Category: news

Seeking to stand out for 2027

Delbert Hosemann got the attention of Mississippi voters in his 2007 campaign for statewide office through a campaign commercial where a woman continually got his first name wrong.

That commercial opened the door to him winning three terms as secretary of state and two terms as lieutenant governor.

Now, another political candidate hopes a campaign video out 20 years later will lead to him becoming Mississippi’s next secretary of state.

Shuwaski Young has published a video where he is seen shooting a semi-automatic rifle to go along with photos of him serving in the National Guard and text that says he is a Christian and a conservative.

The video with him holding and firing guns may seem unusual for someone seeking to become the state’s chief elections officer and the overseer of 16th section lands.

However, this will be Young’s first political campaign running as a Republican after running as the Democratic nominee in previous bids for secretary of state and for Congress.

The 2023 campaign for statewide office ended when he dropped out of the race for health reasons. He lost the race for the U.S. House to Republican incumbent Michael Guest in 2022.

In those campaigns, Young made reference to working in the administration of President Barack Obama. The biography on his website for the 2027 race makes no reference to Obama. Instead, it mentions his public service under Democratic and Republican administrations.

The run as a Republican may give Young his best chance of winning his first election. The GOP secured a lock on all statewide offices after Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood lost his 2019 bid for governor.

A victory would also make him Mississippi’s first Black statewide official since the 1800s.

But GOP state Sen. Jeff Tate of Meridian has already said he is seeking the same job that Republican incumbent Michael Watson is expected to give up in a run for higher office. And others may jump into the race as well when qualifying opens next year.

Still, Young is making moves now more than a year before the party primaries. That includes a Monday evening appearance in Tupelo before the Lee County Republican Women.

What Senator Roger Wicker says about Iran

NewsNation

Who can you trust with the news?

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:

As it’s becoming harder for people to recognize fair, ethical, accurate information, our responsibility as credible journalists is increasing. Our job and public service duty as journalists is to help meet our community’s information needs. And in this moment, that need includes helping our audiences navigate news and make educated decisions about who to trust.

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.

Super Bowl Sunday detour in the Golden Triangle

The state is again closing eastbound Highway 82 for more work on the bridge for Old West Point Road.

This will start Sunday morning and run for nearly 24 hours. The closure will again only affect the eastbound lanes from the Highway 45 Macon exit to Main Street in Columbus.

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.

The firm working on the bridge told The Commercial Dispatch more work will be required on the bridge after this weekend. However, that future work will not shut down eastbound traffic.

On journalism

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

When press freedom erodes

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).