One presidential candidate is lighting up the New York Times Opinion page with impassioned attacks and defenses. No, it’s not Barack Obama, Ron Paul, Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, Jon Edwards, Rudy Giuliani, Dennis Kucinich, or Mitt Romney. It’s Ronald Reagan. The crucial question of the day, if you’re reading the New York Times Opinion pages […]

The Race Beat: the Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff tells the story of the role and influence of the media in covering the black civil rights from its beginnings to 1965. Essentially, as their subtitle suggests, the authors make a convincing argument that […]

Today the Roberts Court struck down the ability of school districts to use voluntary race-based busing policies to try to create greater diversity in their school (story here, opinion here [PDF]). That news reminded me of this encounter: It was Martin Luther King Day. I was in downtown Denver that morning. Riding the shuttle to […]