Recalculating: Steve Chapman on a New Century. Steve Chapman

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       Geographic snobbery at home in the news media

       Sunday, January 30, 2000

      It’s well-known among journalists that across this broad land, people dislike the news media. Why those of us who spend our working lives fearlessly bringing the truth to the American people should be met with such ingratitude is a mystery. But the average person tends to think of journalists as arrogant, insular and condescending. I can think of only one obvious explanation for this perception: In many cases, it’s true.

      This will not come as breaking news to Southerners, who are used to being lampooned in the national press as snaggle-toothed bumpkins prone to marrying their underage cousins and keeping rusted-out jalopies in the front yard. The arrival of out-of-state reporters in Atlanta for the Super Bowl provided the occasion for some of them to wax scornful about the city’s countless shortcomings.

      USA Today sports columnist Jon Saraceno, who is to humor what Mike Ditka is to self-control, felt the need to joke about his dissatisfaction with the host city, whose enumerated sins include John Rocker, Ted Turner, bad traffic and the bomb that went off at the 1996 Summer Olympics. In an effort to be fair, he did express regret that Tampa Bay didn’t make it to the big game so we could have had “our first Bubba Bowl. . . . For all the grits.”

      Saraceno also had to acknowledge that he had once bought a truck in Atlanta, and “it didn’t have a gun rack, a CB radio or tobacco juice splattered all over the dash.” Gee, you think he got a discount?

      But that one tolerable experience was not enough to justify the NFL’s inexplicable decision to play the Super Bowl in the Georgia Dome: “Atlanta has hosted only one previous Super Bowl. Personally speaking, I could’ve waited until Y3K for the second.”

      Saraceno should commiserate with New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, whose snobbery toward the Southern provinces is even more pronounced. After North Carolina Republican Sen. Jesse Helms spoke recently at the United Nations, Friedman was sputtering with outrage. “Who authorized him to speak for America?” he demanded. “Why don’t they send Jed Clampett from ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ to the UN too, so we can hear what he has to say about foreign policy?”

      Maybe Friedman, who seems more at home in Jakarta than in Jacksonville, has been spending too much time abroad. Jesse Helms has some authority to speak on international affairs because he happens to be chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And though his arch-conservative political views put him badly out of step with The New York Times’ editorial page, this hillbilly has not been too dimwitted to be elected to the Senate five times by the people of North Carolina.

      If Friedman has never journeyed to that trackless waste, he can read up on it in the latest edition of “The Almanac of American Politics,” whose editors (Michael Barone and Grant Ujifusa) are card-carrying members of the New York-Washington elite. They describe it as “one of the leading-edge parts of nation, a state whose growing economy, booming demography and vibrant culture are in many ways typical of the way the nation is going.” In fact, North Carolina has made so much dadgum progress that Jed Clampett would barely recognize the place.

      The South, however, is not alone in generating derision from ultrasophisticates in the news media. Every four years, Iowans get a lot of attention from the national press corps — along with more than their share of jibes, sneers and patronizing pats on the heads for being so earnest, rural, white-bread and dull.

      The day after last week’s presidential caucuses, Boston Globe columnist David Nyhans addressed the Hawkeye State dismissively: “You had your fling, it’s over, and now as you slip back into somnolence, take solace knowing you get more bites at the apple than most citizens elsewhere.” Somnolence? It’s kind of him to let those Americans located west of the Hub of the Universe know that they’re not dead — just sleeping.

      What else could they be doing without the diversions of the Northeast Corridor? New York Times columnist Gail Collins ventured into the American Siberia to find out why anyone would show up to hear a campaign speech by Steve Forbes and left with the mystery not quite solved: “It could just be,” she finally concluded, “that people who live in Iowa in the winter have a lot of time on their hands. ‘It was either come here or go to exercise class,’ one elderly woman said.”

      Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker got in a lot of trouble for his hostile caricature of New Yorkers, which relied mostly on gross stereotypes of millions of people he has obviously never tried to know or understand. He could be finished in baseball, but maybe there’s a future for him in journalism.

The GOP should sit back and savor its victory

       Thursday, February 10, 2000

      It’s 1975. South Vietnam has just fallen to communism, inflation СКАЧАТЬ