It’s a sign of the amount of raw misinformation floating around the FISA debate that even fundamentally smart and conscientious conservative writers often get the story badly wrong. And by this, I really don’t just mean “come to a normative conclusion I disagree with” or “weigh competing policy values in a non-libertarian way.” I mean […]

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Hey, Matt? I’m looking back over what Noah Pollak has written about Samantha Power, and I’m just not seeing anything that can reasonably be interpreted as a claim that Power is an anti-Semite or “tainted by Jew hatred” or anything else like that. All I’m seeing is an argument that Power has some terrible ideas […]

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So, I was way beyond done with these stupid newsletters, but some people—mindbogglingly, and contra Ron Paul’s own assessment—seem determined to assert that really they’re not so very racist at all, if only placed in the proper “context.” This is both plainly false and a little galling. It strikes me that the best “context” is […]

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Well, I’m more than ready to move on from the topic of Ron Paul and old newsletters, but I suppose I ought to say something about this bit of flailing from Justin Raimondo. Perhaps I shouldn’t, because obviously some folks have decided to try very, very hard to frame our article, and the newsletter kerfuffle […]

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Some enterprising cub reporter at the Ron Paul Forums has determined, through painstaking research, that journalists covering the same area will occasionally notify each other of stories they’re working on. This appears to have been patched together through elaborate Facebook mapping, though might have easier been accomplished by shooting one of us an e-mail. Yes, […]

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This Washington Post profile of Reason parties is both saturated with an undertone of snark and fairly on-the-nose. The one thing I’m a little perplexed about is the choice to repeatedly emphasize the “mostly male” editorial staff. It’s accurate—only four of 15 editors are women—and it surely merits comment, even if it’s a familiar point, […]

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One more in my occasional neologisms series: Journalistic Doppler (n): The phenomenon by which an article, especially one written rapidly about a complex topic, changes dramatically in style and pace as the author approaches deadline and/or word limit, progressing from a leisurely, relatively crafted opening to a dense core-dump of every idea or datum that […]

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I… I don’t know how to say this, but… I think I just enjoyed and agreed with a Thomas Friedman column.

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Over the weekend, many pixels were expended on W. Thomas Smith’s sloppy reporting from Lebanon for National Review. Most of the responses have focused on Smith’s apparent tendency to pass on unconfirmed, dubious reports from parties with an interest in shaping media perception, while giving the false impression they were based on his own observations. […]

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I had meant—before being bacterially besieged—to say something about a very strange piece by MIchael Hirschhorn in the latest Atlantic, which argues that newspapers aren’t doing a good job of “giving readers what they want.” The main—actually, pretty much the only—evidence for this being the slim overlap between newspaper front pages and the contents of […]

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