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Mike Hendricks

Mike at Night

Mike Hendricks recently retires as social science, criminal justice instructor at McCook Community College.

The end of an era

Friday, May 24, 2019

When I was a kid growing up in Atkins, Arkansas, there were two state newspapers operating daily, both from Little Rock. The Arkansas Gazette ran in the morning and the Arkansas Democrat ran in the afternoon. We only subscribed to the morning paper and I remember reading it was the first thing I did after I got up in the morning. I would spread it out on the kitchen table, turning first to the sports section and literally read every word in that section as I drank my orange juice and ate my breakfast. There was nothing like reading the morning paper (at least the sports section) to get your day started off right. I later found out that the Gazette was the more liberal of our two newspapers which I thought was interesting since the more conservative newspaper was named the Democrat. On top of that, there were only three television networks that delivered national news in a news program and those were CBS, NBC and ABC. During my early years, the programs were only 15 minutes each but eventually expanded to 30 minutes as I got older and major cities publishing two different newspapers were slowly but steadily dropping one of them. There were things happening both politically and personally around the country that the news media didn’t think was the business of the public and so they kept them quiet, believing they knew better than the people did about what we should or should not know. We didn’t find out about Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy’s dilly-dallying around on their wives until years after the fact. We found out about Bill Clinton’s immediately.

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