration.

Criminal law says that facts aren't enough to establish guilt. There also has to be mens rea -- a guilty mind. Crooks don't just perform illegal acts;...