2020: The year to support, defend – and trust – our free press

  How about a new New Year’s resolution: To more appreciate a free press, in whatever brand, flavor, or medium you prefer.

  In that spirit, let’s start using a new term: Identifiable News Media. Time to let go of the vanilla-flavored “mainstream media” and drop the pejorative “lame stream” tag — its use as timely political snark ran out some time ago.

Gene Policinski: Two wrongs do not make a ‘right’ — but they can misuse one

  Didn’t we all learn, long ago, that “two wrongs don’t make a right”?

  But two wrongs can misuse a right — as in our right to free expression, guaranteed by the First Amendment.

  First, there’s the wrong done by “Project Veritas,” a gaggle of self-proclaimed operatives on a purported mission to root out corruption and dishonesty in the media. The group uses deceitful tactics to wrong-foot reporters.

Gene Policinski: For source of fake reporter ‘robocall,’ look under a rock

  I know where that fake Washington Post reporter robocall, with its anti-Semitic undertone, came from.

  From under a rock.

  It’s a rock where, no doubt, guffaws went around at seeing real journalists having to report on this shameful, bigoted prank.

  It’s a rock where, no doubt, those responsible for the prank are slapping themselves on the back for folding anti-Semitism in with an anti-news media tactic.

Jacob G. Hornberger: Iran's criminal justice system reminds us of ours

  The judicial procedures that Iranian officials are using in the criminal trial of Washington Post correspondent Jason Rezaian remind us of our judicial system here in the United States. No, not the federal judicial system here within the United States but rather the U.S. judicial system that the Pentagon and the CIA have established and operate at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Gene Policinski: With Post purchase, Bezos has chance to remake newspaper model

  Jeff Bezos made it clear in founding Amazon.com that he can compete in the marketplace.

  We’ll just have to wait and see if he can, and will, do the same thing in the marketplace of ideas — that equally combative zone protected and preserved by the First Amendment’s provision for a free press.

Gene Policinski: Watergate Era: ‘A’ peak in journalism

  Forty years ago this week, The Washington Post – and its self-described “young and hard-digging reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein” – took home a Pulitzer Prize for public service for coverage of the Watergate scandal.

  Other winners in journalism that year included the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times and Knight Newspapers, and entries from several local newspapers  –all part of what we today would call “mainstream media.”