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;...

"Why aren't you talking about Michael Jackson more?"

The question, from a caller to Larry Mantle's KPCC-Pasadena public radio program "AirTalk," interrupted a discussion of the budget mess in Sacramento. Actually, it was more a wail than a question -- a crack about the Michael mania that had hijacked...

We're about to find out whether Americans are as suspicious of the right's anti-health care reform propaganda as Iraqis are dismissive of America's lame hearts-and-minds campaign in Iraq.

"These commercials are boring, poor and annoying," Noor Sabah, an engineer in Fallujah, told the Washington Post's Ernesto Londono. Thanks...

Seconds after the networks say that it's Sotomayor, her Wikipedia entry is updated. My Encyclopedia Britannica can't do that; that's why it's boxed in my closet. The newspapers that hit my driveway a coupla minutes ago can't do that; that's why on-paper distribution is dying. TV can go wall-to-wall...

First I worried that Obama was foolhardy to put Goldman Sachs alumni and other Wall Street geniuses in charge of fixing the mess that they'd made in the first place. But then I bought the pragmatic argument that these masters of the universe were the only people with enough inside...

It will be the playwrights and screenwriters, not the journalists and historians, who will some day get the torture story right. It will be the poets and novelists, not the philosophers and clergy, who will take us to the heart of that darkness. It will be the artists and satirists,...

"If he didn't hear from her at night, he'd go frantic." This is Carmen Bachan, speaking through tears about her husband James and her daughter Adrianna.

"That night he told her to be careful, and she was. She was crossing on a green light until that animal took her...

A big reason that the Iraq war never ignited nationwide outrage on the scale of Vietnam protests was the absence of conscription. As long as the volunteer army confined the consequences of George W. Bush's Oedipal acting-out to one slice of America, taking it to the streets was just not...

Of all the arguments against stem cell research, the lamest has to be that "it would put us on a slippery slope." But since this case comes from the same precincts that gave us "gay marriage will lead to incest and man-on-dog sex," I suppose I shouldn't be...