In the fall of 2010 I wrote a daily road blog for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as I retraced the 10,000-mile trip around the USA that John Steinbeck took in 1960 and turned into his best-seller Travels with Charley. My blog and links to videos I shot as I performed my drive-by journalism are reprinted here.…
Read More ...Pittsburgh’s Phantom Pandemic
OK, OK, though it’s getting less likely every day, I know the coronavirus could still flare up. But so far, since early March and as of April 20, there have been a total of 55 Covid-19 deaths in Allegheny County, where the city of Pittsburgh is located. In a county population of 1.3 million Steelers…
Read More ...Radio Rant: Our Top Journalists Failed to Question Wild-Ass Covid-19 Predictions
At the 60-minute mark of this podcast from Dan Proft, a smart radio talk-show guy in Chicago at AM 560 the Answer, I’m interviewed about the failure of our media to question the sky-high projections of U.S. Covid-19 deaths by disease modeler Prof. Neil Ferguson of Imperial College in London. Bill’s interview with Dan Proft…
Read More ...The New York Post vs. the New York Times
I’ve always used the wild and crazy and fun and reader-pleasing journalism of the New York Post and the smug, serious, boring, good-for-you journalism of the NY Times as the two ends of the newspaper spectrum. In the interest of maximum reader satisfaction, during my 30-plus career in newspapers — you remember them, don’t you…
Read More ...Dead Mag Walking — Time’s Hit Piece on Sweden’s Other Way of Fighting the Coronavirus
Maybe part of the reason Time magazine has become so irrelevant is that its journalism stinks. For decades Time and its weekly cousins Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report were the go-to-places to read continuing in-depth coverage of presidential races and world-shaking events like 9/11 and our serial wars in the Middle East. The…
Read More ...Bill's Q&A's
Q&A: Tucker Carlson, before he became King of Cable — and GOP presidential timber
Bill Steigerwald is a veteran journalist from Pittsburgh. His new nonfiction book "30 Days a Black Man" tells the amazing but forgotten story about an undercover mission by a Pittsburgh newspaperman into the Jim Crow South in 1948 that shook up the whole country. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette star reporter Ray Sprigle's nationally syndicated series "In the Land of Jim Crow" exposed the iniquities and humiliations suffered by ten million black Americans in the segregated South. It shocked the white people of the North, angered the South and started the first national debate in the media about ending America's legal apartheid. Kirkus Review said "30 Days a Black Man" is "a fascinating account of an anti-Jim Crow muckraking adventure..." that Steigerwald turned "into rollicking, haunting American history." ... READ MORE