Opinion WASHINGTON, D.C. – Last Saturday, student journalists at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting told stories from around the globe about religious persecution, sex trafficking and the hopes and dreams of refugees and migrants hunting for a better life across an ocean, or gulf or invisible national border. They were hopes sometimes realized in…
Analysis For the first time in 23 years, southern Illinois was paid a visit by the President of The United States of America on Saturday, October 27. Thousands of people came from across the Heartland to see President Donald Trump as he spoke at the Southern Illinois Airport in Murphysboro, Illinois. The previous president to…
At a campaign rally in Montana on Oct. 18, U.S. President Donald Trump openly praised a politician who assaulted a journalist. There is not a single word in that sentence that could be described as fake news. Trump was in Montana. There was a campaign rally. And video and audio reports, including one from Fox…
The public ambulance service in the small northwestern Illinois village of Hanover was used to working in private. When Galena Gazette reporter Dan Burke asked its governing board for meeting agendas and minutes, it refused. When citizens asked for a budget, personnel qualifications and a list of purchases, it also refused. Citizens’ rights to demand…
Fifty years ago, in the summer of 1968, I was working on my hometown newspaper, the Rock Island Argus. Smithsonian magazine called it a year “that shattered America.” The Kerner Commission, after months of research, declared “white racism,” not black agitators, the primary cause of widespread urban violence the year before. On March 31, Lyndon…