In my last post on President Obama's Afghan escalation speech I noted, "Anyone who believes (the troops) will leave in eighteen months is a fool." I also referenced "a quote buried in the seventeenth paragraph of the Page One New York Times report on Obama's speech." The remarks were...

In January 1992, PBS Frontline broadcast a film I directed that documented the amazing rise, fall and subsequent resurrection of Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church movement. The documentary showed how, through an adroit combination of money, media and the consistent promotion of a conservative political agenda,...

When it comes to the media and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- as in many things -- John Lennon put it best:

"I'm sick and tired of hearing things/From uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocritics/All I want is the truth/Just gimme some truth"

To my surprise, I finally got...

In the fall of 2002 -- a little more than a year after the Al Qaeda attacks on the United States set off a chain of events that soon toppled the brutal, misogynistic Taliban regime in Kabul, and well before the fateful and misguided decision to invade and occupy Iraq...

Why is it left to the National Freakin' Football League - hardly a bastion of liberal thought - to call out bombastic shock jock Rush Limbaugh for his puerile racism and incessant bigotry? And why are NFL owners holding themselves to a higher standard than...the rest of us?

Limbaugh made...

Why was it left to the National Freakin' Football League - hardly a bastion of liberal thought - to call out bombastic shock jock Rush Limbaugh for his puerile racism and incessant bigotry? And why do NFL owners hold themselves to a higher standard than...the rest of us?

Limbaugh made...

"Everybody's a dreamer, everybody's a star, and everybody's in show biz, it doesn't matter who you are," as Ray Davies once so eloquently crooned.

And when it comes to television, everybody's apparently a programming expert as well -- from Wall Street titans to Supreme Court Justices ...

I've long been a fan for years of the zany duo of performance artists/political activists known as the Yes Men, ever since their turn-of-the-century stunt of creating their own "corrected" World Trade Organization website at GATT.org, or the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Soon their fake site began...

Remember that catchy pop tune from 20 years ago, courtesy of Timbuk 3? You know, the one with the catchy chorus: "The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades?"

The lyrics got stuck in my head recently at an unlikely venue: the normally staid Council on Foreign Relations and...

Four decades ago - on September 2, 1969, to be precise -- Leonard Kleinrock and a handful of associates began tests on what was soon to become the Internet. About forty people gathered in Kleinrock's lab at the University of California, Los Angeles to observe two bulky computers fifteen...

Desperate to stay alive, beleaguered newspaper executives first tried to "monetize" their "content."

Now they're desperately trying to "monetize" their "journalists." And although the Washington Post recently stumbled badly in offering its pay-to-play sponsored 'salons" to access seekers, the fact that the paper's own ombudsman called the offer...

Decades ago, while a callow young reporter, I noted favorably that "the late, great Senator George Aiken" had once famously and wisely offered a solution to America's Vietnam quagmire: "Declare victory and go home."

I was wrong on two counts: first, what Aiken -- a conservative Republican...

When the Washington Post recently unveiled its plan to sell sponsorships of off-the-record "salons," the move was widely pilloried in the press and elsewhere. Even the Post's own Ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, described the move as "an ethical lapse of monumental proportions."

Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth and Executive Editor Marcus...

In just six years, the Personal Democracy Forum has become one of the few truly indispensable annual gatherings -- devoted to the nexus of politics, media and technology, as viewed through the prism of the digital revolution that is rapidly transforming the way we create, communicate, campaign and even,...

Was it policy or pressure that led Lamar Outdoor Advertising to tear down billboards featuring a pro-Palestinian political message?

Judge for yourself. Lamar, which operates over 150 outdoor advertising companies in more than 40 states and Puerto Rico, entered into an eight week contract in April with a local New...

Okay, so he's one of the "sexiest men alive" -- but what does Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. Attorney in Chicago and Special Counsel in the CIA leak case, have against us poor, unsexy journalists? It's bad enough that Fitzie won't answer my questions: ("Rory. I just wanted to get...

"I'm a liberal -- and I'm not running from that word!" exclaims Ed Schultz, the latest lefty star in the cable television news-and-opinion firmament. Schultz, America's top-rated progressive radio talk show host, has just finished his first month as host of the eponymous Ed Show on MSNBC, which is attempting...

Garrison Keillor claims to be a liberal. He - and we -- should know better. Keillor has just joined the already large and ever-growing list of allegedly 'liberal' media figures who either advocate or apologize for torture.

In a recent column, (syndicated by the New York...

What is it about torture that is so seductive to our mainstream media?

First, our leading (and often "liberal") commentators and analysts, writing in supposedly respectable publications such as Newsweek and The Atlantic, tried to appear as tough-minded believers in realpolitik by siding with such REALLY tough-minded believers as Dick...

On April 6, 1977, David Frost was having a particularly difficult time interviewing former President Richard Nixon. Frost's colleague James Reston, Jr. suggested a new line of questioning, one used earlier in the trial of former Nixon aide John Ehrlichman: Were there no limits to what a president can do,...