By SCOTT LAMBERT / Jeffrey Sterling is the afterthought. The 1989 Millikin University graduate with a law degree from Washington University is now little more than a footnote as media rush to defend Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist James Risen in his battle against the U.S. government.
I fell in love with the Alton Telegraph newsroom. Who wouldn’t, with its dangling cables, stacks of yellowing newsprint, reference books – that’s right, BOOKS – on cabinets with wheels and reporters’ desks adorned with the bric-a-brac from years of school-board meetings, election nights and city council debates?
A bridge! A bridge! Abridged? The recent opening of a new bridge over the Mississippi River at St. Louis got grand coverage from the city’s television news stations. Footage of the sparkling span dominated morning reports by Fox News Channel 2, KMOV Channel 4 and KSDK Channel 5 on the Friday before the official opening on Feb. 9. Cheerleading, in fact, was in top form as anchors and reporters gave testimony to an engineering achievement accomplished with admirable efficiency. It was a good story about civic progress. But the journalists’ day job – reporting – was noticeably, ah, abridged.
While almost all state trial courts allow some level of still and video camera coverage of court proceedings, the rules on usage of modern communications devices and techniques – blogging, tweeting, texting and emailing using cellphones, tablets and other devices – are a wild patchwork of policies which vary from state to state, courthouse to courthouse, and often even courtroom to courtroom. An example of this is in two wildly diverging policies adopted in late 2012 in Kansas and Illinois’ Cook County.
Despite the decline in the number of political endorsements made by Midwest newspapers, editorial editors still think the process is a civic duty. There is some disagreement, however, as to the influence of endorsements on voters.