Mark Rice

Professor and chair of the Department of American Studies, St. John Fisher College, Rochester, New York

One of the great achievements of the Internet has been the explosion of websites, blogs, etc. dedicated to politics and the news. This very same achievement, however, has paradoxically resulted in the erosion of a common frame of reference for understanding the news.

Peter Dreier and Richard Appelbaum

If journalism's role is to not only report the facts but also to expose wrongdoing, then the Times deserves kudos, and a Pulitzer Prize, for documenting and explaining the emergence of Bangladesh's new sweatshop economy as a major source of the clothing that American and European consumers buy every day.

Wray Herbert

Author, 'On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind's Hard-Wired Habits'

The elderly have never been honored in American society. They have more often been stereotyped, stigmatized and pitied. And according to Princeton University psychological scientist Susan Fiske, this unfair ageist stereotyping could become even darker with the new influx of seniors.

Elliott Negin

Director of News & Commentary, Union of Concerned Scientists

Given the Heartland Institute's penchant for misrepresenting science, you would think reporters would be curious about who finances its work. You would be wrong.

Geoffrey R. Stone

Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law, University of Chicago

Striking the right balance between the government's legitimate need for confidentiality, the press's legitimate need to obtain information about government action, and the public's "right to know" what its representatives are up to, is a difficult and delicate task.

Allen Frances

Professor Emeritus, Duke University

May has been a dispiriting month for psychiatry and a sad and worrying time for our patients. Three of the leading mental health organizations have squabbled among themselves -- promoting silly and competing 'paradigm shifts' while ignoring the unmet needs of our patients.

Susan Mercandetti

Vice President, ABC News

As a "Nightline" producer, I traveled all over the world covering interesting stories, leaving unused theater tickets and broken dates behind. There was always tomorrow.

Nico Lang

Blogger; correspondent, WBEZ

Two-thirds of our most hated celebrities are women, and females count for seven of the top 10 slots. What makes Gwyneth Paltrow 20 times more hateable than Chris Brown?

Shelley Ross

Emmy Award-winning Producer, Director; Founder of Daily Xpress News and Pop Culture Blog

Disclosure of something as personal as having had both breasts removed is quite a daunting decision for many reasons, least of which is fear of being seen as "less of a woman," as even a world-class sex siren felt obligated to note.

Robert Scheer

Editor, Truthdig.com; Author, 'The Great American Stickup'

Shredding privacy is the essence of Tumblr's appeal to Yahoo, and even though it has said it will retain the social networking site's founders in key positions, one way or another that very personal data will be mined and inevitably fall into what users will discover to be the wrong hands.

Craig Aaron

President and CEO, Free Press

As a consummate industry insider and elite rainmaker, it's really no surprise that Wheeler is getting this job. More surprising perhaps is that so many people with public interest bona fides seem to think he's such a good choice.

Charles Moore

Author, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

Mrs Thatcher came to realize that Reagan's strengths and mental abilities were very different from her own, but she never lost her underlying admiration for him.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

President, Waterkeeper Alliance; Senior Attorney, NRDC

Those who bother to read these historical snippets will find many important departures and only tenuous parallels between the Obama Administration's IRS affair and Richard Nixon's Watergate-era IRS scandal.

Chris Rodda

Senior Research Director, Military Religious Freedom Foundation; Author, 'Liars For Jesus'

It seems that Congressman Fleming's ability to separate fact from fiction hasn't improved much in the past year. The stories he's now believing might not come from The Onion, but the headlines are just as far-fetched and the stories just as fictitious.

Roy S. Gutterman

Director, Tully Center for Free Speech, Newhouse School, Syracuse University

Even as a staunch free press advocate, I admit that the government has an obligation to protect certain state secrets. But once information reaches the press and the public, the resulting investigative witch hunts raise questions about how free our press really is.

Heather Laine Talley

Writer, teacher and sociologist; Editorial Collective member, The Feminist Wire

The "crazy" Zelda that has emerged in our popular imagination is as much Scott's making as The Great Gatsby itself. This is, in and of itself, part of the F. Scott legacy. His work depended on Zelda's silence.

Wendell Potter

Author, consultant; columnist at Center for Public Integrity and healthinsurance.org

The mainstream media seems to willfully ignore what corporations and other moneyed interests do to get what they want in Washington. As a result of this lack of media interest, Americans remain in the dark.