With NYU’s Jay Rosen about the curious customs of American political journalists:

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I’m going to have to side with (my friend) Ezra Klein against (our mutual friend) Conor Friedersdorf on the question of whether D.C. is somehow toxic for journalists and thinkers. Here’s the nub of his concern: But inside the world of many ideological magazines, think tanks, foundations, and other intellectual movement operations, a different dynamic [...]

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I know some of my friends are upset about Dave Weigel’s account of last weeks’ Milton Friedman dinner, which focused on the audience reaction to Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji’s Friedman Award acceptance speech. Now, I was seated a table or two down from Dave, and his description matches my recollection, as far as it goes. [...]

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They’re both a little sick of the term—and believe me, at this point, I empathize—but this is as good a summary of what I was trying to talk about as I’ve seen. The whole discussion is pretty interesting and on point. Greenwald is right, incidentally, that technology hasn’t cloistered partisans—research shows online news consumers are [...]

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At Balloon Juice, we find a common complaint about The Village expressed: I don’t mean to pick on Sullivan, who probably just meant this as nothing more than to compliment to a decent lady. But there are plenty of members of the journalistic elite who justify their shitty journalism by saying that some monster is [...]

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Scan the last paragraph of George Will’s column on Arizona’s round-up-the-darkies law while I take a deep breath: Non-Hispanic Arizonans of all sorts live congenially with all sorts of persons of Hispanic descent. These include some whose ancestors got to Arizona before statehood — some even before it was a territory. They were in America [...]

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Over the past couple of weeks, a pair of posts I wrote about what I dubbed “epistemic closure” on the right kicked off a surprisingly broad set of conversations and debates—mostly, I suspect, because it slapped a name on a phenomenon that a lot of people already recognized, and which many conservatives were themselves feeling [...]

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James Joyner captures my thoughts on the recent silliness pretty well. Basically, nobody comes out of this looking good. First, CBS.  Frankly, the journalist in me finds it sort of offensive that they were willing to publish serial plagiarist Ben Domenech on any topic—some things really ought to earn you a lifetime ban from respectable [...]

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The headline on yesterday’s New York Times piece on the demographics of Tea Partiers read: “Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated“—than the general public, that is. The nutgraf adds that they’re also likely to be older, whiter, maler, and (shocking!) more conservative. Now, the obvious question for me is: Why wouldn’t you [...]

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The wires are reporting that former senior NSA executive Thomas Drake has been indicted for leaking classified material to a reporter at a national paper. The paper and reporter are unnamed, but we get a date range for the articles published using Drake’s information: late February 2006 through November 2007. I can’t help but notice [...]

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