In an appearance on "The Dick Cavett Show" in 1980, the critic Mary McCarthy glibly remarked that every word author Lillian Hellman wrote was a lie, 'including 'and' and 'the'. Hellman immediately filed a libel suit, charging that McCarthy's comment...

As television emerged as a major cultural and economic force, many imagined that the medium would enhance civic education for topics like science. And, indeed, television soon offered a breathtaking banquet of scientific images and ideas – both factu...

The Internet is often hyped as a means to enhanced consumer power: a hypercustomized media world where individuals exercise unprecedented control over what they see and do. That is the scenario media guru Nicholas Negroponte predicted in the 1990s, w...

Across America, newspapers that have defined their cities for over a century are rapidly failing, their circulations plummeting even as opinion-soaked Web outlets like the "Huffington Post" thrive. Meanwhile, nightly news programs shock viewers with...