
National media focus on 2nd Amendment over 4th Amendment.
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As the Supreme Court finished hearing oral arguments on two same-sex marriage cases, the Wall Street Journal editorial page (3/27/13) proclaimed what has become a mantra of the right on this subject: The liberal media frame opponents of marriage equality as bigots. America’s cultural and media elites are attempting to browbeat the High Court into coercing the country into recognizing same-sex marriage by casting opponents as bigots for holding a position that President Obama held less than a year ago. Murdoch’s Journal is woefully misguided on two counts. It’s hard to make the case that the most prominent arguments against [...]

The French military commenced Operation Serval against separatist rebels in Northern Mali on January 11, 2013. The air and ground intervention was undertaken with the cooperation and support of the United States, as well as several European and African states. U.S. press reporting has provided a simplistic account of the intervention as a heroic effort to protect the civilized world against Islamic terrorist threats. What is missing from this image is how the past interventions of the “War on Terror” helped cause the Malian crisis in the first place. A Washington Post editorial (1/12/13) claimed the French were simply trying [...]
It’s always difficult to write about a death. If it’s after a lifetime of accomplishments, how do you sum that up in a few brief paragraphs? When a life has been cut cruelly short, it’s even worse—trying hopelessly to convey the sense of lost possibilities. With Aaron Swartz, who died on January 11 by his own hand, you have the worst of both worlds. At the age of 26, he had already achieved so much in so many different arenas as to baffle an obituary writer: taking part in creating the RSS protocol when he was just 14 years old, [...]

As he moved into his office as Barack Obama’s budget director in 2010, Jack Lew took down a portrait of Alexander Hamilton—“the father of American finance,” the Washington Post (1/21/13) told readers—and “put up paintings of New York City by jobless artists who had been hired into the New Deal’s public works program.” It was, the Post admitted, a “small gesture”—but one that friends say “speaks volumes” about Lew’s mindset. What really speaks volumes is that the Post in 2013 would offer this three-year-old office-decor anecdote as evidence that, as the headline put it, “Nominee to Lead Treasury Values Social [...]