There are times when I wonder whether the newspaper industry is bent on committing suicide. In reading the story on the capture of 37-year-old Michael Dunn in the Lexington Herald-Leader, and planning to add to my “You in a heap o’ trouble, boy” series, I was sadly amused that the newspaper had used only a stock photo of a criminal’s wrists in handcuffs. Since it is the policy of this site to print mugshots, I initiated a Google search for Michael Dunn Kentucky, and there it was, screen captured on the right, with three television stations and what my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal listed as the four top stories, with three showing the now-captured fugitive’s mugshot, and the newspaper not, exactly the type of thing which would cause people searching for this story to pick a source other than the newspaper.
Missing Kentucky child, 13, found with 37-year-old man wanted for escape
By Karla Ward | Saturday, January 10, 2026 | 7:00 AM EST
A missing 13-year-old girl from Louisville was found in Knox County on Thursday in the company of a 37-year-old man who was wanted on outstanding warrants, according to the Barbourville Police Department.
The girl had been reported missing Jan. 4.
The London office of the U.S. Marshals Service’s Central Kentucky Fugitive Task Force was notified on Thursday that she was thought to be with Michael Dunn, 37, the police department said in a social media post.
Dunn had been wanted in Jefferson County since June on felony warrants including second-degree escape and tampering with a prisoner monitoring device. He also was wanted for probation violations for receiving stolen property and possession of a handgun by a convicted felon, police said, as well as first-degree possession of a controlled substance.
That paragraph is important, because it informs us that Mr Dunn was not just a criminal suspect, but a convicted felon.
Dunn “was known to be armed, dangerous, and trafficking narcotics,” police said.
At about 10:50 p.m. Thursday, the U.S. Marshals, with help from the Knox County Sheriff’s Office and the Barbourville Police Department, learned that Dunn and the girl were walking south on the 3100 block of U.S. 25E in Barbourville.
Task force officers, deputies and officers confronted them and took Dunn into custody, police said.
The missing child was safely recovered and taken to a local hospital. She was medically cleared and reunited with her family at about 3:30 a.m. Friday.
There’s more at the original. It will be the natural assumption that a 37-year-old fugitive with a 13-year-old girl is indicative of a perverted sexual situation, but none of the news sources indicates that is the suspicion, and at least one source has actually named the girl, complete with a link to the missing persons notification that includes her photograph, something unusual if the possible sexual assault of a minor is concerned.
That the Herald-Leader did not include the mugshot of Mr Dunn would be part of the McClatchy Mugshot Policy[1]McClatchy Mugshot Policy: Publishing mugshots of arrestees has been shown to have lasting effects on both the people photographed and marginalized communities. The permanence of the internet can mean … Continue reading, though that policy shouldn’t really apply. The policy is meant to protect those arrested and accused but not yet convicted of a crime, as well as “the inappropriate publication of mugshots disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness,” but the accused is a white male, and has already been convicted.
We note this because, as we reported in November, the Herald-Leader has moved to print publication only three days a week, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays, to be delivered not by carriers, but mail, with the Sunday edition being delivered in Saturday’s mail, because the United States Postal Service does not deliver mail on Sundays.
I am reminded of Vernon Dursley’s happiness that “there’s no post on Sunday.”[2]J K Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Chapter 1.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which had previously gone to a thrice-a-week print schedule, announced just a few days ago that it would cease all publication, print and digital, on May 3rd.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is shutting down
Earlier this week, owner Block Communications also announced the closure of City Paper, a Pittsburgh alt-weekly.
by Emily Bloch | Wednesday, January 7, 2026 | 2:41 PM EST
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will fold after nearly a century. The paper will cease operations entirely — both its digital and physical versions — on May 3.
The announcement comes on the heels of years of declining ad revenue and internal strife within the newsroom, including a yearslong labor strike.
With the paper’s closure, there are concerns that Pittsburgh could become a news desert, leaving locals without a range of diverse and credible outlets to turn to in an age of increasing misinformation.
The Post-Gazette was led by former Inquirer senior vice president and executive editor Stan Wischnowski. He resigned from The Inquirer in 2020 after a controversy following a headline after the murder of George Floyd.
That last was a mealy-mouthed way to put it. Mr Wischnowski’s ‘resignation’ was forced due to a revolt among the #woke[3]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading staffers at the Inky for writing a catchy headline, “Buildings Matter, Too” designed to catch the eye and attract people to actually read the story, but staffers apparently thought that this was downplaying the seriousness of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, a movement which was torching buildings, including black-owned businesses and residences, in the City of Brotherly Love as well as other places.
Why did I cite a story from The Philadelphia Inquirer concerning the Post-Gazette’s closure? It was because the Post-Gazette’s own story was hidden behind a paywall!
The upcoming closure of the Post-Gazette has generated all kinds of stories, including two separate ones asking if the newspaper can be saved, plus at least one calling the closure a “threat to democracy.”
Is it really a threat to democracy? As we reported on the 8th, the credentialed media were very slow and sparse in their reporting on the popular uprising in Iran. This site, and many, many others, noted how the credentialed media pointedly ignored President Joe Biden’s descent into dementia, something obvious enough that William Teach noted it in August of 2021, yet the legacy media, wholly in the bag for the Democrats, wouldn’t report anything that might have endangered Mr Biden’s re-election prospects against then-former President Donald Trump.
We saw how well that worked out for them!
If the Post-Gazette could not survive printing just three days a week, in Allegheny County, population 1,231,814, how can the Herald-Leader do so with 329,437 people in Fayette County?
McClatchy has already been cutting staff.
We previously noted how the Lexington newspaper, which has always specialized in covering University of Kentucky sports, gave scant coverage to the women’s volleyball team, which made it all the way to the national championship game, and the #6 ranked women’s basketball team, while publishing scads of stories on the middling, 9-6, and unranked men’s basketball squad and disastrous, 5-7, football team. How can a newspaper survive if it doesn’t actually print much news?
References
| ↑1 | McClatchy Mugshot Policy:
I have not been able to access the McClatchy Mugshot Policy directly, as it does not seem to have been published externally. The only reason I have it is that two McClatchy reporters tweeted it out after it was imposed in August of 2020, and it is possible that some changes have been made to it subsequently. |
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| ↑2 | J K Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Chapter 1. |
| ↑3 | From Wikipedia:
I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid. |
