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James Fallows

James Fallows - James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States, and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. His latest book, China Airborne, will be published in May.
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James Fallows is based in Washington as a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has worked for the magazine for nearly 30 years and in that time has also lived in Seattle, Berkeley, Austin, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, and Beijing. He was raised in Redlands, California, received his undergraduate degree in American history and literature from Harvard, and received a graduate degree in economics from Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. In addition to working for The Atlantic, he has spent two years as chief White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, two years as the editor of US News & World Report, and six months as a program designer at Microsoft. He is an instrument-rated private pilot. He is also now the chair in U.S. media at the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, in Australia.

Fallows has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award five times and has won once; he has also won the American Book Award for nonfiction and a N.Y. Emmy award for the documentary series Doing Business in China. He was the founding chairman of the New America Foundation. His two most recent books, Blind Into Baghdad (2006) and Postcards From Tomorrow Square (2009), are based on his writings for The Atlantic; he is at work on another book about China. He is married to Deborah Fallows, author of the recent book Dreaming in Chinese. They have two married sons.

Fallows welcomes and frequently quotes from reader mail sent via the "Email" button below. Unless you specify otherwise, we consider any incoming mail available for possible quotation -- but not with the sender's real name unless you explicitly state that it may be used. If you are wondering why Fallows does not use a "Comments" field below his posts, please see previous explanations here and here.
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Why can't Murdoch just buy (and dismantle) the WSJ ed page?

By James Fallows

Jul 17 2007, 6:01 AM ET

I hate to say anything bad about the Wall Street Journal on the day when, it appears, the Bancroft family has decided to view one of the world's great newspapers as "just another asset" to be liquidated to Rupert Murdoch.


So perhaps the Journal's editorial page is trying to soften the blow and prevent golden-age nostalgia by reminding us that it has no standards at all.



Last week, the US edition of the Journal was widely ridiculed for publishing a chart that violated every rule of honest data interpretation. (For anyone who hasn't already seen it, link below from Economist's View site. The curve drawn by the Journal was an attempt to offer "proof" of the Laffer-curve effect: that rising tax rates meant falling revenue. Of course a line through the heart of the data, not the outlying point of Norway, would suggest just the opposite.)



Yesterday, undiscouraged, after three days of such criticism, the Asian edition of the Journal published exactly the same chart.


The pre-Murdoch Journal: a first-rate newspaper surrounding a few pages of agitprop. In the Murdoch era?????

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