Reid Collins
It began as another classic test of a reporter’s obligation/right to protect a confidential source. It has been propelled into a discussion of something even more basic, more forbidden, and ubiquitous: the uses of power between the sexes. And one…
The single-most salient feature of today’s grilling of oil company executives is a number: 93 percent. It was stated by Exxon’s Lee Raymond as the percentage of Exxon Stations run by local managers who set their own prices. So much…
Until 9/11 it had been the most atrocious act of terror; the mid-air bombing of Pan Am’s flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, December 21, 1988. Two hundred seventy were killed, many of them American students homeward bound. A bomb secreted…
Never mind what Karl Rove said to “Scooter” Libby that may have been heard by Judith Miller who would do 80 days in jail for something Bob Novak would put in print with impunity. And who spells Flame with a…
Coverage of the President’s “major address” is the surest indication of the decline of the office, or at least of the deference the big boys now feel they must pay. None of the major broadcast networks carried it. Martha Stewart…
This personification business applied to disaster has gone too far. It affords the anchors too much elan to refer to “Rita” as if she were a girlfriend waiting out in the car. The moniker “Rita” is especially abhorrent because it…
When Hurricane Andrew ripped through Dade County, Florida, in August, 1992 it took three days for county officials to ascertain the extent of the damage but it took the Dade County Emergency Manager only seconds to utter a phrase that…
“So this Frenchy, Jean Baptiste le Moyne, got an idea in 1718. ‘Let’s build a town here, in this hole between the big lake to the north and the River to the south. Never mind that the lake (Pontchartrain) is…
It was a song, written in 1919, that has resonated through the years of wars, depressions, and social depredations. Singer Dick Haymes adopted it as his theme song. “With someone like you, a pal good and true, I’d like to…
America held its breath Tuesday morning. Twice, it had seen what could happen when 4.5 million pounds is hurled skyward by 7.4 million pounds of thrust to achieve an orbit of the earth and then shed that energy for a…
