Breaking News

Editorial

Senate must revive bill to preserve local journalism

Last week, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act was pulled from Senate consideration after Sen. Ted Cruz managed to squeeze in a bill-killing amendment during committee markup. The JCPA was introduced to give small- and medium-sized newspapers and broadcasters the ability to collectively bargain with tech giants like Google and Facebook that have been unfairly using news producers’ content for their own gain, even as Big Tech gobbles up the lion’s share of advertising revenue that newspapers and broadcasters need to stay afloat. As tech companies and their platforms ...

The legacy of Sept. 11

The average college student has no true memory of Sept. 11, 2001. Neither do current high school, middle school or elementary school students. They were too young — if they had even been born yet — to remember the day two planes took down the twin towers of the World Trade Center, while another crashed into the Pentagon and yet another nosedived into a field in Pennsylvania. Twenty-one years after the day that changed the United States, America’s youth have no memory of the catalyst, but they have lived their entire lives in the aftermath. They have never known a world in which ...

Forgiving student debt will help W.Va.

President Joe Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan (should it be implemented) strikes a valiant compromise between those who preach fiscal responsibility and those who’d like to see all student debt erased. Biden’s plan forgives up to $10,000 for borrowers making less than $125,000 annually ($250,000 for married couples). Individuals who’d received Pell Grants (awarded based on financial need) can get up to $20,000 in student debt forgiven. Certain policy changes will help current and future borrowers. There are plenty of objections: It’s not fair to everyone who has ...

‘Forever chemicals’ in W.Va.’s water

As you may have heard, the U.S. Geological Survey recently released a report on the presence of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in West Virginia’s water. The study came at the behest of the state Legislature and was done in conjunction with several West Virginia agencies, including the Department of Environmental Protection. If “PFAS” is ringing a bell, it may be because we’ve addressed it in this space before — or because you watched the movie “Dark Waters,” about the DuPont plant near Parkersburg that poisoned residents for decades. “PFAS” is an ...

No, Gov. Justice, we don’t need new lakes

In typical Jim Justice fashion, the governor threw out a half-baked answer to a serious question about flood prevention during his anything-but-COVID briefing Aug. 23: “West Virginia needs to build lakes,” he said, “lots of them.” Lakes can and do help with flood control and prevention. However, the answer isn’t to create more of them. The biggest reason is that creating a lake from scratch often means flooding entire communities. There’s a website called “The Atlas of Drowned Towns” dedicated to West Coast communities that were flooded and destroyed in pursuit of ...

Important things to know about monkeypox

With almost 17,000 confirmed cases of monkeypox, including four in West Virginia (at the time of this writing), and Morgantown’s Pride events kicking off this weekend, it’s time to address the latest viral sensation and the perceptions around it. According to Johns Hopkins, monkeypox is an orthopox DNA virus related to smallpox, though milder. Contrary to the name, rodents are the primary carriers of this particular disease, not monkeys. Although monkeypox is largely unfamiliar to the Western world, it has regularly spread among the general population in several African countries ...