The media, in effect, now operates on two levels. One includes a small group of companies or non-profits with the financial muscle to serve elite national and international audiences. The other — a potpourri of failing or struggling, well-known or little-known, journalistic organizations serves the rest of us. Scrupulous and devious operators alike percolate on both levels.
Read MoreA four-year-old effort by journalism entrepreneur Steve Bill and Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, NewsGuard grades news organizations on their editorial integrity much in the same way Standard and Poor grades corporate finance or J.D. Powers differentiates a car that sizzles from a lemon.
Read MoreI covered the fight against inflation during the late 1970s and 1980s, much of the time as the chief economics correspondent in Washington for the Chicago Tribune. The Fed had put its muscle behind the Philips Curve — a theory that the central bank could lower unemployment by tolerating high inflation to goose the economy.
Read MoreIn 2013, Paul Salopek took his first steps out of Ethiopia on an epic 24,000 mile walk following man’s migration out of Africa to populate the world. Paul is currently in China. He is one of the few outsiders in the Middle Kingdom, trudging up mountains, across ancient trade routes and through rural villages where he shocks local populations who’ve never seen a white man.
Read MoreI can still see Paul Volcker sitting at his desk twirling an unlit cigar in his hand. He was a gruff man who didn’t smile much and the comments he made that day give me pause about current headlines that herald easing inflation. The interview was off the record, probably a reason that Volcker spoke so candidly. But he and Neikirk have passed away, and I think neither wouldn’t object to this report on our conversation.
Read MoreSalopek suggested we focus on something everyone’s learned from engaging with people as we walked Chicago and the globe: How the concept of “Home” meant different things to different people in different places. “Perhaps your home is not a house,” Paul wrote, “but a special place, such as a street corner where you played as a kid, or a park where you first fell in love in one of the city’s seventy-seven neighborhoods.”
Read More“This was the Church’s greatest achievement in Ireland,” O’Toole writes. “It had so successfully disabled Irish society’s capacity to think for itself about right and wrong.” Priests, politicians, parents, bothers, and sisters shielded themselves from the misconduct surrounding them, embracing the idea of the “unknown known,” the phrase Donald Rumsfeld employed in claiming the lack of evidence linking Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to weapons of mass destruction. “Ours was a society that had developed an extraordinary capacity for cognitive disjunction.
Read MoreI’ve always felt the worst thing Donald Trump has done to our country is to lower standards of many Americans. By using Twitter to churn out lies and distortions, he prompts responses by Americans of a better nature to sink to his level. He represents a president of the lowest common denominator. Nowhere is this more currently evident than in journalism where some staff members of The New York Times castigated opinion editor James Bennet, and forced him to resign for publishing a piece by Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas.
Read MoreI think it’s hard for many people to understand the systematic racism that triggers violence in America. It’s a bias that most of us, particularly people like me, never think about because we don’t experience it every day, week, or month. That’s why we at CityXones wrote the story of Amorita Falcon for the Crain’s Forum series on long-term problems facing Chicago. She’s a 24-year-old ‘Latinx woman who spends as much — or more — time getting to her job in the Loop as colleagues who live twice as far away as the crow flies.
Read MoreGrowing up on the North Side of St. Louis, I had a friend named Phil whose Dad was a banker and a Republican. Since I lived in a working-class neighborhood, I thought everyone belonged to a union, was a mailman, cop or fireman and, above all, Irish, Catholic and a Democrat. Poor Phil, I thought, must be tough to be a minority. Phil was a Lutheran, too!
Read MoreNormally, I don’t just pass along information I come across about a subject as serious and alarming as COVID-19. I’m a journalist who deals in facts and treats mere claims with considerable skepticism. Years of dealing with “miracle cures” of all sorts as an editor at newspapers taught me to tread carefully when dealing with subjects such as vaccines, more properly the domain of scientists and epidemiologists.
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