Media Bigotry toward the South

Tim Chavez, a columnist for the Tennessean, apparently ignited a firestorm with a column about news media bigotry.

Ah, there's nothing like igniting an electronic civil war from coast to coast. My Wednesday column on news media bigotry toward the South got lots of folks worked up....

Many print journalists do not want to understand. From most but not all of their responses, my industry is one of the few businesses in which the customer is always wrong. [Higher education is another!] Readers supposedly don't understand the mystical ways of journalism. Readers supposedly do not understand the difference between news and editorial pages.

Bunk. These news consumers are smarter than they are given credit for. And journalists give themselves too much credit.

He includes several reader reactions. Here's one.

Sally Logan wrote: "I've lived in New England all my life and now work at a typical New England, liberal arts college, and hardly a day goes by that I don't hear some off-hand disparaging remark about the South or Southerners. I find the bias in the media and academia to be symptomatic of the lazy, liberal thinking that has dominated our culture for over three decades. Northern liberals are exactly what they believe Southerners to be: hidebound reactionaries who think in stereotypes."

via One Hand Clapping