Washington Monthly

Eight years ago this week, as the nation mourned the loss of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, left-wing pundits unleashed an appalling storm of hateful comments about the longtime conservative jurist, slashing him as “regressive,” “cruel” and “reprehensible.”

If you think the "traditional media" like CNN and NPR and MSNBC is hopelessly centrist in pursuit of "artificial balance," we'd like to propose a Breathalyzer test. 

If the liberal media’s relative silence towards Facebook and Google’s Orwellian behavior this electoral cycle seemed deafening, perhaps it's because many outlets have received big loads of cash from them.

It was thirty years ago this week that the FCC, wanting to “extend to the electronic press the same First Amendment guarantees that the print media have enjoyed since our country’s inception,” abandoned the Fairness Doctrine. Some liberals hoped that the Obama administration would retrieve it, but that didn’t happen. That was too bad, indicated The Washington Monthly’s D.R. Tucker in a Monday…

Last week, vehement anti-Trumper George Will declared that conservatism in 2017 is “soiled by scowling primitives.” Washington Monthly blogger Martin Longman doesn’t disagree, but he contends that Will is partly to blame for that sordid state of affairs.

In a Friday post on the website of The Washington Monthly, not of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Martin Longman discussed President Trump in strikingly medical terms. “The reason Trump has become so vulnerable so quickly is because he’s treating Washington like the pathogen when he’s the infectious agent,” declared Longman. “A better politician might be able to take over the host…

Should the mainstream media lead, to borrow a term from religion, a great awakening? Yes, in a sense, suggested longtime journalist Steven Waldman in a Thursday Washington Monthly piece. “Donald Trump and his campaign have pushed the idea that each of us has our own truth, or ‘alternative facts,’” wrote Waldman. “Suddenly I feel like journalists are the most religious people in America. I don’t…

Donald Trump: future war criminal? You never know, suggests Paul Glastris, who believes there are “apt” and “worrisome” parallels between Trump and Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian and Yugoslav president who was facing charges that included genocide when he died in prison in 2006. “During the years of carnage...the ethnic cleansing, the rape camps, the 100,000 people killed...journalists…

Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote margin continues to be a compelling news story for some, including Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, who believes that the Electoral College should vote next month for Clinton because she was “the people’s choice.” Even though The Washington Monthly’s Martin Longman thinks Lessig’s view is “nonsense” and that Donald Trump’s loss of the PV is trivial under our…

Liberal bias in news coverage has bothered conservatives ever since there were only three TV networks. But in Nancy LeTourneau’s odd telling, conservative media bias came first, about twenty years ago, and liberals then had to catch up. “In order for Fox News to be successful, they had to convince potential viewers that the mainstream press was liberal,” wrote LeTourneau in a Friday post. “That…

George H. W. Bush apparently won’t vote for Donald Trump and reportedly “harbors a deep disgust” for him. Still, according to The Washington Monthly’s D. R. Tucker, the “race-baiting on steroids” of Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign paved the way for Trump’s current approach. Tucker was referring to two television ads: the so-called Willie Horton ad, from a pro-Bush PAC, and the Bush campaign’s “…

Some left-wing pundits, anticipating that Donald Trump will lose on November 8, are pre-emptively trying to make sure that conservatives take the blame for Trump’s nomination. Gary Legum of Salon argued that right-wing news outlets “have both spent the better part of the Obama administration pushing the exact silly demagoguery  and conspiracy theories that riled up the conservative base and…

According to one left-of-center blogger and one right-of-center professor, a major takeaway from the 2016 presidential contest is that ideological conservatism is unpopular, even in the Republican party. Samuel Goldman, a political-science prof at the George Washington University and a frequent contributor to The American Conservative, stated that the “great message” of Donald Trump’s campaign “…

A current MSNBC personality just passed the half-decade mark as a host on the channel. A former MSNBC personality who’s made plenty of comebacks just made another one. The Washington Monthly’s D.R. Tucker praised each man to the skies this past weekend. Tucker called Chris Hayes "the classiest man on cable” and opined that from the get-go, he was brilliant, “an engaging, charismatic host whose…