Posts Tagged accountability
The Deficit That Matters
Posted by Sheila Kennedy in Public Policy and Governance on October 10th, 2011
I know I’ve been beating this horse for awhile now, but I am firmly convinced that the most troubling deficit Americans face is not fiscal. It’s our deficit of civic literacy. Only 36 percent of Americans can correctly name the three branches of government. Fewer than half of 12th grade students can describe the meaning [...]
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The Shadow Government
Posted by Sheila Kennedy in Public Policy and Governance on October 4th, 2011
A fair amount of my academic research has addressed issues of government privatization–or more accurately, contracting out. (Privatization, as Morton Marcus frequently notes, is what Margaret Thatcher did in England: selling off government enterprises to private sector owners. In the US, privatization means providing government services through for-profit or nonprofit contractors–a very different thing.) My [...]
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Fact-Check the Talking Heads
Posted by Sheila Kennedy in Random Blogging on January 4th, 2010
One of the most persistent complaints about broadcast journalism–a complaint that comes from both left and right–is the practice on shows like Meet the Press, Face the Nation, This Week, etc. of asking questions of their guests, allowing those guests to answer, and then moving on to the next question. The hosts rarely challenge even the most obvious [...]
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A Very Tangled Web: Public and Private Redux
Posted by Sheila Kennedy in Academic Papers on April 14th, 2009
A Very Tangled Web: Public and Private Redux A Cautionary Tale Terre Haute is a mid-sized town on the western border of Indiana. In 2007, it held municipal elections, and voted in a new mayor, Duke Bennett. Bennett had defeated the former mayor, Kevin Burke. Shortly after the election, Burke sued to have [...]
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