Earlier this week, I participated in what was proving to be a very interesting thread on the Columbia Journalism School Facebook page.

A graduate of the school asked if anyone thought the press was biased toward Israel, in light of coverage of the current Palestinian/Israeli firefights and rioting.

There were many different opinions, and in the course of the discussion, I offered my own story of reporting from Gaza and the reaction of The PBS Newshour to my stories.

Sadly, and rather strangely, the thread, which was quite active and popular, vanished. No one would take responsibility for taking it…

Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney is all but certain to lose her leadership position in the GOP this week, punished for the crime of telling the truth, that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, that there was no ‘rigged vote’, and that the nonsense that he has been spewing about the election is the Big Lie.

Cheney is to be commended for her courage to speak the truth, but the price that she is going to pay speaks volumes not just about what Trumpism has done to the Republican Party, but what its continued presence and power is about to do…

Next week I am going to be attending a virtual conference on “News Deserts” organized by the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.

The official title of the conference is “Filling The Vacuum Left By Expanding News Deserts.”

Journalists love to throw around the term News Deserts, and it is certainly true that they are expanding. More than 2,000 local newspapers have closed since 2004. That is a problem. Newspapers in America are slowly going broke.

There’s a reason for this — they no longer generate the revenue they used to. And there’s a reason for that. First, almost…

We were driving this morning, listening to BBC Radio 4.

The almost never-ending effusive praise of the recently departed Prince Philip was interrupted by a personal essay by a not to be named BBC correspondent, waxing ecstatically about his ‘amazing’ experience of getting to spend time with Greta Thunberg.

His ‘report’ bore all the markings of a 21st century version of a vision of The Virgin Mary. She passed on bits of wisdom in every utterance.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Greta Thunberg seems like a nice kid. I know, she skipped Fridays at her school to hold up a…

Of all the channels that The BBC presents on television, I like BBC4 the best.

It’s the home of some of The BBC’s most intelligent programming.

So it was with a great deal of disappointment that I read in this week’s Guardian that BBC4 was going to cease commissioning original programming and was going to become an ‘archives only’ channel.

This is a mistake.

This is, in fact, a very big mistake.

I understand that The BBC has to cut costs. They have already cut some £880 million out of their budget, but it seems worse is yet to come.

…

One year into Covid and it has been a pretty terrible year.

Nearly 3 million deaths worldwide, businesses and lives destroyed or severely disrupted. It will take a decade to dig ourselves out of this disaster.

There is, however, a small bright spot amidst the darkness.

Our lives have been changed, and in some small way, for the better, even if that is hard to believe.

Like Scrooge in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, we have been forced to look at our misspent past and realized, before it is too late, that we can change.

For the past 30 years, or…

On March 13, 1881, tragedy swept Russia.

Czar Alexander II, ‘The Liberator’, a liberal and progressive Czar was assassinated.

In a very Russian way, the Jews were blamed for the killing and a wave of pogroms swept the country, killing thousands and destroying homes, villages, businesses and lives.

In response, my great grandparents, along with tens of thousands of others, left the lives and small villages they had always known, boarded ships and headed for the new world — America.

Of course, it changed their lives, and mine, forever.

A year ago, another tragedy swept the world — Covid-19. It…

From 1378 to 1417, there were 2 Popes, one in Rome, the other in Avignon. Why not 2 Presidents, one in DC, the other in Mar-A- Lago?

For Donald Trump, it was never about being President.

He never really cared about being President, running the country or defending the Constitution.

What he cared about was being the star of the biggest reality TV show in the world. The Presidency.

Compared to The Presidency, The Apprentice, his last gig, was really nothing. OK, it rated great for ten years, had a killer set and made him about $450 million. …