journalism Archives - Page 4 of 10

Said in Court

In April 2021, during the second wave of Covid-19, a judge of the Madras High Court remarked in a hearing that the Election Commission should “probably be booked for murder.” The remark was not part of any written order. The Election Commission went to the Supreme Court about it.

In May 2021 the Supreme Court held that there was no question of expunging the remarks, because oral statements are not part of the judicial record. “We have to make sure that media reports everything that happens in court,” the bench said.

Bend and Crawl

“You were asked only to bend, but you crawled.” This is how L.K. Advani described the conduct of the Indian press during the Emergency of 1975 to 1977, when the government of Indira Gandhi imposed press censorship. The Quint calls the remark famous. It gives no date or occasion for it.

Nod and Take It

In a column in The Tribune, Lakhinder Jit Singh Vohra wrote: “Instead of saying no, we are taught to nod our head and take it.”

In India, he wrote, “everything is a yes, even when everything is meant to be a no.” A refusal arrives as an assurance, such as “200 per cent it will be taken care of.”

Fifty States

Before the 2012 presidential election, the statistician Nate Silver gave Barack Obama a chance of “more than 70 per cent,” and then “north of 90 per cent.” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough called Silver “a joke.” He said anyone who thought the race was “anything but a tossup right now” was “such an ideologue.”

Silver’s forecast called the result correctly in all 50 states. In 2008 he had called 49 of the 50, missing only Indiana.

The Whistleblowers

Time magazine named three women its Persons of the Year for 2002: Sherron Watkins of Enron, Coleen Rowley of the FBI and Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom. Each first raised the problem inside her own organization.

Watkins, an Enron vice president, wrote to chairman Kenneth Lay that the company’s accounting methods were improper. Rowley, an FBI staff attorney, wrote to Director Robert Mueller that the bureau had “brushed off pleas” from its Minneapolis office to investigate Zacarias Moussaoui. Cooper told WorldCom’s board that the company had hidden “$3.8 billion in losses.”

Time called them “women of ordinary demeanor but exceptional guts and sense.” Cooper said: “I’m not a hero. I’m just doing my job.”

Dewey Defeats Truman

On election night in 1948, the first edition of the Chicago Tribune went to press with the headline “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.” Harry Truman won. On November 4 he held up a copy at St. Louis Union Station. The photograph became famous.

The printers who ran the Tribune’s typesetting machines had been on strike. The paper’s substitute method forced it “to go to press several hours earlier than had been usual,” before most states had reported results. About 150,000 copies were printed before the headline was corrected.

Grading the Teachers

In August 2010 the Los Angeles Times began publishing ratings of about 6,000 Los Angeles teachers by name. The ratings measured how much each teacher’s students gained on standardized tests, a method called value-added.

The reporter Jason Felch said that “individual teachers really matter.” Hundreds of teachers protested, and the union leader called for a boycott of the paper. The National Research Council had warned: “Too little is known about the accuracy of these methods to base high-stakes decisions on them right now.”

Bitter Pill

On February 20, 2013, Time published a cover story by Steven Brill, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us.” Brill read hospital bills line by line. One patient was charged $1.50 for a single 325-milligram Tylenol tablet. Brill noted that a hundred cost about $1.49 online. An alcohol pad was billed at $7.

The prices came from the hospital’s chargemaster, “a list – six-, seven-, 10,000 items long of everything the hospital provides.” Brill found that the uninsured were the only patients asked to pay those prices.

Very Normal to Fade

Alison Green writes the workplace advice column Ask a Manager. In November 2025 a reader wrote about a close friendship with a former coworker. “I can let the friendship naturally fade, but I feel guilty,” the reader wrote.

Green answered: “It’s actually very normal for work friendships to fade once you’re no longer colleagues.” She gave the reason. When you no longer have work in common, “there often isn’t enough of a connection to keep the relationship going.”

The Obameter

Just before Barack Obama took office in 2009, the fact-checking site PolitiFact launched the Obameter to track his more than 500 campaign promises. Each promise was rated as kept, broken, compromise, in the works, or stalled. A year later, PolitiFact counted 91 promises kept, 33 compromises, 87 stalled and 14 broken.