Ronald E. Yates's Blog, page 27
December 11, 2022
A Lesson on Gun Control from Wounded Knee
Recently I received an e-mail reminding me that December 29 will be the 131st Anniversary of the murder of 297 Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. These Native Americans, in their winter camp, were murdered on Dec. 29, 1891, by federal ...
December 8, 2022
A Life Behind the Lens: Val Mazzenga’s Incredible Journey as a Photojournalist
During my 27-year career with the Chicago Tribune, I rubbed elbows with some of the best journalists in the world. Anthony “Val” Mazzenga, my friend and colleague at the Tribune, was one of those. Val passed away on December 2, and with his death, one of the greatest careers ever ...
December 6, 2022
Elon Musk’s Censored “Twitter Files” & Miranda Devine’s “Laptop from Hell”
I was getting ready to post today on Elon Musk’s release of damning emails regarding the Biden crime family. Then I read the column below by former Chicago Tribune colleague and columnist John Kass. John left the Tribune a little more than a year ago, the victim of “cancel culture” ...
December 4, 2022
Are American Voters Uninformed or Simply Stupid?
During the Obama administration, MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, one of the chief architects of Obamacare, said the “stupidity of the American voter” and a “lack of media transparency” were critical to the passage of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Needless to say, Gruber’s comments ignited a firestorm of outrage. But ...
November 30, 2022
The Challenges of Writing Historical Fiction: Part 3
During a recent “virtual book tour” with several book bloggers, I was asked what three lessons I learned while writing my Finding Billy Battles trilogy. It was a good question because it caused me to stop and think about the fiction-writing process in a way I never had before. Here ...
November 29, 2022
The Challenges of Writing Historical Fiction: Part 2
When I was signing copies of my Finding Billy Battles trilogy at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books recently, I was asked several times how I conduct research when writing historical fiction. I explained that researching the Finding Billy Battles trilogy began with my memories. I grew up in Kansas ...
November 28, 2022
The Challenges of Writing Historical Fiction: Part One
Those of us who write historical fiction are faced with a plethora of unique challenges. In fact, there are so many that it would be difficult to deal with all of them in one post. So I will break the challenges down into several parts, which I will share with ...
November 27, 2022
Journalism in Crisis: The War on Dissent
As those who follow my blog know, I spent most of my life as a reporter, foreign correspondent, and editor with the Chicago Tribune. After almost 30 years as a professional journalist, I entered academia as a professor of journalism and dean of the College of Media at the University ...
November 23, 2022
Celebrate Thanksgiving with a fact feast
I received this interesting little note from USAFacts and thought I would share it with my followers and subscribers. I found it interesting. I hope you will also. Today is Thanksgiving, and USAFacts has been busy cooking up dessert. The 7 days of pie buffet has returned for a wide-ranging, ...
November 21, 2022
Jogging With the Greatest
I posted the following piece a few days after the death of Muhammad Ali on June 3, 2016. When I was teaching journalism at the University of Illinois, I used to tell the story of how I went jogging with Ali on Chicago’s South Side in 1974. My students always ...
