Washington, D.C., March 5, 1998 A s I write, the Monica Lewinsky affair-or perhaps episode is a better term-is far from resolved, but it is possible to draw certain conclusions about the role of the press. The most important is that the barrier separating the elite media from the print and television tabloids-the Washington Post […]
Books, Arts and Culture
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State of the Debate: The Rise and Fall of Racialized Liberalism
Liberalism took a fateful turn in the 1960s by redefining reform in racial terms. Two new books on urban politics sometimes overstate their case against recent liberal policies, but they help clarify what went wrong.
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What’s Wrong with This Picture?
A dissenting opinion on American Beauty.
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Consuming Passions
How the successors to Love Connection and The Dating Game reduce love to a consumer choice.
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Should Journalists Do Community Service?
T he Philadelphia Inquirer should not have been embarrassed last May when the Wall Street Journal uncovered a scandal in a Philadelphia charity. Even Pulitzer magnets like the Inky sometimes miss big stories right under their noses. But this was no ordinary case of being scooped by out-of-town competition. The foundation that the Journal exposed […]
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Do Ask, Do Tell: Freak Talk on TV
Daytime television has become a “freak show,” but it’s also an opportunity (and not an entirely bad one) for gays and others with nonconforming lives to talk directly with the public.
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Cosmopolitics
G eorge Washington famously disdained faction. In his farewell address, he warned the nation against the “baneful effects of the spirit of party.” This dislike for partisanship may be the only connection between Washington and his namesake, the magazine George. Editor John F. Kennedy, Jr. describes George as post-partisan, an effort to engage more people […]
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Orwell’s Poor and Ours
Orwell depicted the poor unsentimentally, but with compassion and economic realism. Today’s conservative critics, who blame poverty on an absence of values, do neither.
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Animal House Meets Church Lady
One moment it’s frat-boy humor; the next, it’s the old verities. Limbaugh, P.J. O’Rourke, and other comedians of the right love to have it both ways.
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We’ll Talk About That: Can Liberals Do Radio?
Liberals do movies, rock and roll, talk TV, even local talk radio. So why no liberal Rush?