Category Archives: Blog

Constitution Day

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We celebrate September 17 as Constitution Day, marking the day in 1787 when delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed the Constitution of the United States in Philadelphia.

I remember when I first studied this great document. You couldn’t graduate from the eighth grade in the Chicago Public Schools without passing an exam on the Constitutions of the United States and the State of Illinois. In class of O’Keeffe Elementary I was fascinated by the text and the little we learned of the history. And I have remained impressed today, after much more detailed study in college and graduate school, and as I teach First Amendment law to young journalists.

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Who is to Blame for Trump?

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Why write about Trump, you ask? Everybody is writing about Trump. True. And you will have to be the judge of whether I have anything of value to add to the discussion. But everywhere I go Trump is the main topic of debate. And the debate is about as heated and uncivil as anything I’ve ever seen.

I had a journalism professor, the late John Patterson, who hated clichés. If you were in the mood for a good yelling at all you had to do was begin a stand-up with the phrase, “It remains to be seen”.

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To Blog or Not to Blog?

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That has been the question for quite some time. Once, long ago on a planet far away, I was at the bleeding edge of technology. I moved from my hometown, Chicago, to New York in 1989 to begin a new job as New York Bureau Chief and Senior correspondent of the public television program Nightly Business Report. Among the many hats I wore I found myself reporting most of the stories about technology and trying to convince my bosses to employ as many of the new technologies as possible.

We created a “page” on America Online when AOL was the center of the online universe. That was before the Internet was opened up to commercial and general public use. I remember hosting a “live chat”, a novelty at the time, from Microsoft Headquarters  in Redmond, Washington. I had gone there interview Bill Gates and report on the release of Windows 95 with the first appearance of Microsoft’s web browser, Internet Explorer.

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