Essay RSS
Thu, 5 Jun 2008
The Devil in the Details
Polls reinforce reporters' stereotypes about evangelicals
By Posted at 09:00 AM Comments (1)
My New York friends congratulated me for my “bravery” when I headed off to cover evangelical supporters of Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign in Iowa shortly before Christmas. I grew up in Virginia at a time when the state’s Christian right was gaining strength, but have spent most of my adult life in liberal circles where evangelicals—if there were any—kept... Read More
Thu, 17 Apr 2008
The Last Word
Advice for aggrieved writers: zip it
By Posted at 09:00 AM
There is a place in readers’ memories, if not on the musty shelf of literature, for an author’s published rebuttal to a harsh review, and this is best evidenced by the widespread and seemingly obvious wisdom on the matter. The poetry critic David Orr has advised, “The best way to respond to a bad review is simple: don’t respond.... Read More
Tue, 18 Mar 2008
Somewhere East of Eden
Why the St. Pete Times model can't save newspapers
By Posted at 09:00 AM Comments (1)
The temple housing Nelson Poynter’s holy relics of journalism is located outside of downtown St. Petersburg, on a sunny chunk of Florida real estate just a stone’s throw from America’s only museum dedicated to the surrealist master Salvador Dalí. Visiting both buildings in quick succession, as I did last summer, offers an interesting study in contrasts. Dalí’s work highlights... Read More
Tue, 11 Mar 2008
Out of Focus
How indie dogma undercuts the documentary
By Posted at 09:00 AM
Recently, I attended a screening of the documentary Meeting Resistance, an inside look at the Iraqi insurgency. I was eager to see it. Few Western journalists had managed to penetrate the insurgency, and the glimpse offered in the documentary was original enough to garner showings at West Point, Centcom, and Camp Victory in Baghdad—part of an effort by the... Read More
Tue, 29 Jan 2008
What Would You Do?
The journalism that tweaks reality, then reports what happens
By Posted at 09:00 AM
On a Friday morning last January, a group of Washington, D.C., commuters played an unwitting role in an experiment. As they emerged from the L’Enfant Plaza metro station, they passed a man playing a violin. Dressed in a long-sleeved T-shirt, baseball cap, and jeans, an open case for donations at his feet, he looked like an ordinary busker. In... Read More
Fri, 4 Jan 2008
Checkbook Journalism Revisited
Sometimes we owe our sources everything
By Posted at 12:00 PM Comments (1)
In November 1970, Esquire published one of the most memorable covers in its history. Illustrating “The Confessions of Lt. Calley,” the first of three articles about the man who, with his platoon, murdered hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians in the village of My Lai, it consisted of a photograph of Calley, in uniform and grinning broadly, surrounded by four... Read More
Mon, 24 Dec 2007
Rights and Wrongs
The most common words in politics can be the most deceptive
By Posted at 09:00 AM
In 2002, a year after the terrorist attacks on new York and Washington, the Bush administration published a new version of “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America.” That document helped to signal the administration’s intent to launch a war against Iraq by asserting the readiness of the United States to engage in preemptive wars against... Read More
Tue, 18 Dec 2007
Orwell Abuse
Orwell: muse, not model
By Posted at 09:00 AM
Once in a great while, one encounters a writer who seems not only to have a finger on the pulse of his or her own era, but also to have something authoritative to say to posterity. In the English language, Dr. Johnson is still probably the paradigmatic example of such a writer. But since his death in 1950 at... Read More
Thu, 13 Dec 2007
'Surge,' Meet 'Escalation'
The fight for clarity in language: a case study
By Posted at 09:00 AM Comments (4)
Nothing has the capacity to frame political debate more successfully than a good turn of phrase, characterization, or metaphor; nor can anything do more to pervert democratic discourse than inaccurate, imprecise, or misleading language. George Orwell understood the game and called its bluff more than sixty years ago. In words that offered an eerie forecast of the rhetoric of... Read More
Thu, 8 Nov 2007
The Limits of Clear Language
Orwell worried about polluted language, but polluted information is more toxic
By Posted at 09:00 AM Comments (25)
Can there be a political writer who has not fallen in love with George Orwell’s 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language”? Part of its appeal is what’s appealing about all of Orwell—its directness and honesty, its plainspokenness, its faith, against all evidence, that human affairs can be conducted morally, its sense of being on the side of ordinary... Read More
