Reclaim the American Dream

Even after five decades with the New York Times and making documentaries for PBS, taking on a new social media like YouTube is daunting. So I looked for a mentor and found David Hoffman, a friendly Pied Piper and savvy filmmaker from Santa Cruz, California who has built an astounding audience of 600,000 subscribers on […]

Washington – History may not exactly repeat itself, but in five decades of reporting I’ve learned it does echo with familiar refrains. Russia today, for example. It as if we’re back in the old USSR, once again witnessing the astounding spectacle of the solo dissenting voice of Aleksei Navalny, a 44-year-old activist defying the organized […]

(Author’s Note: Neil Sheehan and I worked together during the Vietnam War – in Saigon, Washington and on The New York Times Pentagon Papers series, the TOP SECRET internal Pentagon history of the war. Neil Sheehan died Jan. 7 at age 84. This is my memorial tribute to Neil, as a friend, colleague, and a […]

  by Hedrick Smith What struck me when I began reporting on grassroots citizen reform movements in states as varied as Florida, Connecticut, and South Dakota was how creative and ingenious political amateurs were in generating ideas for reform and how gutsy and resourceful they were in mobilizing millions of voters to adopt state-level reforms […]

Washington – Except for the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination, our national media is so mesmerized and monopolized by the political war zone in Washington that you’d think nothing important ever happens in the rest of the country (except perhaps natural disasters). Unfortunately, that means the major media have largely missed one of the […]

In his short White House tenure, Donald J. Trump has set some kind of record for histrionic temper tantrums against the media — whether CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times or, most recently, MSNBC for revealing his 2005 tax return. He’s actually pursuing a well-worn path of American presidents blaming the press for […]