Reading Time: < 1 minute Covering the increasingly urgent matter of food supply safety, the New York Times’s Michael Moss delivers a classic of investigative reporting in his examination of manufacturer instructions relating to frozen entrees. The thrust of the article is that, as food manufacturers look to cut costs and increase imports of ingredients, more and more pathogens are Read More
Reading Time: < 1 minute Steve Gandel at Time thinks Citigroup should have failed its stress test: When the results of the government’s financial stress tests were announced last week, Citigroup seemed to have dodged a bullet. The bank, long thought to be in the worst shape among the nation’s largest lenders, was said to need just $5.5 billion in Read More
Reading Time: < 1 minute Recently, I raised some questions about the reports that Democratic members of Congress had been aware of CIA interrogation methods. Now, members of Congress themselves are suggesting that the CIA put out the information about the briefings in order to pass the buck. There are crucial questions we should be asking about the CIA, about Read More
Reading Time: 2 minutes Anytime government or corporate interests allege an imminent crisis, journalists must guard themselves against manipulative terminology. Take the report the Obama administration released yesterday showing that the Social Security and Medicare trust funds are being depleted at a faster rate, thanks in part to the recession. The Medicare fund will run out of money in Read More
Reading Time: < 1 minute The Financial Times has reported that America’s top banks need not raise the full amount of capital mandated by the recent “stress tests” if they manage to book higher than expected earnings: The banks have 28 days to announce their capital-raising plans and until November 9 to implement them. Wells Fargo and other banks that Read More
Reading Time: 2 minutes Over at Electric Politics, former diplomat George Kenney offers a seldom-seen view of super-emissary Richard Holbrooke, once a top figure in the Clinton Administration and now President Obama’s special envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan. Whether you agree or disagree, it is interesting to get something other than the almost uniformly laudatory media coverage. Kenney’s posting Read More
Reading Time: < 1 minute David Sirota asks three questions that all journalists should be raising about President Obama’s alliance with the health care industry to reduce costs and reform the system: 1) If the health industry is saying it can lower costs by $2 trillion over 10 years and remain highly profitable, isn’t the industry admitting that it was Read More
Reading Time: 2 minutes Sometimes, here at WhoWhatWhy, we find it useful to see what was said, back in the good old days, about the institutions that later became so reviled. Along these lines, we refer you to an April 2007 New York Magazine cover package, “Behind the Hedge”—a primer on hedge funds and the (almost all) men who Read More
Reading Time: 2 minutes In an opinion piece, the Wall Street Journal convincingly argues that top Democrats in Congress have been speaking out of both sides of their mouths in criticizing Bush Administration policy on Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs), also known as torture. These days, Speaker Pelosi insists she heard and saw no evil. “We were not – I Read More
Reading Time: < 1 minute In a revealing interview with the New York Times that stretched over five hours, the Hamas leader, Khaled Meshal, offered to be “part of the solution” in the quest for peace in the Middle East, and granted the surprising concession that his movement was only seeking a state in the areas Israel won in 1967. Read More