What we do
Judging from the letters and phone calls we receive, there are a lot of misconceptions among our readers about the role of the opinion pages in the overall St. Louis Post-Dispatch product. Along with the snapshots below of the people behind the opinion pages, we’d like to offer a brief explanation of what we do.
The most important thing to know is that the opinion section is completely separated from the news department of the Post-Dispatch, as it is at every other major metropolitan daily in the United States. Within the Post-Dispatch building, our offices are located on entirely separate floors. This physical division is designed to send an important signal to the public: In no way do we on the editorial board attempt to influence news coverage, nor do we want to.
American journalism is respected around the world for its integrity, specifically because we do not allow opinion to mingle with the news product. Elsewhere in the world, it is common to find reporters inserting their opinions directly into news stories. American newspapers employ multiple layers of editors whose job includes parsing reporters’ copy for potential bias.
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Where you absolutely will find bias is on the opinion pages. Our job is the opposite of reporters’. They are required to report only the news and leave their personal opinions out of their work. On these pages, our job requires us to have opinions. You’ll see opinions in our editorials, cartoons, letters and op-eds.
Opinions rankle by their very nature. We don’t deliberately try to upset people, but no newspaper can possibly please all the readers, all the time. We aren’t afraid of anyone who disagrees. We work to achieve balance by including letters to the editor and op-ed pieces by writers who hold opposing points of view. Our only requirement is that writers meet our space limitations and stick to verifiable facts. Opinions are flexible. Facts are not.
The unsigned items that appear each day above Joseph Pulitzer’s Platform are editorials. They are unsigned because they represent the view of this institution, not necessarily individual writers. Occasionally, an editorial is assigned to a member of the editorial board who does not necessarily agree with the board’s view. Our discipline requires us to keep our editorials consistent in terms of established policy on specific issues but also consistent with the tenets outlined in The Platform.
Finally, please note that op-eds are not editorials. They appear every day except Saturdays and Mondays on the right-hand page, opposite the editorial page (thus the name “op-ed”). They do not represent the view of the newspaper and, in fact, often represent the exact opposite view of this editorial board. They are columns, and they represent only the view of the person whose name is attached to each item.
Ray Farris
Publisher Ray Farris, 60, took over from his predecessor, Kevin D. Mowbray, in 2013 after Mowbray was promoted to chief operating officer at Lee Enterprises Inc., the Davenport, Iowa-based newspaper chain. The Post-Dispatch is the largest newspaper in the Lee chain. The publisher oversees all advertising, circulation, printing and news operations of the paper, which includes daily consultation with the editorial board and oversight of the editorial pages. Ray also oversees classified advertising for Lee Enterprises.
Ray previously served as general manager of the Post-Dispatch and vice president of sales for Lee’s St. Louis operations. He joined the Post-Dispatch in September 2006 as vice president of classified advertising. He became vice president of advertising in 2009 and general manager in 2010.
Before coming to St. Louis, Ray was vice president of classified advertising for the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News. He started his newspaper career as a proofreader at a small community newspaper in Southern California and switched to his first advertising job in 1985 as an automotive account executive at the Los Angeles Times.
As publisher, Ray also oversees all of Lee’s operations in St. Louis, including stltoday.com, Suburban Journals of Greater St. Louis and STL Distribution LLC.
Ray and his wife, Pam, live in Sunset Hills. They have two adult sons.
Gilbert Bailon
Gilbert Bailon is editor of the Post-Dispatch, overseeing all print and digital news coverage, including the editorial pages. He served as editorial page editor for 4 ½ years before he became editor in 2012.
Gilbert, 57, received the Benjamin C. Bradlee 2014 Editor of The Year Award from the National Press Foundation after the August police shooting in Ferguson. The Post-Dispatch photography team won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography, and the editorial page was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for coverage of the Ferguson shooting aftermath.
A Tempe, Ariz., native, he worked almost 25 years in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, chiefly at The Dallas Morning News, where he held a number of positions ranging from reporter to executive editor. In 2003, he became the founding editor and publisher of Al Dia, then a newly launched Spanish-language daily newspaper operated by the Morning News. He also has worked for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, San Diego Union and Kansas City Star.
Gilbert is a past president of the American Society of News Editors and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, which has inducted him into its hall of fame and awarded him the N leadership award. He remains active in ASNE and serves on the Alfred Friendly Press Partners advisory board, which provides U.S. fellowships for international journalists. He also is president of the Hispanic Chamber of Metropolitan St. Louis foundation board.
Gilbert was named the outstanding journalism graduate at the University of Arizona in 1981 and earned his master’s degree in American history at the University of Texas-Arlington. Bailon has worked for newspapers since middle school and served as editor of his school newspapers in high school and college in Arizona.
Gilbert and his wife, Lourdes, and daughter, Brianna, live in Maryland Heights. Their families live in Texas and Arizona.
Tod Robberson
Tod Robberson, 60, has served as editorial page editor since January 2016. Before coming to St. Louis, he worked 18 years at The Dallas Morning News as an international correspondent and editorial writer. Before joining the Morning News, Tod was a correspondent and editor at The Washington Post.
His foreign assignments included bureau-chief postings for the Dallas newspaper in Colombia, Panama and London. He was The Washington Post bureau chief in Mexico City from 1992 to 1996. He also was the Reuters news service bureau chief in El Salvador in 1986.
He has covered nearly every country in South and Central America and the Caribbean, including Cuba and Haiti. He also has lived in Beirut, Lebanon and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. International wars and conflicts he has covered include Iraq from 2003 to 2006, Afghanistan from 2001 to 2006, the Lebanese civil war, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Salvadoran civil war and the Zapatista uprising in Mexico in 1994.
Tod holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Texas Tech University and a master’s in Arab Studies from Georgetown University. He speaks Spanish and can speak, read and write Arabic. He is also fluent in Donald Duck.
Tod’s professional recognition includes a Pulitzer Prize he received in editorial writing in 2010 and a National Headliner Award in editorial writing in 2014. He has appeared on CNN, Fox News, National Public Radio, MSNBC and SkyNews in London.
Tod is an avid tennis player and sailor. He also enjoys woodworking and set construction for the theater. His wife, Catherine, teaches high school drama. Their daughter, Fiona, is a professional actor.
Kevin Horrigan
Kevin Horrigan, 67, is deputy editorial page editor and Sunday columnist for the Post-Dispatch, where he has worked for 28 years. His first tour at the Post-Dispatch ran from 1977 to 1989; his second tour began in 2000.
Kevin first joined the Post-Dispatch after four years on the Kansas City Star, where he was a general assignment and political reporter. He did pretty much the same thing at the Post-Dispatch until October 1982, when his boss asked him how he’d like to cover the World Series and write anything he wanted. Thus began a six-year stint as the Post-Dispatch’s sports columnist.
Kevin left the Post-Dispatch in June 1989 to join the nascent St. Louis Sun, where he was a general news columnist. The tabloid startup folded in April 1990, whereupon Kevin switched media and became a radio talk show host. He worked for KMOX Radio until 1996, and KTRS radio until 1999. He rejoined the Post-Dispatch in August 2000.
Kevin has published two books, “White Rat,” a biography of former St. Louis Cardinals manager Whitey Herzog (Harper & Row, 1987), and “The Right Kind of Heroes” (Algonquin, 1992), about inner city politics and high school football in East St. Louis.
His portfolio includes politics, features, editorials, humor, sports, news side columns, radio commentary, advertising copy, radio drama, narrative journalism and two novels whose genius went unrecognized by the publishing industry. He has covered Super Bowls and World Series, Olympic games, political conventions, presidential campaigns, earthquakes and the fall of the Berlin Wall. He also co-hosted the radio broadcast of the grand opening of the Ladue Schnucks, where his guests included Becky, Queen of Carpets.
Kevin grew up in Texas and holds a bachelor’s degree in communications from the University of Houston and a master’s from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. He and his wife, Katherine, live in Tower Grove.
Deborah Peterson
Deborah Peterson, 63, is an editorial writer and member of the Post-Dispatch’s editorial board.
She began her career in 1978 as an Associated Press reporter, working in Denver and Springfield, Ill. In 1980, she joined the Kansas City Star as a general assignment and investigative reporter.
While on staff with the Kansas City Star, the staffs of the Star and its sister paper, the Kansas City Times, were awarded a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1981 collapse of the Hyatt Regency Hotel skywalks. The accident caused the deaths of 114 people and injured 216 more. Deb was assigned to the Star’s investigative team that covered the cause of the accident. The team was cited by the Pulitzer committee.
In 1984, her late husband was named St. Louis correspondent for The Associated Press, and Deb joined the Post-Dispatch in 1985. She was a metro desk reporter, editor and reporter on some investigative projects until 1995, when she switched gears to become a Post-Dispatch features writer and movie critic. In 2002, Deb became a metro columnist, where she stayed until joining the editorial board in 2012.
Deb has received awards from the Illinois Bar Association; the St. Louis chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists; the Mathews-Dickey Boys & Girls Club; and the Terry Hughes Award from the United Media Guild. She was alumna of the year at SIUC in 1983 and was inducted into the Public Affairs Reporting Hall of Fame at University of Illinois-Springfield in 2015.
Deb is a St. Louis resident.
Frank Reust
Frank, 48, is attached to the editorial department as a copy editor. He also selects and edits the letters to the editor that are published on the editorial page and on stltoday.com, a job he has held since 2012.
Frank selects five to seven letters a day from readers’ submissions. He also copy-edits opinion columns and editorials. As if that doesn’t take enough of his time, Frank copy-edits stories for our features sections.
Although we try to maintain a strict division between the staffs of the editorial and news sections, Frank’s is one of those rare positions in which we allow overlap.
Frank graduated from St. Francis Borgia Regional High School in Washington, Mo., and from Northwestern University. He has worked at newspapers ever since college, with stops in Peoria, Ill., and Stamford, Conn. He joined the Post-Dispatch in 1998.
Frank lives in Washington, Mo., with his wife, Lisa Haddox, and daughters Mary Beth and Willa. They also have a cat named Mimi. Frank’s interests outside the newspaper are soccer refereeing and fantasy baseball.
Dan Martin
Dan Martin has spent more than 36 years as a Post-Dispatch illustrator, cartoonist and designer. Dan, 58, is a native St. Louisan and Lindbergh High grad. He has drawn the weekly Postcard from Mound City cartoon for our Saturday page, in addition to designing and illustrating both the editorial and commentary pages.
Since 1986 he has also drawn our front page, 115-year-old Weatherbird, the oldest continually drawn daily cartoon in American journalism. His sketchbook assignments have taken him from murder trials to playoff baseball.
Dan has illustrated and/or authored several books and frequently lectures about St. Louis’ cartoon history. Along with serving on the boards of the St. Louis Mercantile Library Association and the St. Louis Media History Foundation, he was recently honored as a St. Louis Press Club Media Person of the Year.
Dan holds a bachelor of fine arts in design from the University of Kansas and is a member of the National Cartoonists Society. His hobbies include studying St. Louis, river and cartoon histories. He and his wife, Kris, and son Ben live in Crestwood.