Ronald E. Yates 
Our society seems obsessed with labels. Take the word “Hero,” for example. It is applied in the most absurd and inappropriate ways to people who don’t deserve that distinction. When Whitney Houston died in 2012, for example, I couldn’t believe people were calling her a “hero.” Why? Because she was …
The other day, I had a long conversation about the state of American journalism with a couple of friends. They told me, in no uncertain terms, that they don’t believe anything they hear, read, or see when it comes to the news today. “It’s all propaganda and what isn’t propaganda …
Today, I am sharing my blog with historian Victor Davis Hanson, a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness as well as Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. In his commentary, Prof. Hanson asks the following compelling question: America went from the freest country in the world in December 2019 to …
Those of us who have been in the news business for more than a few years (for me, it’s more than 30 years) have learned a hard truth in the past decade or so: There has been a palpable shifting of the lines between what we learned journalism ideally should …
I’ve always been fascinated by the future. How will it look? How will people live? How will they travel? How will medical advances change their lives? What will be the most significant changes? Recently, I received an email that attempted to answer some of those questions. Here’s one peek at …
FLASH! FBI Asks Americans to Inform on Family Members and Friends What? Can that headline be correct? Regrettably, yes, it’s true! The Federal Bureau of Investigation is morphing into America’s version of Nazi Germany’s Gestapo. In a tweet on July 11, the FBI asked Americans to spy on “family members …
Well, what do you know? America is dead last among 46 nations in public trust of news media. Why am I not surprised by this? For most of my 28 years as a reporter, editor, and foreign correspondent with the Chicago Tribune, America’s news media were generally respected and trusted. …
Today, I am running a column that I posted a while back about the sorry state of American journalism. Historian Victor Davis Hanson wrote it in 2019, but much of its content is still quite current. You will find Hanson’s complete bio at the end of the post. For the …
For writers and those who are struggling to be writers, there is no shortage of rules, guidelines, tenets, and imperatives all calculated to turn you into a bestselling author. They are often daunting and overwhelming and in some cases a bit terrifying. But mostly, they are unnecessary. Yes, I said …
Occasionally I reprint stories I wrote while working as a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. Here is one I wrote from Bangkok, Thailand in 1985. It examines the attitudes some Asian countries have toward Western (read “American”) culture—specifically, its music, its films, and what some consider its promiscuous lifestyle. …