Here’s the list of items that are eligible for Alabama’s Severe Weather Preparedness Sales Tax Holiday, which runs through the weekend. Many Alabama cities and counties near Northeast Mississippi have agreed not to charge local taxes on these items as well.
Trust in journalism never really crossed my mind when I started in broadcast journalism after graduating from the University of Southern Mississippi in 1992. At that time, most people trusted reporters. However, that trust has eroded significantly since then even though many traditional journalists still follow the standards taught in college and reinforced in newsrooms. (Among them are The Associated Press, Reuters and the Society of Professional Journalists.)
Because of that erosion, the group Trusting News started in 2016 to help journalists in general get that trust back. I subscribe to the organization’s weekly newsletter, and the latest one shared checklists that reporters could share to help people decide if something they see online is legitimate. Trusting News project manager Mollie Muchna wrote the following:
I have been retired from full-time journalism for about a year now. But when sharing news stories online, I still use those journalistic standards that guided me for more than three decades on the job. My hope is you notice that in the stories appearing on my social media accounts as well as on this website. I also hope you find the information that shows up when clicking on the images in this post helpful.
The state is again closing eastbound Highway 82 for more work on the bridge for Old West Point Road.
Traffic heading for Columbus on Highway 82 will be sent through West Point before drivers can reenter the eastbound lanes from Highway 45 North. Those driving from Columbus to Starkville will not be affected.
Governor Tate Reeves made the announcement of the federal ice storm aid approval Friday afternoon.
At this point in our country, great reporting isn’t a craft or a talent. It is a patriotic act. It presents the facts on which we can build a serviceable picture of what happened, of right and wrong. This steadies the civic mind.
What reporters do is hard—find human beings in the thicket, in the wild, earn their trust, convince them to speak, read opaque documents, decipher things, restrain their own views, get the facts accurately and then let those facts speak for themselves.
A little side trip here to Walter Cronkite, whose name is being mentioned a lot. “Everyone trusted Cronkite.” True. I knew him, he was human, and he wasn’t trusted because he had nice eyes or a nice way or a well-lit set or smoked a pipe.
People trusted him because for much of his career he’d been a workaday reporter at United Press International. And it formed him, shaped his journalism. UPI, the Associated Press and other wire services told America what was happening each day in the country and the world.
Here is what the wires taught you. Their product was purchased and had to be acceptable to every newspaper in the country—liberal and conservative, big city and small. So wire service reporters had to play it straight—get it first but get it right, facts are gettable, verification necessary. You disciplined yourself out of the story. Accuracy was all.
Because of that training, viewers could tell Cronkite was a professional operating under clear and continuing standards.
People think journalism is hopelessly tainted, just another partisan player, can never get its reputation back. Wrong. You can build it each day. You can open up a new account in the credibility bank, see it grow. When Cronkite said Vietnam was a failure, he was believed because he had a big personal account to draw on.
Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2026
An analysis by The Economist found strong links between media-muzzling and corruption. Looking at 80 years of data from about 180 countries collected by v-Dem, the news outlet found that a reduction in media freedom in a given country was a strong predictor that graft in that country would subsequently grow worse. This held true even after correcting for past and current levels of corruption, change in incomes and worldwide trends.
The full story can be read by clicking here (must be a subscriber).
Here’s what happened Friday night in Clay County where someone is accused of killing five men and one girl at three locations west of West Point by shooting each victim in the head. Information is from Sheriff Eddie Scott.
“And for me, almost 30 years, this is one of the toughest ones we’ve had to work.”
Clay County Sheriff Eddie Scott
“It really shook me because this is the worst one I’ve seen in ten years.”
District Attorney Scott Colom
You can watch the news conference with law enforcement courtesy of WTVA.
craigford.tv 