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…
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…
A century ago, the First Amendment was taking its first, tentative breaths of life. The protection of speech, protest, religion and the press had been in the Constitution for 120 years, but no one had won a First Amendment claim in the Supreme Court. It was a nasty time. Americans exited World War I shell-shocked…
Opinion During Watergate, President Richard M. Nixon claimed he didn’t have to turn over the White House tapes because the constitutional separation of powers “precludes judicial review of a President’s claim of privilege.” In other words, Nixon claimed the court couldn’t even consider whether he had to turn over the tapes. The Supreme Court disagreed. …
Opinion Donald Trump is unfit for the office of president because he threatens core American values, ignores hard-won lessons of history and assaults the constitutional role the press and truth-telling play in our democracy. He delegitimizes the press by calling it fake and the “enemy of the people.” He invents an alternative reality – Spygate…