Primary Sources
Preserving U-Boats
Neat piece from the Raleigh N&O:
Sixty-two years ago a German submarine prowled the Hatteras waters. Its mission: Sink anything afloat.
U-701, commanded by a 29-year-old orphan from Hamburg named Horst Degen, was carrying out the Nazi plan to sever besieged Britain from its lifeblood of American war materiel. But on July 7, 1942, an Army bomber [...]
Road to Perdition
My former boss, Chuck Lewis, on press freedom:
And in trying times like these, when it occasionally looks like things are going to hell, it is strangely consoling to recall that actually others before us also have traveled on what must have seemed to be the road to perdition.
At the Center for Public Integrity, we have [...]
Schooled in Jihad
Chicago Tribune:
In the struggle for the soul of Islam, few things are as important as education reform. Terrorists can be defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan, but if nothing is done to end the intolerance and the teaching of hard-line Islam in classrooms, militants will have a never-ending supply of new recruits. Nowhere is this [...]
No Conspiracy Here
A number of reporters that I know have been deluged with emails demanding that they investigate and expose alleged voter fraud from the past presidential election, particularly in areas where votes for Bush exceeded the number of registered Republicans. Among the places ripe for such examinations, we’re told, some Florida counties where Democrats hold a [...]
Ron Elving on the Next Big Story
My former political editor, Ron Elving (now at NPR), has his usual long view of the political media’s love of the “Big Story“:
Anything that surprises editors, anything we seem to have missed in the past, gets featured treatment. It’s how we do penance for underplaying a story one day that seems to block out the [...]
