History or His story?

Politicians’ sex scandals are rearing their hoary heads in the press once again. There’s the Strauss-Kahn front-page news of a nude Frenchman pursuing a maid in a New York hotel, his perp-walk photos, the French maintaining it was a suave man behaving normally, and, well you get the picture (though it’s hoped that no pictures…

Radio helps in Joplin

An ever-increasing number of the public, media professionals and journalism educators seem to think that the new/electronic media are the only media that still matter. Don’t tell that to the residents of Joplin, Missouri, though, where members of this tornadoes-ravaged community have been getting their local news almost exclusively from Zimmer Radio’s six stations.  It…

Should columnists air readers' complaints?

Jim Romenesko has blogged (May 24) that Ronnie Polaneczky, a Philadelphia columnist, has been posting online comments from readers remarking on her suggestion that Arnold Schwarzenegger and other cheaters “get tattoos of their kids faces – on their penises [because] it would remind them just who gets screwed when daddy’s wee-wee wanders.”  (

Alito talks media with lawyers in St. Louis

Justice Samuel Alito didn’t direct his remarks at the press when he spoke to a ballroom full of lawyers in St. Louis. But it was clearly the press he had in mind when he described the misconceptions that people have about the Supreme Court.

Alito even singled out for criticism the star Supreme Court reporter of the past generation, Linda Greenhouse, who writes a column about the court in her retirement from the New York Times. He noted that Greenhouse had wondered in her column about “topsy-turvy world” Supreme Court where business had not won as high a percentage of cases this term as in the past.

“Maybe the law has something to do with it,” said Alito with some sarcasm. “Maybe the text has something to do with it. I know that is a radical thought.”