Category: Media

Press flubs first draft of history of race

The press’  rough draft of the history of race in St. Louis, Missouri and Illinois got most things wrong. In the early 1950s, a group of young civil rights activists – Irv and Maggie Dagen, Charles and Marion Oldham and Norman Seay – led a CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) sponsored sit-in of lunch counters

The Land of Dred Scott: Scenes from our racist history

The nation’s fight about the meaning of America’s great promises of freedom and equality played out at St. Louis’ Old Courthouse in 1850 and before huge crowds in the seven Illinois towns during the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858. It took the death of 750,000 men to settle the issue. Five paragraphs beyond those stirring words

Limbaugh destroyed media’s credibility

Rush Limbaugh was never a journalist. But he did more to harm journalism than any other human being in the last 50 years. Limbaugh was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom Feb. 4 during the State of the Union. Democrats sat flabbergasted while Republicans cheered. It was the perfect moment for a State of the

E.F. Porter Jr., iconoclastic Post-Dispatch reporter dies at 88

Eliot F. Porter Jr. was a one-of-a kind. He was a brilliant thinker and writer. He was crusty, cantankerous, infuriating and funny. Sometimes at the same time. I first met Porter in 1971 when writing about his work as technical secretary to Lewis Green, the head of the Missouri Air Conservation Commission. Green and Porter