Media
Layoffs mark end of era at Post-Dispatch
Ninety-nine years after Daniel R. Fitzpatrick became the editorial cartoonist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, that proud history of.
Ninety-nine years after Daniel R. Fitzpatrick became the editorial cartoonist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, that proud history of.
The Illinois General Assembly failed this month to change the state’s tough eavesdropping law even though federal and state courts have said it violates the First Amendment. Currently, audiotaping without the permission of everyone involved in a conversation is a felony in Illinois, making it unlawful for citizens to tape encounters with police.
Last month, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Illinois law – viewed as the toughest in the nation – could not be enforced as written because it barred recording of public officials’ actions in public. The decision was handed down just before the NATO meeting in Chicago, which attracted large protests and citizen-police confrontations.
For a time late last month, Rush Limbaugh succeeded in abusing copyright law to get YouTube to take down a Daily Kos video stringing together the insulting remarks he made about Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student who became a featured player in the contraception controversy a few months back.
The video stitched together short excerpts of Limbaugh calling Fluke a slut and a prostitute who should videotape herself having sex. Limbaugh apologized (sort of) after he began to lose advertisers. But when Daily Kos helpfully put together a greatest hits of Limbaugh’s comments, Limbaugh used copyright law to demand that YouTube take down the video.
John Jackson, a veteran political scientist at the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University, recently told a room of newspaper editors that the media are partly to blame for the misperception held by most residents of Southern Illinois that they don’t get their fair share from the government.
Almost eight of ten residents of the 18 southern counties in Illinois told Simon pollsters that they got less than their fair share in state spending. Jackson says that clearly false belief results partly from shallow media coverage.
Last week the Missouri House passed a bill that the sponsor calls the Whistleblower Protection Act. The law actually removes protections from whistleblowers rather than enacting them. This is the latest version of a bill commonly called the Enterprise Rent-A-Car bill because the Clayton, Mo. firm has been lobbying to weaken whistleblower protections for the past six years. Earlier versions of the bill have passed but been vetoed by Gov. Jay Nixon.
Enterprise has made weakening whistleblower protections a top legislative priority ever since the firm lost a whistleblower lawsuit filed by its fired corporate comptroller, Thomas P. Dunn. Dunn testified that he was fired after taking the position that Enterprise was not following the accounting principles required of a public company. At the time of the dispute, around the time of the Enron debacle, Enterprise was planning to go public, although it later decided against that course. To go public, it needed Dunn to attest to the company’s adherence to generally accepted accounting principles.