It's hard to overstate the effect Watergate had on a whole generation of journalists. We were in journalism school when it happened, and, man, oh, man, here was the perfect example of just what we were aspiring to. Brave, dogged reporters take on the powerful and corrupt and, with the help of a courageous insider, expose the truth and bring down a president.
And, of course, it was all a big crock.
Further proff, if anybody still needs it, that we live in a culture that sometimes values style over substance, the symbolic over the real, the aesthetic over the functional, appearances over meaning . . . well, you get the idea. After a prolonged controversy over an abbreviated quote on the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, the National Park Service has announced it will replace the abridgment ("I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness") with the full quote -- "Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice.
If the bible your profession goes by is "silly" and "worrying and dangerous," how valuable is the service you provide?
Millions of healthy people - including shy or defiant children, grieving relatives and people with fetishes - may be wrongly labeled mentally ill by a new international diagnostic manual, specialists said on Thursday.
Sorry to tell you this, dog lovers, but:
Experts say that if all the world's cats suddenly died, things would quickly go to hell in a handbasket.
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This should be an interesting debate:
I'm on vacation this week. Back on Monday, Feb. 6.
So, Dummy, how'd you like the State of the Union speech? You can read all the political reactions in plenty of places and probably had already decided it was a good or bad speech before you even heard it. So, let's try a different angle:
President Obama's 2012 State of the Union address again rated at an 8th grade comprehension level, on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test — the third lowest score of any State of the Union address since 1934.
For the first time in its 71-year history, the Chicago Sun-Times says it will not make endorsements in the upcoming elections.
In an editorial published Monday, the Sun-Times essentially said as a newspaper endorsements are passé at a time when there are so many other sources of information that “allow even a casual voter to be better informed than ever before.”
They're continuing to work out the bugs of the new blog platform, and I'm passing along all your concerns as they try to fine-tune things. The newest addition is my ability to approve authors as well as individual blogs posts (which gets to be tedious). So, to all my regulars: The next time you comment, I can give you author approval, which means all your future comments will be posted automatically. (Phil Marx and Christopher Swing -- you were the first to comment after I got author-approval capability, so you're already in.)
Couch potatoes, arise! Er, make that, "Sit! Stay!"
