| Thanksgiving weekend is a good time to take it easy and digest recent news events. In that spirit, here are some thoughts to nibble on: --President Obama caused a storm last week regarding immigration, but the most important thing his administration is doing on that front is secret, dangerous and no less controversial. The Wall Street Journal says U.S. marshals, who serve under the Justice Department, are donning Mexican Marine uniforms and helping in armed raids against drug dealers and other gangsters. Agents from the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration also help in a supporting role. Mexican officials deny it’s happening. They probably worry about a backlash in public opinion, considering Mexicans generally don’t want U.S. officials wielding guns in their country. The U.S. isn’t anxious to talk about it either, but a raid last July ended with a U.S. Marshals employee being wounded, making it difficult to keep the operation completely secret. |
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 The New York Times has published an investigative piece about how a hit-and-run accident involving a star football player at Florida State University apparently was swept aside, with help from Tallahassee police. It was improperly investigated and charges were reduced to a pair of minor traffic citations, all without the media or the public ever knowing.
The saga, involving FSU cornerback P.J. Williams, is all too familiar. As my research for a column three years ago demonstrated, colleges and their  It has been 53 years since FCC Chairman Newton N. Minow described television as a “vast wasteland.” His larger point was that TV ought to choose instead to focus on “education and culture,” as well as “decency and decorum.”
But if TV in 1961 was a wasteland, what is the Internet today? A wasteland on steroids, perhaps? If anything, it has magnified some aspects of the American story that have been with us for a century or more, and not in a good way. The case of #AlexfromTarget is exhibit A in this discussion. You may not have heard of this Internet phenomenon (my audience tends to skew a bit older than the teenage crowd). As the hashtag implies, Alex was an employee at Target — a 16-year-old part-timer who attended high school in Frisco, Texas. He was an unassuming,  A colleague with a well-developed sense of civic duty came to me last Tuesday after voting in his precinct. Why, he wondered, had he even bothered?
Not a being a resident of Utah’s fourth congressional district, he faced a ballot with no real races. His choices consisted mainly of candidates with either no opposition or a token opponent who couldn’t be taken seriously. His only real choices involved three statewide constitutional issues. Looking around the country, this sounds
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The author
Jay Evensen is the Senior Editorial Columnist of the Deseret News. He has nearly 40 years experience as a reporter, editor and editorial writer in Oklahoma, New York City, Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. He also has been an adjunct journalism professor at Brigham Young and Weber State universities. Archives
November 2020
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