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‘Media’ is a broad term

I’ll be the first to say that I, as a reporter, am not perfect. No one is. I can sometimes make mistakes in stories, both grammatical and factual. I can sometimes read a bill or a study too quickly and miss something important. If I get something wrong, I work as quickly as I can to send up a correction to my copy desk. Sometimes mistakes escape me and my copy desk. When you write as many words as I do in a week and you read as many words as my editors do, sometimes mistakes fall through the cracks. But when they are pointed out, we try to fix them. I believe the same goes for my ...

President Trump can’t stop backing down

Does it sometimes seem as though too many people have never learned the lessons of the schoolyard? If you capitulate to a bully, you will be bullied forever. If you stand up to him, he will back down. What’s true on the playground is also true in the office, in politics and in international relations. Standing up to bullies is not free of risk. You might get bloodied in the process. But afterward, the bully, having learned that there is a price, will hesitate to push you around, whereas if you fail to stand up to him, he will grow ever more menacing. All of the bowing and scraping ...

Census surprise

About a month late, presumably due to last fall’s government shutdown, the Census Bureau has released its estimates of the populations of the 50 states and the District of Columbia for July 1, 2025. It provides an interesting picture of what the country is, and is becoming, halfway through the decade of the 2020s and one-quarter of the way through (have we really gotten this far?) the 21st century. It also provides some political dynamite, all the more explosive because of Census Bureau statisticians’ deserved reputation for apolitical rigor and willingness to admit mistakes, as it ...

The hidden cost of leadership inexperience

How much impact does leadership inexperience have on your organization? I feel the sleeping giant today in terms of operational excellence is the number of new people. By this, I mean those who are new to the organization as well as those who are new to the role in general. For example, a person might be experienced in leadership but new to the organization. Or, they might be part of the organization, but new to leadership.  In both cases, the lack of experience impacts operations—often in a good way but sometimes in a not-so-good way. Layer in the inexperience on the ...

Rough first year

To say the very least, Donald Trump has had a rough first year. His coalition is strained, with MAGA losing ground and traditional Conservative Republicans gaining more say. Nothing he does other than claim he is prepared to annex Greenland or a faux boast of being a peacemaker advances Populism. He sounds more like Richard Nixon every day, tough talk without purpose. As to the similarity with traditional hard-shell Conservatism, Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture urged austerity when she highlighted a three-dollar meal. Brooke Rollins suggested a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, ...

Remembering the Challenger disaster

I learned this week that there were two teacher candidates from each of the 50 states for the ill-fated Challenger mission by reading an article in the Charleston Gazette. Melanie Vickers was a teacher candidate from West Virginia, and she knew Christa McAuliff in a NASA training class. After the Challenge explosion, Vickers helped raise funds to create a memorial statue for Christa McAuliff in Charleston near the former Sunrise Museum. Melanie Vickers said she believed that “Christa would want us to protect the future and show our children what’s possible … And that the ...