Analysis For the first time in 23 years, southern Illinois was paid a visit by the President of The United States of America on Saturday, October 27. Thousands of people came from across the Heartland to see President Donald Trump as he spoke at the Southern Illinois Airport in Murphysboro, Illinois. The previous president to
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
The public ambulance service in the small northwestern Illinois village of Hanover was used to working in private. When Galena Gazette reporter Dan Burke asked its governing board for meeting agendas and minutes, it refused. When citizens asked for a budget, personnel qualifications and a list of purchases, it also refused. Citizens’ rights to demand
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
