Benjamin Barber, publicat a The Huffington Post, el 9 de novembre de 2009.

In the orgy of Reagan revisionism and capitalist triumphalism that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago, we have largely forgotten how and why the Cold War came to an end. It would be almost impossible to discern its real origins from today's Disney style celebration of the "Mauerfall" that began on Thursday evening with musical celebrities (e.g., Bono and Beyonce) and the European MTV awards in front of the Brandenburg Gate and ends this evening in the same place with a gala featuring political celebrities (e.g., Hillary Clinton) and sundry Nobel Prize winners (e.g., Gorbachev), a performance of Beethoven's Ode to Joy (the Ninth Symphony) and a symbolic wall happening. A thousand large painted domino blocks stretching from Pottsdammerplatz to the Reichstag (that have actually divided the two Berlins again this week since cars can't get through!) will topple domino style -- sort of the way the Eastern bloc countries and then the Soviet Union did after November 9, 1989.

Hendrick Hertzberg, publicat a The New Yorker el 2 de novembre de 2009.

One of the most successful politicians of the first century before the Christian era was Marcus Licinius Crassus, who was reputedly not only the richest man in Rome but also, by one accounting, the eighth-richest man who has ever lived. His fortune was pegged (by Pliny the Elder) at upward of two hundred million sesterces. Most of those millions were in real estate, some of it acquired in a manner strikingly like the operations of health-insurance companies a couple of millennia later. Crassus had his own private fire department, and if your house caught fire his representatives would offer to buy it on the spot, at a one-time-only, fire-sale price that would fall rapidly as the flames climbed. If you said yes, you’d get a few sesterces, after which Crassus’ firefighters would do their thing. If you said no, you’d end up with a pile of ashes. (No public option being available, few owners were in a position to quibble.)

The Obama White House’s decision to challenge Fox News appears driven equally by strategy and frustration. It is also a test case for politicians in both parties.

That is because partisan fragmentation throughout America’s news media and their audiences has grown significantly. Future Republican presidents will have to decide, as Team Obama has, how to buck or accommodate that trend.

Fox News has attracted the most attention because of its “fair and balanced” challenge to its competitors and its success. But the audiences of its competitors have tilted sharply in the other direction. (This reporter is chief Washington correspondent for CNBC and hosts “The New York Times Special Edition,” a program on MSNBC.)