Mark White

As you might have guessed, how to cover a worldwide pandemic is not a topic they cover in journalism school, although I suspect it might be added to the curriculum this fall…LOL. Truth be told, I don’t think this is a topic that gets covered by trainers for almost any profession besides maybe infectious disease specialists and public health providers. The reality is nobody in pretty much any profession has a playbook for how to handle the COVID-19 pandemic. I think I can speak for many people in saying that if someone does then I would love to see it. To News Journal readers and the community at large, I would like...

With the outbreak of the coronavirus, let’s face it things have gotten to be just a little bit, well, nuts for lack of a better description. One person at the health department Friday compared a recent trip to Walmart to a scene from the television show, “The Walking Dead” where survivors of a zombie plaque go into empty supermarkets scavenging for food among nearly empty shelves. My wife put it another way describing Kroger crowds as worse than at Christmas or before a snow, which in southeastern Kentucky is really saying something. After all everyone knows you have to go buy milk and bread before we get that 1/16 of an...

Imagine for a moment that you have an ethically-challenged local judge-executive, who is stealing money from their office, not that this kind of thing would ever happen in real life in the Commonwealth of Kentucky…LOL. Now imagine that the Kentucky Auditor of Public Accounts – while doing a routine annual audit – discovers $100,000 in unaccounted for money missing from such an office, and issues a scathing audit with a recommendation that the FBI or Kentucky State Police investigate the matter. Now imagine that our ethically-challenged office holder has the option of either having this audit published in its entirety in the local newspaper, which has thousands of readers, or this...

Best wishes to my pal, Trent Knuckles, on his future endeavors now that he has left the News Journal. As many of you know, Friday was Trent’s last day as publisher. He is leaving after 24 years to pursue other interests. A part of me will miss him, while another part of me is happy for him to be making a fresh start, and taking on new endeavors in life. There are two things that are certain regarding Trent’s departure. The first is that our Corbin office will definitely be a lot quieter with Trent gone. The second is that it should be much easier to get through on the office telephone...

So what would downtown Williamsburg have looked like in recent days if the floodwall hadn’t been in place? “I think we would have been riding a boat down Third Street taking pictures,” said Whitley County Emergency Management Director Danny Moses to this reporter’s question early Monday afternoon. During the 1977 record flood in Williamsburg, this is exactly what some people did in the flooded downtown area. Williamsburg Mayor Roddy Harrison even recalls getting in trouble for boating in floodwaters as a youngster. I imagine the scene was very similar in places like Harlan, Middlesboro, Pineville and Barbourville during that flood. In recent days, flooding like this didn’t happen in several cities across southeastern...

It’s important not only to avoid impropriety, but also to avoid the appearance of it. These were the words that a couple of wise-old judges, the late Jerry Winchester and the late Paul Braden, used to tell me when they were asked to recuse themselves as the judge in a case. It’s one of many lessons that now former Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin would have been wise to have learned before he left office last month. He didn’t. Prior to leaving office, Bevin issued several controversial pardons, including pardons to convicted killers. One of the more controversial pardons was to Patrick Baker, a Knox County man, who had served two years of...

Over the last 12 years that Kay Schwartz has served as Whitley County Clerk, if you went into her office to pay your car taxes or any number of other things, you were just as likely to get waited on by Kay as you were one of her deputy clerks most days. I know. I speak from experience. If Kay was in her office, she was usually busy working either answering questions for somebody either in person or on the phone, looking something up on the computer or waiting on customers. She was the kind of official that wouldn’t ask her employees to do anything she wouldn’t do herself. A case...

Some people have criticized Gov. Matt Bevin for asking for a recanvass following his nearly 5,200-vote loss to Andy Beshear in last week’s election, but I think this is entirely appropriate given that the race was decided by less than 1 percent of the vote. Had Beshear lost by 5,200 votes, it would have been equally appropriate for him to ask for a recanvass as well. A recanvass essentially involves all of the county clerk’s offices in the state rechecking their math, and making sure that no vote totals were added wrong on election night. It also involves double-checking to make sure that the totals from all voting machines were...

Something about former Commonwealth’s Attorney Allen Trimble, who died Saturday, that many people probably do not realize is that he used to be a journalist. When he was a student working on his undergraduate degree, Allen was the News Editor of the Eastern Progress, which is the student newspaper at Eastern Kentucky University. When I first met Allen about 25 years ago, we quickly bonded over both of us having previously held that position at the student newspaper in different decades. I suspect working as a journalist was something that Allen was quite good at even though I never read any of his articles. As many have pointed out in recent days,...

Recently, I got up at 5 a.m. on a Wednesday so I could catch a flight to Salt Lake City, Utah. I got there about 7 p.m. our time the next day. When it comes to air travel, it seems like nothing is ever easy, and this was one of “those” trips. Let me start at the beginning. My wife, Cecelia, and her co-worker, Rebecca Conn, were going to a conference in Salt Lake City that started on a Thursday, and I was tagging along. We had a flight originally scheduled for about 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday out of Knoxville, and picked up Rebecca in Williamsburg along the way. As we approached Knoxville,...