Bob CollinsWe can pretty well guess what NPR ombudsman Elizabeth Jensen’s next column is going to be about. It’s going to be about whether NPR should have given seven minutes of national radio time on Thursday evening to Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who coined the term ‘alt-right’. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Archives for November 2016
If there’s anyone who deserved a good retirement, it’s Buddy. And that’s what he’s getting today at age 30.
Buddy is a therapy horse with We Can Ride, a Minnetonka therapeutic horseback riding program for people with special needs. Read more →
In the wake of a decision by a federal judge today, here’s a pro tip for attending a baseball game: Stop looking at your phone during the action. Read more →
There have been plenty of ballyhooed high school athletes in Minnesota over the years and Grace White should be one of them.
This week she signed a letter of intent to play Division I basketball with the University of Denver, becoming the first Red Lake reservation athlete to play an NCAA Division I sport.
Read more →
Just as sure as the sun will rise in the east, the baseball awards season will lead to people calling for baseball writers to get out of the business of voting on postseason awards. Read more →
It’s unclear if Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., intended for her snapshot of the meeting of the House Republican Caucus, of which she’s chair, to go viral today, but it has. Read more →
Northfield council members, except one, affirmed the college town’s “commitment to be a safe, inclusive and welcoming community for all.” Read more →
If the election 2016 was an opportunity for a comprehensive discussion of health care insurance, the nation failed badly. Instead, it was a debate over a word and a general concept — Obamacare. You’re either for it or you’re against it.
That’s too bad because there are people — Republicans and Democrats and everyone in between — who are suffering under the byzantine health insurance system, just as they suffered under it in the pre-Obamacare days. Read more →
Instead of complaining, journalists should be bringing value to the conversations that now occur without us, a journalist argues. Read more →
‘The world is watching’ is one of those cliches uttered so often that we can occasionally forget that, indeed, the world is watching.
The kids of Maple Grove, who responded to racist graffiti last week by posting welcoming letters to other students, were likely focused only on their fellow students.
But the world was watching. Read more →
Melvin Laird, the secretary of defense under Richard Nixon, died today.
A lot of old-timers probably weren’t even aware the Carlton College alum was still alive, except that his name has come up a few times in the last week as an example of why a president’s cabinet choices are pretty important.
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In public radio, ‘politicians and pointyheads’ tend to dominate. So it can be jarring to hear from people who are neither. Thus the term public radio.
There were some flaws in how NPR covered the campaign, sure, but it would be unfortunate if people walk away from the notion that hearing from people living their lives is something requiring apology. Read more →
If you’re like a lot of people on planet Earth this week, you’ve spent a lot of time looking at the moon, which is closer to Earth this week than the last time it was this close to Earth. Read more →
It was considered a criminal offense to try to pay taxes with a bad check in Minnesota. Until today. Read more →
Katherine Cramer, a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, has been traveling to specific towns in rural Wisconsin for about 10 years and she says the results of last week’s election was about respect — or the lack of it — for rural areas more than anything else. Read more →