By Ted Gest >> In the fast-paced media environment of 2025, how has news coverage of the courts evolved since the classic portrayal of “The Front Page”? The Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur drama in the 1920s was set in the press room of Chicago’s criminal courts building, where cigar-chomping, card-playing reporters phoned in sensational stories about
By William H. Freivogel and Ted Gest A new Missouri law passed last year deletes the names of victims and witnesses in court documents making Missouri courts the least transparent in the nation, experts say. Among the witness names deleted are police officers. Eugene Volokh, a nationally known libertarian legal commentator, called the law “a
The first assignment that David Bowes got when he joined the St. Louis Post-Dispatch 61 years ago was to cover a coroner’s inquest for Maye Trainor, the city’s premier madam and hostess to Babe Ruth when Ruth’s New York Yankees were in town. In the years that followed he interviewed Dr. William Masters, the sex
The growth of the internet and the economic decline of mainstream local media have combined to give news consumers a very mixed bag. The paradox is that the volume of information available on many important subjects has exploded while the accuracy of much of it has diminished, as many of the traditional “news gatekeepers” have
It started with a maddening statistic. Missouri has ranked first or second for 11 years as the state with the nation’s highest rate of African Americans who die in homicides. The Washington, D.C.-based Violence Policy Center says that 57 Missouri Blacks per 100,000 people were killed in 2017, nearly triple the national average. Typically, news
