The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

John Willis, R.I.P.

The Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune reports that my former colleague and good friend John Willis has died of a heart attack at age 63, quoting publisher Otis Raybon, “John was a mentor for many young and upcoming journalists and will be missed by  many.” When I first met John in the late 1980s, I was sports […]

Secrets of Neutral Objective Journalism: Deadline Stress and Lots of Coffee

Today, for reasons that need not be explained, I was looking through my American Spectator coverage of the Republican National Convention: Monday, Aug. 27: Storm Surge Tuesday, Aug. 28: The Exact Opposite of Truth Wednesday, Aug. 29: Off to a Strong Start Thursday, Aug. 30: ‘Breitbart’ as a Verb Friday, Aug. 31: Exceptional Five columns […]

Podhoretz ‘Evolves’ on Gay Marriage; Editorial Insubordination, Not So Much

Donald Douglas calls to our attention an interesting internecine quarrel at Commentary, where their freelance literary critic David Myers has been terminated because of a dispute that Myers claims was about gay marriage, but which the magazine’s editor John Podhoretz says was in fact about acts of insubordination by Myers: What I did not like, and what I […]

Obama: ‘I’ve Got a Plan!’

Yesterday, I woke up and turned the TV to MSNBC (which I watch so you don’t have to), and they showed almost the entirety of a speech Obama gave at Davenport, Iowa. Perhaps you can watch it without succumbing to the urge to throw your computer across the room: It’s particularly painful for me to […]

McKay Coppins, Concern Troll

Every newsroom is a seething cauldron of frustrated ambition. It’s been that way forever, and is true everywhere. Nobody goes into the news business with the goal of being the headline writer on the obituary page, but somebody’s got to do it, and the phenomenon of the “disgruntled staffer” is not really interesting unless the […]

Fake Celebrity Account Fools Drudge, Crashes Twitter With Endorsement

If you were on Twitter last night, you might have noticed that the notorious “fail whale” made its unwelcome appearance for a while: Twitter was over capacity, and now we know why: Drudge Report posted a headline that would likely perplex anyone who has followed the politics of various Hollywood celebrities. Actor Jake Gyllenhaal, the […]

How Do You Spell ‘LOL’? Idiotic Error by Former New Yorker Fact-Checker

When Bob Tyrrell told me about this on the phone, I was astonished: Evidently, James Pogue is a person with literary pretensions who once worked as a fact-checker for the New Yorker. In order to support his literary pretensions — he’s “writing a novel,” as are, inter alia, about nine thousand unpublished lawyers who dream of […]

How to Deal With Biased Media Liars (and Other Such Worthless Scalawags)

“My God, Scarlett O’Hara! When I start out to cut somebody up, you don’t think I’d be satisfied with scratching him with the blunt side of my knife, do you? No, by God, I cut him to ribbons.” — Tony Calvert, in Gone With the Wind Well, that’s merely an analogy — a colorful literary […]

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