News organizations have been babbling about “diversity” since before the flood, but if you want to see two “diverse” journalists being taken seriously at the same time, you have tune in to rare venues like MSNBC’s “Up with Chris Hayes.”

For two hours every Saturday and Sunday morning, Hayes and his experts-of-the-week drink coffee and dig deep into issues that demand extended attention, but rarely get it in today’s attention-deficit disordered media-verse.

Saturday’s show featured the Miami Herald’s Joy-Ann Reid and the Tampa Bay Times’ Tia Mitchell. These young, gifted and black women joined two academics with stellar credentials and unpronouceable names for a lengthy, thoughtful, and nuanced discussion of Florida governor Rick Scott’s stunning 180 on “Obamacare.” Read all »

Roy Boldt, 81, was acting so strangely last Friday that a concerned friend called the police.

By the time they tracked him to Clare Bridge of Tequesta, the assisted living facility that was now home to his wife of 56 years, Roy, an Air Force veteran and long-retired commercial pilot, had fatally shot Virginia, and then himself.

“My parents were wonderful people, and gravely ill, and got to the end of their rope,” their son, Jacksonville dentist Paul Boldt, told The Palm Beach Post’s Eliot Kleinberg.

The Boldts met as children in Queens. Years laters, they taught their children how to sail off the south shore of Long Island. After Roy retired in 1979 from his post-military career flying for U.S. Airways, they bought a large home on two acres in Palm City. There, they welcomed a growing pack of grandchildren and made beautiful music on his-and-her pianos. Read all »

As we’re about to host our program tomorrow night “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby?” we’re delighted to run this piece on one of Florida’s finest – and toughest – women.

Lucy Morgan didn’t aspire to a career in journalism. Like many women of her generation, she married as a teenager and planned to live happily ever after.

Not too long later, she was a single mother in Middle of Nowhere, Florida with a high school education and three small children. Her entertainment budget consisted entirely of a public library card.

That card would be her ticket to the storied career which Suncoast Tiger Bay Club will honor at a banquet on January 30.

It was 1966 and the Ocala Star-Banner was looking to hire a reporter. Asked by an editor if she had any suggestions, the librarian told him about a young woman “who reads more books than anyone I have ever seen.” Read all »

When the Grim Reaper finally came for Eugene Corbett Patterson, the 89 year old Pulitzer Prize winner surely did not blink. Fear was not in his character and anyway, he had seen death before.

Patterson had always been a man of great ambition, and as he prepared to meet his Maker at his St. Petersburg home, the dying editor started and brilliantly finished condensing the King James Bible. It was an old newsman’s last service to seekers of truth in an attention deficit disordered world.

In the decade from 1978-1988 when Patterson called the shots at the St. Petersburg Times, Florida journalism was widely recognized as the best in the world, and the St. Petersburg Times was recognized as Florida’s best newspaper by everybody who didn’t work for the Miami Herald.

Death had tried and failed to claim Patterson when he was a 20 year old tank commander at the Battle of the Bulge. In General Patton’s 10th Armored Division, Patterson learned verbal, sartorial and blood and guts elements of style that would inform how he led by example from the Ardennes Forest to the hour of his death. Read all »

News does not have a virgin birth. It is not delivered by the Stork.

News is midwifed by people whose egos are large enough to support the notion that what they think is important is what all of us should think is important.

It worked pretty well when the news was delivered exclusively by editors and broadcasters who had spent decades earning the respect of the communities in which they reported.

These days, the bonds between journalists and communities are frayed. Established media brands change beat reporters and sometimes ownership as frequently as Taylor Swift changes boyfriends.

Pressured to squeeze bigger profit margins out of shrinking staffs, some publishers confuse old school muckraking with just plain muck. Read all »

Ft Lauderdale—As a writer of spy novels, Bob Graham is no threat to Ian Fleming. As a statesman, the former three-term U.S. Senator and two- term governor is the best of the best.

Graham’s novel, Keys to the Kingdom, is the hail-Mary pass of a dedicated public servant working way beyond the call of duty and well outside his comfort zone to provide the world with the unvarnished, uncensored truth about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

As Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and Co-Chair of the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11, Graham became convinced that the Saudi government has the blood of September 11th on its hands.

Specifically, the Saudis created a social and financial infrastructure stretching from Sarasota to San Diego which made it possible for the 19 hijackers —who had no fluency in English, no ties to America and no visible means of support—to live in anonymity amongst us as they prepared to shatter our domestic tranquility. Graham is chillingly persuasive in making the case that this infrastructure is still here and remains capable of unleashing new horrors on American soil. Read all »

“Bubbe couldn’t stand an injustice, “ or so it was always said of Fanny Richardson, the great-grandmother after whom I’m named.

She was born in the Old Country and spoke only Yiddish. She had four daughters, one son, and no formal education. Bubbe was what was called a “poor relation” in pre-Social Security America. After her husband died, she shuttled among her five children, cooking briskets and playing canasta with her grandchildren.

Bubbe would fix after school snacks and listen intently for hours as the little girl who grew up to be the endlessly patient grandmother of my children gave minute-by-minute accounts of her day.

Bubbe did not live to see that little girl become a speech teacher, a television personality, and the first woman everything in Florida’s state university system. But Mom never forgot her debt to Bubbe. Read all »

“People always think they’re behaving ethically, even when they’re being hauled off in handcuffs,’ said Democrat editorial page editor-turned-Leon County Commission candidate Mary Ann Lindley at the Florida Chamber Foundation’s community conversation on ethics last week, co-sponsored by The Village Square and the Collins Center.

Paid professional ethicists, students, political people and garden variety taxpayers gathered at the Challenger Learning Center to consider the effects of ethics — or lack of ethics – on the economy.

If Sydney Greenstreet in Casablanca had Power Point and an IMAX theater screen, he’d have given Florida Chamber Foundation President Dale Brill’s lecture. “There’s a role for corruption in the marketplace,” said Brill as he scrolled through a series of slides that proved it.

Far from endorsing bribery, Brill was merely restating recurring themes of human behavior familiar to readers of the Bible and viewers of cable news. If Greenstreet was central casting’s version of the tribal elder in every community who knows which people are for sale, and at what price, Brill is the avatar of 21st century professionals who make the business case for ethical behavior.

There are more of them than you think.

The Ten Commandments were good enough for God and for a long time, the Twitter version—do unto others—sufficed for the rest of us. But these days, America alone has 130 academic “ethics centers” with more on the way. In addition, there’s a small army of private consultants like Jonathan Low, who joined Brill in making the case that “it makes for a bad economy when “your customers, suppliers, lenders and investors don’t trust you.”

Low’s company, Predictiv Consulting, serves clients all over the world but his home is in Palm Beach County, which earned the name “Corruption County” as a parade of city and county officials were perp-walked out of their offices and into prisons in recent years.

Whether you’re talking about communities or corporations, believe Low when he says that much of its reputation resides with the folks at the top. If you’re looking for a sustainable business, or political career, there had better be no air between what you’re doing, and what you say you’re doing.

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Florence Snyder is a corporate and First Amendment lawyer. Contact her at lawyerflo@gmail.com

Photo credit: George Bannister

Editor’s note: Tomorrow we host Dr. Byron Johnson, author of “More God, Less Crime” at Faith, Food, Friday. In the beginning of his book, Dr. Johnson tells a pretty convincing story about how he was discriminated against in his academic career over his religious beliefs. The person responsible for bringing Dr. Johnson to town is the very Reverend Allison DeFoor (a close friend of the author) mentioned in this piece. The irony of that required a peanut gallery observation: Perhaps we’ve got ourselves in a bit of a do-loop, with aggressive behavior begetting aggressive behavior – lather, rinse and repeat endlessly? And perhaps it’s a cycle we could reverse? Read all »

For anyone who has lived with or been around mental illness—and who has not?—Melancholia is a must-see movie.
 
The characters are richer and better looking than we are, but we have all been to the wedding at the center of this film. You don’t need a medical degree to know that the bride, Justine, is seriously unstable; you would be, too, if you’d grown up in her family. Read all »

Tonight, tonight…
 
Moviegoers will have the chance to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the film version of the groundbreaking Broadway musical West Side Story with a one-night only screening in theaters nationwide. 
 
Socialist movers, Ayn Rand shakers, and every politico in between should do us a favor and see it.
 
Most performing arts fans know that West Side Story is a scene-for-scene retelling of the Romeo and Juliet story.  The 20th century makeover of Shakespeare’s tragic tale of star-crossed lovers separated by their warring clans is set in a 1950s Manhattan slum.  Read all »

I know it’s fall when the Walgreen’s flu shot reminder arrives in my mail.
 
This time each year, I take my personalized, computerized paperwork and thirty bucks cash on the barrelhead to my neighborhood Walgreen’s. In minutes, the friendly staff pokes my arm and sends me on my way to a respiratory distress-free holiday season. Read all »

As Tallahassee’s pols, pundits and power brokers gathered around the TV last Thursday to reinforce opinions they’ve already formed about the job performances of President Obama and Congress, a far more uplifting show unfolded at Ruby Diamond Auditorium. 

Filmmaker Spike Lee was in town to give his director’s cut on the meaning of life.  The crowded house of mostly FSU-FAMU-TCC students hung on his every word.  The kids’ eyes widened and their heads nodded in recognition as Lee, 54, described the recessionary summer between his sophomore and junior year.  Read all »