The loss of local news nationwide has led to “an enormous test of our democratic institutions.” So said Colorado Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet over Zoom Thursday during a roundtable with journalists. He was there to talk about The Future of Local News Commission Act, a federal bill he rolled…

“Virginian-Pilot journalists: Corporate management pressure is stifling coverage,” Jan. 14, 2015, for Columbia Journalism Review. This was an inside look at a storied newspaper in Virginia where reporters had to battle their corporate bosses from influencing their investigative reporting on the local political and business elite in Virginia Beach. After…

RQ-11 Raven was on a protection mission for a nearby Army base by COREY HUTCHINS UPDATE: “Drone that crashed in Colorado Springs found to have broken Army, FAA rules,” Sept. 19, 2015. UPDATE: Aug. 17, 2015. About three months after initially saying “Fort Carson is conducting an investigation and will share results as soon as they are available,” base spokeswoman Dani Johnson…

In late January, President Barack Obama was relaxing at his desk in the nose of Air Force One and watching the Miami Dolphins lose to the Carolina Panthers. David Remnick, the editor of the The New Yorker, was there. The reporter couldn’t help but think about recent reports of multiple…

#TrueStory — On a recent Sunday afternoon, the neighborhood was mostly quiet. But if you listened hard and long enough, you could have heard the entire Modest Mouse album Good News for People Who Love Bad News twinkling through the open windows of the new gluten-free bakery that just opened on the…

Vermont’s independent U.S. senator has been appointed to a bi-partisan budget panel tasked with averting another government shut down. He offered some first shots at ‘deficit hypocrites’ in South Carolina. — United States Sen. Bernie Sanders, the longest serving independent in Congress and a self-styled democratic socialist, will join Republican Paul Ryan on a budget conference committee with the goal of averting another government shutdown.

A self-styled democratic socialist will be on the budget conference committee fighting against cuts in the social safety net — Yesterday I got a chance to hear Bernie Sanders speak to progressives in a small hall at a backwoods retreat on a salt marsh island near Beaufort, South Carolina. It was at Penn Center, one of the earliest schools for freed slaves, and a pastoral place where Martin Luther King…

U.S. Senator wants American-born Al Qaeda spokesman killed ‘without hesitation’ — South Carolina’s senior Republican U.S. Senator, Lindsey Graham, unleashed a string of Tweets today in which he advocated for the killing of an American citizen working as an Al Qaeda operative. “Even though Adam Gadahn is an American citizen, he should BE subject to being killed or captured by our…

New post at CJR is about Virginia’s gift-giving scandal as a way for the press to explore ethics reform — At this point, if you’re paying attention at all to politics in Virginia, you’ve heard at least some of the stunning revelations about undisclosed gifts that a wealthy, well-connected businessman has lavished on Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican, and members of his family. I’ve got a new piece in Columbia…