Southeast Missouri's love-hate relationship with Speak Out

"Take some advice from me. Never make chicken and dumplings in a crock pot. They turn into a giant mound of flour that crawls out of the pot, down the street and scares the neighbors."

In March 1982, this useful warning helped launch a local newspaper tradition. Speak Out has been Southeast Missouri's soapbox offering wisdom, scorching criticism, political debate and general advice for 22 years.

Love it or hate it, the anonymous commentary is no doubt one of the most popular features in the newspaper.

It spurred the first advice Jay Knudtson received after he was elected mayor of Cape Girardeau. Never read Speak Out, a colleague warned.

"When you're in the public eye, you have to take the attitude that Speak Out is pure entertainment," Knudtson said. "If you look at it any other way, it will eat you up."

The Southeast Missourian's version of the call-in/write-in forum, called SoundOff, first appeared on Dec. 30, 1982. The original Speak Out actually debuted in Cape Girardeau nine months earlier in Gary Rust's Bulletin Journal newspaper.

The two forums shared the same basic tenets. Readers were invited to call or write in comments, though SoundOff focused more on answering readers' questions than Speak Out. When Rust acquired the Southeast Missourian in July 1986, he brought Speak Out with him.

Thousands of Speak Out comments form a rather opinionated account of every major event and issue that has surfaced locally and nationally in the past two decades -- the Oklahoma City bombing, Florida's chad fiasco in the 2000 presidential election, riverfront casinos in Cape Girardeau, the 9-11 terrorist attacks, Southeast Missouri State University's River Campus, the war in Iraq, local property tax increases and more.

Cape Girardeau School District superintendent Mark Bowles, like many public officials, has seen his share of Speak Outs contradict or complain about his decisions or the school district in general.

Bowles says that he does not read Speak Out because the comments are anonymous.

"Any opinion that is not worth claiming is not worth considering," Bowles said. "I get very concerned when I hear someone suggest that the opinions expressed in Speak Out reflect the sentiments of the community."

Recurring topics

While Speak Out's hottest debates are typically raged over politics, there are also a few timeless issues that continue to surface year after year, often setting off a domino-like rampage of comments. For instance, the correct etiquette for restaurant tipping:

"This is for all the servers at our area restaurants. I can't understand your concept of tipping. Why should the public have to help pay your wages? After spending $50 for a family of four, 10 percent should be more than enough for your good service. If you want more money, get a real job." -- October, 2003.

And the intermixing of religion and politics:

"To all the people in Speak Out who refer to President Clinton as Slick Willie: Don't forget when you're judging him that God is judging you. That includes Rush Limbaugh, too." -- February, 1995

Then there's Cape Girardeau's infamous roundabout, which attracted nearly 100 Speak Out comments in the months after it opened in 2001. Most of the callers complained about the narrowness of the roundabout, which the city did eventually widen.

"There is a very large contingency of the citizenry that views it as the pulse of the community," Knudtson said. "Most of the time, it isn't utilized to talk about positive things. It's a forum that allows people to purely vent."

Knudtson said while he doesn't read Speak Out regularly, he does pay heed to issues that attract numerous comments over several days. Like Bowles and other public officials, Knudtson finds fault with the fact that Speak Out comments are anonymous.

"Letters to the editor with signatures have a far greater impact on me as I try to evaluate what's going on in the community," he said.