"In the 21st century, can facts matter?"

Good question from Mitch Kapor, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, at a UC Berkeley forum on the Future of the Forum last weekend. "How do we make facts matter? Or is that hopeless?"

Ouch.

More potential bad news for...

In the film The Paper, Michael Keaton's editor character explains to a reporter that you can always get past a police barricade or most other obstacles "with a clipboard and a confident manner."

Tareq and Michaele Salahi were just extending the concept, leavening one of Washington's most tony events...

Not every president in the last 35 years has considered Richard Nixon a role model. But our current POTUS seems to.

When the darkly fascinating Mr. Nixon declared Charles Manson guilty of murder before that 1970 trial was over, there was only a small intake of national breath....

Barack and Michele Obama, the couple, continue to captivate the public and the press, most recently in the cover story of the NY Times Sunday magazine: "The first marriage. It's modern, it's a formidable international brand and it's an ongoing negotiation." Sounds like a reality show promo to me....

I like the tussle of digital world commenting, as nasty and angry and messy as it can get. There are also endless tips, suggestions, ideas and other useful things in comments sections that may be bad for the ego but good for journalism.

I've tried to have a fairly...

The grand, grey New York Times made its Bay Area "local content pages" debut last Friday, even as execs there prepared to cut 100 newsroom staffers in Manhattan.

After causing competitive shivers among some Bay Area journalism institutions, how interesting it is that the Times chose to invade...

The death of Gourmet magazine is a big, sucking wound for all those consultants advising the panicked print industry to go niche, baby, go niche. As though we haven't been hearing that since the 1980s.

But even as we bury another paper publication, this one high end and historically...

A campaign executive for Gavin Newsom's governor's race said I was "scraping the bottom of the barrel" when I posted a photo of the mayor's green recycling bin in connection with a column about the city's new mandatory composting regulation. Point and shaky pun taken.

But, despite my own...

By the time Jimmy Carter weighs in, with all due respect to the former President, home builder and Nobel Laureate, you can bet that's pretty much the end of the news cycle for that story.

When I watched Mr. Carter offer an opinion about South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson...

South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson, it turns out, was just the red-faced canary in the coal mine of anger toxicity poisoning our national psyche.

Fury is being unleashed across the land and don't say you weren't warned: it's all been astrologically predicted.

While you've been burying your nose...

It's not fun to criticize Barack Obama anymore now that everyone's doing it. Even cautionary blog posts used to feel like a wonderfully lonely place, particularly if you live around San Francisco or on HuffPost.

I warned early on about the dangers of over-stimulating the public expectation...

Civility in public discussion these days is as rare as a bald-headed Kennedy -- the last of that mane now lionized by Ted's passing.

But damn if John McCain didn't have a bunch of citizens at his Arizona health care reform town hall meeting yesterday behaving like the...

Criticizing the recently deceased is as rude as punking the Queen of England at an official event: it's bad form both in terms of timing and reasonable respect.

As a journalist, I know I should revere Bob Novak, whose death from brain cancer was announced this morning, almost as...

I am NOT HIM! Hear me roar!

The loose lips parade of outbursts has replaced swine flu as the national epidemic of the moment. And there's no vaccine in sight for this 223-year-old unruly American problem.

But even Arlen Specter's gamely stiff spine in the face of...

In a secret meeting last week at a Denny's outside Squamish, British Columbia, Barack Obama's chief strategists David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett shared coffee and a plate of donuts with Palin steering committee chairman, Levi Johnston. The purpose of the improbable session: to come up with a joint,...

Who's the better decider now, sucka?

When I heard Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn tell Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, "You'll have a lot of splainin' to do," if she went home, got a gun and shot him, my first sensation was the warm wash of memory watching I...

There's a new N-word permeating our culture and it has nothing to do with racial epithets.

The warm bath of public narcissism is getting as crowded as the rooftop hot tub at SF's kink.com on a Friday...

Don't worry Google, they found him.

Let me just say it before a commentator on Fox does:

This whole Mark Sanford mess is a Barack Obama conspiracy.

The sad spectacle of Mr. Sanford's teary...

All Twitter needed this last week was for Ashton Kutcher to be named the compromise president of Iran. Then the perfect circle of social networking, information gathering, and real-world events would have been balled up tighter than a Microsoft intellectual property-rights case.

But in actual life, the news gathering...

Craigslist is saving newspapers!

I respectfully disagree with Arianna Huffington's claim this week that Craig helped her kill print journalism.

Just as Prohibition handed over the lucrative liquor trade to the Bronfmans and the Kennedys, rabid law enforcement agents are chasing the equally lucrative classified sex...