We're already into a decade of immense, uncharted, and widely distributed federal spending but with one vital part of the democracy in jeopardy.

At the same time that our President is engaged in a Hail Mary of economic planning, our much-reputed constitutional mechanism for accountability (otherwise known as newspapers,...

There's a striking image by Farida Batool in a current exhibit at New York's Aicon Gallery (reviewed at the New York Times). Seeing it was especially astonishing for me because I know something of the artist and the complexity of her relationship to Pakistan, its history and its...

There's little that excites the art world so much as a deaccessioning brouhaha. The National Academy Museum--one of the loveliest New York cultural institutions that is visited by too few people--has fallen on very hard times. It recently sold two paintings to put some version of real bread on...

There's yet another newspaper "turn off the lights" commentary in the New York Times, appearing ghoulishly on the last day of 2008: "When the Watchdogs Don't Bark," tracking Zell-related and Journal-Register depredations in Connecticut (Hartford, New Britain and Bristol) and journalistic enterprises laid waste in New Jersey. This summary...

My biggest personal problem in what seems like a placid, normal Delhi is that wireless is not working in my otherwise-charming hotel. But this means I'm spending more time watching the television news. Today, NDTV had a story on Shiv Sena, the hard-right Hindu organization, seeking to ban and harass...

It's hard to have yet another Sarah Palin epiphany, but that's what happened as I was drifting happily through a conference called "Reality Worlds," organized at the Annenberg School for Communication by Marwan Kraidy and Katherine Sender.

Scholars devoted to the genre were generating all sorts of theories...

We're less than 50 days away from the Mother of all Inaugurations (maybe that was Andrew Jackson's), and there is an almost unquenchable thirst throughout the country to participate, to celebrate, to possess the moment and relish it.

Is the Inaugural Committee doing enough to slake this thirst? Certainly the...

It may be peculiar to comment on one's own blog. But, having recently provided a post on possible directions for Obama's international broadcasting and public diplomacy strategy, I realized I had missed the elephant (or donkey) in the room.

In thinking about a strategy for the new administration, the...

Can two late thinkers, a French philosopher and British media scholar, point the way to a new American public diplomacy--or at least an American international broadcasting strategy-- for the Obama era?

Let's start with two unarguable points. The very election of Barack Obama shifts the world of public diplomacy...

Wherever there's a hot war, there's an information war and the Georgia-Ossetia-Russia conflict is certainly no different. How do Georgians, how do South Ossetians, how do U.S. citizens get information in this propaganda-ridden event?

Here's a spotty collection of blogs and factoids that might encourage comment:

The ever-valuable Ethan...

I'm an Obama-ite and an Alaskaphile. So this gives me some running room to critique the Obama campaign for their first reactions to the announcement that Sarah Palin would be John McCain's running mate.

Soon after that Dayton surprise, campaign spokesman Bill Burton issued a pretty mean-spirited, slightly thuggish...

The lights are about to go out on Beijing 2008, and -- guess what -- there's already talk of a Georgia-related U.S.-organized boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games. That's because 2014 is set for Russia and its resort city of Sochi.

In the Olympics boycott category, this one...

I've blogged about the substantial dustup in late July, 2008, between the IOC and BOCOG over censorship of the Internet, but I left out one tidbit.

Things surface in these moments of revelation and debate. One of the most interesting documents to appear during the blogosphere brouhaha was this...

The Knights of the IOC Negotiate with the BOCOG Dragon and the Website Skies Turn Mostly Blue

How should we read the Great Olympics Internet Website Censorship drama that has unfurled during the last days before the Opening Ceremony?

As foreign journalists came to Beijing, the...

There can and will be surprises ahead, but the imminence of the Games means the inundation of positive imagery has started. Sitting in a hotel room in Abuja, Nigeria, watching Al Jazeera English, there was story after story about heroic kids coming from disadvantaged backgrounds, training and getting ready for...

The search is on for the unique encapsulation, the stroke that conveys China, the Olympics and change all in one go. It's a journalistic race to capture the weird, uncanny Olympics' contribution to the making and falsifying of China, finding the right formula of heroism, change, dynamism and, in a...

There's a really excellent June 19 piece in the New York Times on Lenovo -- the Chinese computer company that is the new incarnation of IBM laptops, having swallowed the Thinkpad. The informative essay by Stephanie Clifford explores how big Olympic corporate sponsors are navigating the opportunities (and vulnerabilities)...

Ok, there will be all these TV journalists at the Olympics, but will they be able to set up their cameras? This is explored in a useful article by Richard Spencer in the Telegraph on the issue of camera locations and philosophies of broadcasters. The BBC policy on...

Read more HuffPost coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games

We're getting down to the fine points of controlling imagery at the Olympics. The International Olympics Committee, the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) and all federations and players are setting the stage for tough controls across...

In the really vigorous competition to use the Olympics as an opportunity for persuasion, one sector to watch involves outside Christian missionaries. Think of their commitment to spreading the Word as a very passionate case study of the many groups seeking to gain adherents to products, different ways of life,...