One evening in 1971, I drove out from the Post-Dispatch newsroom to join other young reporters in the living room of Charles and Rose Klotzer’s home in University City where we talked about the St. Louis Journalism Review, which they had just launched. The Post-Dispatch newsroom of that day looked a lot like what you’ve seen in movies such as The Post or Spotlight or All the President’s Men. There were side-by-side desks with mostly white men banging on typewriters and yelling “Copy” to hail a copy boy or girl to come running to transport a page of a story to an editor.
None of us in Klotzer’s living room — not the sage survivor of the Holocaust nor the young, eager reporters who had covered the anti-war and civil rights movements — had an inkling of what lay ahead. A tsunami of powerful technological forces would inundate the familiar news landscape of nightly TV news and big metro newspapers – bankrupting many and radically transforming the battered survivors.
Wave after wave of unforeseen and jaw-dropping technological advances broke over them. First there was the Internet, then the smart phone that put the internet and a camera in everyone’s pocket. Then came unregulated social media networks that didn’t check facts because they didn’t have to. Finally, artificial intelligence arrived, courtesy of a smart young John Burroughs graduate, Sam Altman, and other tech geniuses.
It was like Guttenberg’s printing press times four, with each revolutionary change compounding the impact of the previous one. The smart phone brought the internet to everyone’s pocket and purse where they could surf for social media networks to join the live, chaotic international exchange of news, information, gossip and disinformation. Once AI robots joined in, it became hard to know if the words on the screen came from a person or a machine.
Many of the new innovations were spectacular. Even as metro dailies fell off a financial cliff, hundreds of online nonprofits replaced them, and social media became a platform for distributing news and information.
In 2014, the story of a policeman shooting a kid suspected of a robbery in Ferguson, Missouri, was suddenly beamed around the world in millions of tweets, tiny nuggets of information and argumentation. News that once waited until the next day was tweeted in a moment, not having been read or checked by an editor or a copy desk. Copy desks were soon abolished. “Citizen journalists” tweeted reports, sometimes breaking news and often spreading rumors. Cable news went from dependable to highly partisan. KMOX’s community oriented At Your Service faded away. Fox seized a leadership role in broadcast, but had to pay almost a billion for knowingly reporting false claims about Donald Trump and the 2020 election.
Meanwhile, big city dailies closed and cut back. Washington bureaus, like the Post-Dispatch’s, disappeared as did and many newspaper foreign bureaus..
The reader or listener or viewer no longer knew if the information they were getting was reliable, whether it was the result of a reporter’s shoeleather or a machine’s algorithm. It could be a deep fake of photos that looked real but weren’t. Facts chased around the internet trying to catch up with the lies, while wide-eyed citizens grabbed on to intriguing but false conspiracy theories such as QAnon.
Topping off the abuse of the news technologies this month was the president’s AI-generated video of himself with a crown flying a top gun fighter plane, dumping brown waste on the heads of protesters in American streets – even as construction machines tore down the East Wing of the White House with hardly a warning. St. Louis’ Gateway Pundit, whom Paul Wagman revealed in the GJR to be a purveyor of false information about the 2020 election, got a press pass to the Pentagon, while real journalists refused the Pentagon’s terms requiring them to transform themselves into pr mouthpieces.
Who could have imagined?
Klotzer’s living room
Maybe George Orwell.
But certainly no one in the Klotzer living room in 1971 in the days before personal computers.
As Klotzer explains in this issue, his idea for the journalism review grew out of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Much of the Chicago and national media reported it as a student riot, but many reporters on the streets saw a police riot. Chicago started a journalism review and St. Louis and other big cities followed.
Citizen news councils and newspaper ombudsmen brought accountability to news rooms. Ted Gest, who was sitting next to me on the couch at the Klotzer’s, writes in this issue about how almost all of those accountability institutions have disappeared. Klotzer’s journalism review is the last one published in print in the nation.
Klotzer’s first issue contained a blockbuster.. The Post-Dispatch and Globe-Democrat had a previously undisclosed joint operating agreement under which they shared profits. It wasn’t the kind of news the papers wanted to spread around.
In 1971, the City Desk was a bustling place with more than a hundred reporters. It was almost all white and male and old. Ted Wagner and the veteran rewrite men would go off to Miss Hullings for breakfast after the first edition – although others traveled a shorter distance to the Press Box bar across the street to have mid-morning drinks.
Some of the jaded rewrite reporters would laugh when Ed O’Brien, the Globe-Democrat’s lone Washington reporter, beat the fancy pants crew of seven in the PD Washington Bureau. Sometimes news gathering by these rewrite men devolved into calling up the cops or city hall and asking – “The story on p-1 of the Globe – is it right?” If the answer was yes, the rewrite man would copy it.
Blacks and women were just arriving in the newsroom. Robert Joiner, Ellen Sweets, Fred Sweets, Don Franklin, Tommy Robertson, Tony Glover and Damian Obika joined the staff with Gerald Boyd, Sheila Rule, Kenneth Cooper and Linda Lockhart soon to follow. A number of the Black reporters were the product of the visionary Pulitzer scholarship at Mizzou. Cooper later won a Pulitzer prize covering school desegregation in Boston and Boyd won three Pulitzers as managing editor of the New York Times. Carolyn Kingcade became the PD’s top-ranking Black editor and Cynthia Todd the recruiter.
Most of the women, including my wife, Margie, had to start on what had been called the Women’s Page. Sally Bixby Defty, Connie Rosenbaum, Linda Eardley, Charlene Prost and Christine Bertelson were among the first women on the city desk. By the time Margie and I arrived on City Desk in the spring of 1972, there was a sprinkling of women in the rear rows. Margie, Sally Thran and Karen Van Meter were among them. The brilliant, irascible E.F. Porter Jr. sat among the women in the back to the section looking for ways to cause mischief, mostly with the editors. They were about 12 rows back from the editors and almost out of sight.
Martha Shirk soon joined the staff. She wrote about children as no other reporter in the country; her stories reformed Missouri’s handling of child deaths. Sally Bixby Defty was the first woman to lead the City Desk and provided a model for young female reporters, although she at first terrified me. Jo Mannies dished political scoops.
Mike Milner, the short, gruff, military veteran who was assistant city editor, was shocked when Van Meter, in her 20s, threatened to throw him out the 5th floor window for butchering her copy.
Seated in the front rows were the gray-haired or balding veteran rewrite men who took stories from legmen on the beats. They were the graying princes of the newsroom. Eardley once described them as “row after row of white men typing, smoking and screaming.” Reporters on the beat would call them from pay phones and give dictation.
Ted Link, the mob reporter, sat behind me. He never said anything to me and I never said anything to him. I was too intimidated. I did notice that he put a revolver in his desk drawer every morning. A Jefferson County deputy once told me Link was so plugged into news about the underworld that he once reported a hit before it happened. I think it was an apocryphal story.
And there were fisticuffs. John J. Hynes, was a friend of Link’s. Hynes, an intimidating presence at 6-foot-6, had covered the mob too after a stint with the CIA. Once, upset at a young rewrite man, Dana Spitzer, Hynes stalked down 12th St. and punched him. Another time, the otherwise mild-mannered political reporter Fred Lindecke punched the Globe’s John V. Colt in Jefferson City because Colt had broken the release time on a press release.
Ignoring civil rights
Even though the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had outlawed sex discrimination, newsrooms weren’t paying attention. This was before Betsy Wade Boylan sued the New York Times. It was six years before the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and the same year Title IX passed, advancing women’s rights.
Newspapers openly discriminated. When my wife tried to get a job at the Boston Globe in 1971, the interviewer asked why he should hire her when she would just get pregnant. He could do that. It was legal.
The Post-Dispatch didn’t always live up to the Pulitzer Platform in its coverage of civil rights. The second Joseph Pulitzer favored Brown v. Board but cautioned editorial editor Irving Dilliard not to push for desegregation of hotels and restaurants. When Richard Dudman happened upon a civil rights sit-in in the 1950s at a downtown department store and excitedly rushed back to the paper, he was told not to cover that kind of story for fear of riots. The managing editor had the first floor of the building bricked up to guard against the riot that never came.
James C. Millstone, a mentor to many of us, filed stories on the Civil Rights Movement in the South, but his dispatches never ran as written but were blended into wire stories – to his horror. Coverage of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream speech” was buried far down in the story. The liberal editorial page patronizingly advised the Jefferson Bank demonstrators in 1963 to pull back from blocking bank entrances, lecturing, “does it not not owe the business efforts to end discrimination a chance to prove successful?”
They didn’t notice that the Jefferson Bank protests were a turning point and would lead to the election of the first Black congressman, Bill Clay.
And in 1972, when Percy Green’s ACTION group unmasked Monsanto VP Tom K. Smith Jr. as the Veiled Prophet, the Post-Dispatch joined the Globe in keeping his identity secret.
It was Klotzer’s journalism review that revealed the story.
One of Klotzer’s goals was to provide more honest coverage of police brutality.
One day in 1972 Charlie Prendergast, a beloved executive city editor at the Post-Dispatch, assigned me to investigate the death of Joseph Lee Wilson in police custody. Wilson was white. Police said he had fallen off a barstool; Mike Royko, the witty Chicago columnist, quipped the barstool must have been on top of the John Hancock building. Prosecutors confided that the damage to Wilson’s ribs was in the shape of an imprint of an officer’s shoe. But no officer would talk and no officer was charged.
As Prendergast sent me off on the story he gave me a final warning. He opened the bottom left drawer of his desk and pointed to a stack of stories. He told me it was a big project on racism that never had made it into publication. Make sure you don’t make the same mistake, he cautioned.
It wasn’t the only time a big racism project at the Post-Dispatch failed to make it into print. A months-long project in 1999 also never saw the light of day. And when the Beacon tried to line up media partners for its Race Frankly series a decade later, some media executives said it was “too soon.”
Globe in league with Hoover’s FBI
Meanwhile, the Globe-Democrat was an accomplice of J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO undercover intelligence program intended to hound King into killing himself. One 1968 document obtained by the Post-Dispatch read:
“The feeding of well chosen information to the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, a local newspaper, whose editor and associate editor are extremely friendly to the Bureau and the St. Louis Office, has also been utilized in the past and it is contemplated that this technique might be used to good advantage in connection with this program.”
Another read: “The St. Louis Globe-Democrat has been especially cooperative with the Bureau in the past. Its publisher [name deleted] is on the Special Correspondents List.”
And just before King’s assassination in Memphis, the Globe carried an FBI ghost editorial complete with a misspelling. The March 30, 1968 editorial read: “Memphis could be only the prelude to a massive bloodbath in the Nation’s Capitol [sic]”
The only blood spilled in Memphis was Dr. King’s.
(For a more detailed account of how the press flubbed coverage of the Civil Rights Movement, see our special issue on race.)
The Globe, where Pat Buchanan wrote editorials before becoming a Nixon speechwriter, also attacked Dudman, the Washington Bureau Chief. Dudman reported from Vietnam about the Pentagon’s lies about the war and obtained the Post-Dispatch’s copy of the Pentagon Papers on a tip from I.F. Stone.
Dudman had reported after a trip to Vietnam, “The South Vietnamese government…may be losing and the Viet Cong winning.” Nixon blew up. A week before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, Alexander P. Butterfield relayed to Henry Kissinger Nixon’s view that “Dudman is a ‘violent leftist’ and that these statements are completely opposite from the truth.”
The Globe ran an unheard of front-page editorial – “For America or For Hanoi” – essentially calling Dudman a traitor. Nixon put Dudman on the Enemies List.
On its news and editorial pages the Globe championed Juvenile Court Judge Gary Gaertner who had replaced Theodore McMillian, a splendid Black judge who went on to serve on the federal appeals court. The Globe praised Gaertner for bringing down crime after years of McMillian “coddling” young criminals. It turned out some of the court’s top staffers were horrified by Gaertner’s operation of the court. Gaertner and the Globe were cooking the figures on juvenile crime and Gaertner even was holding juveniles in custody to keep control of detention cells.
A court source mentioned Gaertner had appointed the publisher of the Globe, G. Duncan Bauman, to serve as “guardian ad litem” in some cases. This was a cushy, well-paid court appointment. I was having trouble confirming the tip. But Rep. Bill Clay volunteered to help get court records through his patronage employees in the circuit clerk’s office. Those records proved payments of taxpayer money to Bauman.
But the Post-Dispatch wouldn’t run my story even after it was confirmed because it was critical of the competitor’s publisher. So I went to Klotzer, who gladly published the story on Bauman. One day, shortly after the story published and our first son was born, a box arrived at our house from Washington. Clay had sent a flag that had flown over the Capitol to mark our son’s birth and publication of the story.
Klotzer’s SJR not only reported on the Globe/Hoover connection and Bauman’s shenanigans, but it also criticized the Post-Dispatch, most often from the left.
When the newspapers went on strike in 1973, Klotzer worked with Lou Rose, Roy Malone and others in publishing the strike newspaper St. Louis Today. Klotzer’s daughters remember the excitement in the house with young reporters arriving and going downstairs where the work was being done. Miriam Rushfin says, “The strike paper was a pretty wild time, and you can feel the excitement…so reporters and kids were constantly coming up and down (the basement steps.). You could tell that everyone was excited to be working together and that this was something unusual and special.”
Through the 80s and 90s Klotzer held monthly brunches with reporters and community leaders. Mark Sableman, a media lawyer at Thompson Coburn, says he was drawn to SJR by these rich discussions, first at the Forest Park hotel and later the colorful basement of Balaban’s with its paintings of nudes on the wall.
Documentarian Tony West says it was these discussions that led him to investigate the serious radiation exposure of Mallinckrodt workers that resulted in his 2015 film, “The Safe Side of the Fence” — and the compensation those workers received.
“It’s like throwing a pebble in a lake and it makes ripples…. Charles helped me and I am a ripple and that film and everyone who got helped through watching that film are ripples as well.” Klotzer “taking the time to ask me to come to those meetings, all these people have been touched…..we helped a lot of people.”
Russian Roulette
The Post-Dispatch’s Charlie Prendergast, a graying but cheerful editor, always told us, “Let’s get something done.” I found that journalism was an effective way to get things done.
Paul Wagman and I helped clean out a brutal Maplewood police department where Thomas Brown had been shot dead in the police station in 1977 and other officers forced suspects to play Russian roulette with guns in their mouths. Gov. Christopher S. Bond sent me a pen he had used to sign a bill reforming the bail system. The head of the St. Louis pound, a color announcer on the Football Cardinals broadcasts, quit soon after a story about how he spent most of his time running his tavern – a story that required many hours of drinking beer at his bar. Monsanto Co. ended its questionable political contributions program after I met confidentially at a hotel near the airport with a top executive who provided a checkbook showing Monsanto’s Washington lobbyist directed executives’ donations to CREEP – the Committee to Re-elect the President.
I lucked out and spent a day in 1972 observing lax security at Lambert; it happened to be right before Martin McNally hijacked a plane and parachuted from the rear with his cash. When a judge ordered the St. Louis School Board to negotiate with the teachers union, I put my ear to the door in the Jefferson hotel room where they were negotiating and got a scoop. The judge laughed the next day that I had overheard how the mediators excoriated the School Board for a proposal “straight out of the 19th century.” When the South County bomber frightened St. Louisans in 1977, a six-pack of Michelob outside the hotel door of a St. Louis County cop got me a big scoop – the boyfriend of the first victim had been seen at later bombing scenes.
There were threats along the way. I started getting calls from Franklin V. Chesnutt who announced he was a card-carrying member of the KKK – literally a card carrying member because he sent me his business card and threatened to burn a cross on the lawn. City desk got a bomb threat in connection with stories about bail bondsmen. Wagman – my partner on Maplewood police stories – started getting threatening calls at home, sending him to a friend’s house to spend the night. I put plastic tape on the door to our garage in Parkview because I was covering car bombings involving labor leaders connected with the mob.
So in 1980 I welcomed the idea of going to Washington and covering the Supreme Court.
But there was only one job and two of us – actually about to be five of us as our third child was on the way. Margie and I had a new idea. We proposed splitting one job. That way we could each have time with the children and keep our careers going.
Dudman, the bureau chief, was a liberal but had strict ideas about work. He wasn’t so sure about our proposal. One night, at a dinner party on his front porch, he asked his friend, Betty Friedan, what she thought. She told Dudman it was exactly what she was writing about, the second wave of feminism.
Dudman became a believer the day Reagan was shot. Margie went to George Washington Hospital. Close to midnight I loaded our kids into a Barwood taxi and met her at the hospital. She took the kids, I took her notes. And Dudman got what he always wanted – a reporter who could work 24 hours a day without sleeping.
Joseph Pulitzer Jr. called it “our little experiment.”
Some of us in the Washington Bureau joined Laszlo Domjan and other St. Louis reporters to dig deeply into dioxin contamination in Missouri. “Dioxin: Quandary for the ’80s may have been an exaggerated headline. But it was a big story and part of the even bigger scandal at Reagan’s EPA.
Another Washington reporter, Charlotte Grimes, told the tragedy of five nuns from Ruma, Illinois, who were murdered in Liberia in 1992. Rob Koenig brought us back pieces of the Berlin Wall. And Sawyer, following in the steps of Richard Dudman and Marquis Childs, traveled the world, writing stories a reporter couldn’t get from the safety of the American consulate. He was there with photographer Odell Mitchell Jr. for Nelson Mandela’s triumphal election in 1994.
Bill Lambrecht wrote about the environmental degradation of Native American lands when no one else was paying attention. Most people still aren’t.
The editorial page helped block Attorneys General John Ashcroft and Jay Nixon’s attempts to kill the St. Louis school desegregation plan and it crusaded for the sales tax that continued it for two decades into the 21st century.
In the tradition of Irving Dilliard, Richard Dudman and Robert Lasch’s pieces exposing the folly of Vietnam, Sawyer and the editorial page challenged the false narrative that weapons of mass destruction justified the invasion of Iraq.
Cole Campbell’s spectacular fall
Cole Campbell became editor of the Post-Dispatch in 1996 after the paper’s gentleman editor, William Woo was forced out. Woo had made his mark as an editorial writer. Several times Woo was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. No other paper in the country was graced with the elegance of the column Editor William Woo wrote weekly to readers that blended family, community and national issues.
Campbell was different. His editorship was tumultuous and short. Harry Levins likened his demise to the Caine Mutiny and sent Publisher Terry Egger a copy of that novel after Egger forced Campbell out in April 2000.
Don Corrigan wrote in the St. Louis Journalism Review about the drastic shift from Woo, a leading opponent of ‘public journalism” to Campbell, a leading evangelist. And Ellen Harris wrote a damaging 1998 SJR story about Campbell’s scandalous social affairs.
Trying to head off the story, Campbell wrote Ed Bishop, then SJR’s editor, that if he published any statements that Campbell had made decisions for “personal reasons, that would be libelous on its face.” Campbell denied this was a threat to sue but added his legal understanding had been “confirmed … in connection with this inquiry with counsel for the Post-Dispatch.”
It didn’t help Campbell’s reputation that a few years later the Pulitzers had to send attorney Bob Hoemeke of Lewis Rice to apologize to a top editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune for Campell making a pass at his wife.
By the time Campbell arrived at the annual James C. Millstone Memorial Lecture in March 2000 and joined a discussion with Gerald Boyd — former Post-Dispatch reporter and The New York Times managing editor — Campbell looked haggard and was deeply unpopular.
Boyd did not want to debate Campbell about public journalism. But Campbell immediately took after the Times as a paper for “elites” drinking Bombay martinis. He said elites buy the Times “so at cocktail parties they can say to each other: ‘Did you see the story about such and such in The New York Times?’ And then they can say: ‘Yes, I did see that.’ And then they give each other high fives and say, ‘We are elite. We are elite.’”
Although Campbell bragged about being a debating champion, it was Boyd, who grew up bagging groceries in North St. Louis and attending Soldan High School, who won the day.
Egger, the publisher, asked for a recording of the exchange with Boyd. He also met at the Missouri Bar & Grille with Levins, the respected writing coach, McClellan, the star columnist, Carolyn Tuft, an investigative reporter, and John McGuire, a legendary feature writer. As Alicia C. Shepard reported in the American Journalism Review, Levins told Egger, “We are the officers from the Caine, and this time we are not going to chicken out.”
A few days later, on April 5, Campbell was out.
One person who stabilized the paper during this era was Managing Editor Richard K. Weil, long a source of good judgment in the newsroom. Campbell pushed him aside toward the end of his editorship. Weil should have been managing editor far sooner than he was and Campbell’s decision to push him aside was foolhardy.
After the PD
When it became known that the Pulitzers were selling the Post-Dispatch, Jon Sawyer, Bob Duffy, Margie and I had a truly bad idea — an employee buyout. Jon and I sat through a meeting one afternoon during which financiers told us how easy it would be for an employee-owned PD to take on $400 million in mezzanine debt — whatever that is.
Suffice it to say we didn’t get too far and Pulitzer sold to Lee Enterprises. Emily Pulitzer, the chief stockholder and a friend, invited our buy-out group to lunch at a fancy club and nicely said this was the only sensible way to go.
Whenever we think back on our crazy idea, we breathe a huge sigh of relief that we failed. The 2005 sale date was the moment newspapers fell off a cliff. The Pulitzers walked away with $1.46 billion, while Lee Enterprises ended up filing for bankruptcy by 2011.
The class of 2005 was what Richard Weiss called the big cohort of reporters and editors leaving the PD at the end of that year. We joined the communications revolution and started online news operations. Many of us started the St. Louis Beacon in 2008 with Margie as editor, Weil chair and Bobby Duffy fundraiser extraordinaire.
Meanwhile Sawyer had started the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in D.C. and soon was joined in that enterprise by his wife Kem. The Pulitzer Center has become a burgeoning new media nonprofit telling untold stories from abroad and at home. It is the biggest source of funding for international reporting in the country.
Emily Pulitzer was key to both startups.
Margie decided to try again to publish a race project at the Beacon. She travelled around town to line up media partners. Many said it was a good idea but all had reasons they could not participate. One media executive actually said it was “too soon” to write about race in St. Louis.
The Beacon ended up publishing the project with the Missouri Historical Society as a partner. It was called: Race Frankly, which included my stories on Kirkwood’s racial Journey. Charles “Cookie” Thornton had killed five officials in the Kirkwood City Hall in 2008.
I spent a year listening as people in my hometown described the racial hurt they still felt from racial discrimination. Harriet Patton, the strong leader of Meacham Park, told of a junior high teacher at Nipher ripping up an English essay she had worked hard on as a child. The teacher ripped it up because it was too good — no Black child could have written it without cheating, the teacher claimed. A few years later when Mizzou’s doomed president Tim Wolfe tried to block the Beacon’s merger with St. Louis Public Radio, Emily Pulitzer and other St. Louis civic leaders were again key to closing the deal.
As a result, the Beacon and St. Louis Public Radio newsroom had merged by the time of Ferguson and provided some of the best coverage. St. Louis Public Radio devoted the entire staff to Ferguson reporting, curating a live blog to keep up with the rapid news developments. Stories on the legal aspects of the grand jury investigation and a multi-media recreation of the events won national prizes and the station launched the “We Live Here” podcast on race and class.
The Post-Dispatch had begun shrinking, but who can forget the PD photographers’ Pulitzer-prize images of the Ferguson protests or Tony Messenger’s Pulitzer winning columns that grew out of an enlightenment brought on by Ferguson.
GJR published a special issue showing that Ferguson was a journalistic revolution that marked the triumph of the citizen/activist journalist over the traditional mainstream media. Gone forever was the day when an editor at the Post-Dispatch or KMOX could decide a black kid killed by a police officer on a Ferguson street wasn’t big news.
The first tweet reporting Michael Brown’s death was two minutes after he crashed to the pavement on Canfield Drive. There were five million tweets in the week after Brown’s death and
35 million in the months that followed. There was no putting this story back in the bottle.
Protesters with cell phones seized the national agenda, told the story from their points of view, knit together a new national civil rights movement and scratched the scabs off the nation’s racial scars.
The Black Lives Matter movement came alive and journalists here and across the nation realized that what they had done to cover civil rights was not enough, just as what the nation has done to remedy the sins of slavery and segregation was not nearly enough. In the Front-Page days of Ted Link, the police reporter on Saturday afternoon would have just called up the Ferguson police and asked, “Anything happening?” I know. It was my job. The police would almost always say, “Everything’s quiet.”
Police shooting a suspect from a strongarm robbery on a Saturday afternoon in the middle of summer wouldn’t have made the front page on a Sunday paper back then. The story — which would have been based entirely on what police told a reporter — might not have been published until the following week, if at all. It would have been forgotten by mid-week. But the communications revolution had changed everything. Never before in America had a story exploded so fast from the people who were disenfranchised.
The Twitter story had big mistakes. The “Hands up, don’t shoot” story was false, as I reported on KWMU and in GJR. No credible witness saw or heard that. But an essential truth emerged about white police officers killing black suspects. And it awakened journalists to the wider truth about race in America and their responsibility to finally tell the truth about it.
The journalistic legacy of Ferguson includes Weiss’s River City Journalism Fund, Jeremy Kohler’s disclosures about police misconduct for ProPublica and Marshall Project’s new local newsroom focused on police and the justice system. Yet when GJR wrote a 10- year retrospective last year, it found that the arc of the moral universe was veering away from justice.
A quirky history
This memoir leaves out many great stories and people with a big impact and is slanted toward events and people I knew best. I apologize for its egocentricity. It is not a balanced history. So it’s a quirky recreation of some important events, leaving out many others — Pat Rice’s coverage of the Pope’s trip to St. Louis, the sports and photo staffs’ great work on the World Series, Vahe Gregorian’s singular Olympics coverage to say nothing of the Rams’ Superbowl and Blues’ Stanley Cup. Kevin Horrigan was a terrific sports editor and editorial writer. He and I competed each year to write the most editorials; he always won. Harry Levins had a gift for making complicated things simple and Tim O’Neil for bringing St. Louis history alive. And Bill McClellan was the franchise player as the local columnist. Dave Nicklaus and Jim Gallagher have outlasted us all at the Post-Dispatch covering business, which also was the domain of Roland Klose and Ed Kohn.
I confess my contributions to sports and business were nothing to brag about — poor coverage of the purchase of the Rams and later complicity in a terrible editorial stand favoring taxpayer support for the new Busch Stadium. Nor am I proud that I pushed aside the views of my Black colleague Robert Joiner in backing Bill Clinton’s welfare reform, which hurt welfare recipients, and the St. Louis business community’s decision to bring in a Brooks Brothers executive to fix the St. Louis public schools, which he most definitely failed to do.
Fifty-five years after we convened in the Klotzer living room, 11 years after Ferguson, five years after police murdered George Floyd, we have all sorts of unimaginable electronic tools to tell our stories, but we are surrounded by lies, deep fakes, callous and casual human rights violations, a weakening of the rule of law and a general confusion among the people about what and whom to believe.
We continue at the journalism review to help distinguish between a protester riot and a police riot, between the Globe-Democrat publication of the FBI editorial editorial on Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the truth, between the Gateway Pundit’s fiction about Black women in Georgia stuffing ballot boxes and the incontrovertible evidence that Trump lost the election, between the fabulous fiction that Jan. 6 demonstrators were sight-seeing rather than trying to help Trump overturn the fair results of the election.
We continue what Charles Klotzer began. As his daughter Ruth Baruch put it, “These authoritarian, these big things aren’t going to control what it says. It’s always trying to speak the truth or get underneath it.”
William H. Freivogel is the publisher of GJR, the only journalism review left in the country that still produces a quarterly print magazine.
