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…
Supporters of the Stars and Stripes news organization are sending a letter to members of Congress asking them to support funding of the 159 year-old institution, which was founded in Missouri in the middle of the Civil War.Kathy Kiely, Lee Hills Chair of Free Press Studies at the University of Missouri Graduate School, and Brian…
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…
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…
Three out of every four American adults are fooled by fake news headlines. That was the finding of a survey authorized by BuzzFeed. I found that too when I started BD Fact Check, Bangladesh’s first fact-checking organization. I was looking for a model to identify fake news. Fake news stories have more engagement than real…