Category: Scoop
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Living and working in Washington, D.C., was special. As a young VP of News 40 years ago, one of my favorite things to do was visit the Vietnam and Lincoln Memorials at night. I would take a visiting job candidate there after dinner. We’d walk over to the Vietnam Memorial Wall first. It seemed that…
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Sparker’s Soapbox has released Vote Smart Collier County: A Nonpartisan Guide for Collier County Voters, which provides factual, nonpartisan information about how local, state, and federal government are structured and how Florida’s election system operates. As Collier County continues to attract new residents from across the country, many voters arrive unfamiliar with how government is structured here…
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One can imagine what it must be like for a political party when the realization finally sinks in, that moment when it’s clear its actions fail to meet the promised expectations. It’s like a huckster realizing the mark isn’t buying the con. Worse still, it’s when the audience knew it was being played long before…
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“One of the things that will happen, as surely as the sun will rise, is that someone will lie: Your governments will lie to you. Sometimes unknowingly, but more often on purpose.” — Ben Bradlee The late Washington Post editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee made that statement to a group of journalists at a 1990 conference in Prague.…
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The modern world of sports media looks completely different from the one Marc Appleman entered in 1983, when he became a sportswriter for the Los Angeles Times. The veteran sports journalist joined the Press Club of Southwest Florida Newsmaker Luncheon at Lujack’s on April 24, where he discussed how he has witnessed the industry’s transformation…
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Hopefully, Will Rogers was watching from heaven when Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche was recently interviewed by Major Garrett on CBS Morning News. Blanche appeared on the program to discuss the grand jury indictment of former FBI Director James Comey. Garrett once again demonstrated he is a superb journalist. Blanche, however, showed something else altogether.…
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At the time of this writing, the gunman who attempted to crash the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night did so less than 12 hours ago. Already, the conspiracy machine is spitting out its usual slop: Trump’s “people” staged the event. Fine. Any story can fall under the umbrella of possibility. But our truth-based…
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The Press Club of Southwest Florida will welcome veteran sports media executive and author Marc Appleman as its featured speaker at the Newsmaker Luncheon on Friday, April 24, 2026, at Lujack’s Restaurant in Naples. The luncheon begins at noon at Lujack’s, located at 7935 Airport Pulling Road North, Suite 20. Registration opens at 11:30 a.m. Click…
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I keep thinking about something the historian Yuval Noah Harari said recently, matter-of-factly, but with the weight of history behind it: In the contest between fiction and truth, fiction usually wins because “…the competition between fiction and truth, fiction least politically, usually wins because the truth is just too painful and too complicated.” Not because…