Newsrooms are snake pits. I say this with great affection.Newsrooms are tribal and competitive, fueling pettiness in the most honorable people. Editors cling to turfs like dictators policing their borders, and sometimes they mistake intimidation for management.As for reporters, they make their ...
These are tough times for NBC's Brian Williams - and tougher times for journalism.The NBC newsman was suspended Tuesday night for six months amid charges that he misremembered or conflated wartime incidents he reported on from Iraq and Israel. He has also come under scrutiny for possible ...
Business schools preach a strict, anti-social doctrine of corporate management that comes down to this: CEOs must be idiots.By that I mean the original Greek word idiotes, which applied to people who care only about themselves and the prosperity of their immediate family. They're the ones who ...
There was a time when the 63-year-old National Prayer Breakfast was a rather mundane affair.It rarely made news. Speakers - evangelist Billy Graham spoke at most of the early ones - talked about Jesus and salvation.Presidents, beginning with Dwight D. Eisenhower, would follow with unremarkable ...
Oxfam reports that the richest 1 percent of people in the world own 48 percent of the world's wealth. Many claim that we should be alarmed by income inequality because it hampers upward mobility. Others argue that because income is distributed so unevenly, justice and fairness require income ...
If the most frequently dialed federal agency in America can't even answer two-thirds of the millions of phone calls it gets, should the government cut its budget?Congress thinks so. That agency is the Internal Revenue Service. And lawmakers have hacked at its budget yet again.Worse still, those ...
She was a lawyer, noisy but nice. He was a Marine, quiet and even nicer. They seemed an attractive, comfortable couple, so I was greatly surprised when - after he left to use the men's room - she leaned over to me at the next table and asked, "What do you think of him?"They had connected ...
Over last several weeks, our community has been engaged in a dialog about finding a delicate balance - a balance between the need for transparency weighed against a fundamental right to privacy.Transparency is central to meeting our mission as a public university. All of us have a ...
Proposed Marquette County Road 595 would irreversibly impact high quality wetlands at the headwaters of several watersheds and foreseeably lead to additional roads that would open up one of Michigan's last remaining wilderness areas to resource exploitation.Wetlands are a foundation of our ...
In the early 1990s, I used to perm my hair into spring coils and wore padded shoulders that gave me the wingspan of a whooper swan, but I thought my biggest problem was my 5-year-old daughter's occasional bed-wetting.So off I went to the pediatrician's office to unravel my woes.Before we ...
WASHINGTON - Flashback: Galileo is under house arrest pondering the unyielding ignorance of The Church for refusing to consider his heliocentric proposition that the Earth circled the sun.We find this historical anecdote preposterous today, but people were persecuted for lesser heresies in ...
It was refreshing to see meteorologists apologize for their dire - and wrong - predictions of an unprecedented snow storm that they had said would devastate the northeast. It was a big storm, but the northeast has seen lots of big snow storms before and will probably see lots of big snow storms ...
Whatever happens over the next two years, you can bet that 22nd century school children will know more about President Barack Obama than kids learn today about, say, Calvin Coolidge. He made history just by being the first non-white man to occupy the White House.What else will tomorrow's kids ...
When the Senate released its shocking report on CIA torture late last year, it renewed a debate from the Bush years about the merits of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques."Polls released afterward suggested that most Americans thought that torture was effective and, in some cases, ...
New York's schools are the most segregated in the nation, and the state needs remedies right away. That was Chancellor Merryl H. Tisch's message to New York's governor and Legislature. She said that minority children are disproportionately trapped in schools that lack teaching talent, course ...
Cuban President Raul Castro has issued new demands for normalizing relations with the U.S. He wants us to lift the trade embargo, remove Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terror and give Cuba the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay.One can imagine President Obama being awfully tempted to ...
Federal Trade Commission head Edith Ramirez put the matter plainly: "If I'm wearing a fitness band that tracks how many calories I consume, I wouldn't want to share that data with an insurance company."In a study last year, the FTC found that 12 mobile fitness apps shared information with 76 ...
Some columnists write New Year's columns chronicling the mistakes over the last year. I don't, but as this January has rolled on, it's become clear I've made many about the 2016 presidential race.One is that I assumed Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush wouldn't run. Now it seems both are. I thought that ...
WASHINGTON - Not since Gen. Douglas MacArthur was called on to address Congress after being fired by President Harry Truman in 1951 has such an invitation to an outsider caused such a stir as House Speaker John Boehner's welcome mat to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.MacArthur was ...
According to an article published by FoxNews.com on Aug. 29, approximately 110 million Americans, or one-third of our population, is currently receiving some sort of assistance.These statistics don't include Medicare or Social Security which most Americans contributed to since their inception ...