In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell wrote, “he who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.” He might have added, he who controls the news, controls the present. In Russia, Vladimir Putin controls the news. One of the very first things Putin did on…

In August, 2016, I wrote an article for The Huffington Post entitled Donald Trump Is Going To Be Elected. As soon as I saw Trump, I knew he was going to be elected because I looked at the election not from a journalistic point of view, but rather as a…

I was going to ask ChatGPT to write this story, and based on what I have read, it probably would have done as good a job as this, or maybe better. (Or maybe ChatGPT did write this. Who can tell.) ChatGPT is just the latest iteration (and the first warning)…

As an American who moved to the UK a few years ago, I was astonished at the entire concept of an NHS. I had, of course, for my whole life spent a fortune on health insurance, and despite that, I ended up in endless fights with the insurance companies who…

Here’s an interesting idea for Liz Truss and Jeremy Hunt, but you better hurry. Time is short. We are approaching the tax season, and living both in the UK and the US, we find ourselves in the rather unenviable position of having to pay taxes in both and then work…

Nearly 40 years ago, or maybe it was more, I was a photographer on an archeological excavation in northern Israel at Tel Akko. It was there that I met Neil Silberman. That’s him on the left, me on the right. We were young then, just starting out careers. He was…

The Heard-Depp trial is big news and it tell us a lot about the future of news. Personally, I did not follow it. But that clearly makes me something of an outlier. More than 18 million people watched it on TV news coverage in the United States. I am sure…

According to recent polls anywhere from 67% to 78% of Russians support the ‘special military action’ in Ukraine. This support is entirely a function of the ‘news’ that they see. For most Russians, according to The BBC, their main source of news and information is television, and television news in…

Elon Musk’s vision of Twitter is a truly open platform — a ‘town square’ where people can say whatever they like. This is the essence of a Free Press. Yet this vision sends a wave of terror through the journalism community. Journalists love to champion “Free Press,” that is, until…