After my inquiring three times about the status of my previous submission for a guest column, I was advised that my writing about the recent beheading of a schoolmaster in Afghanistan by Taliban, angry he was using his new found democracy from the U.S. to educate teenage girls, would not be running as more important content had been selected over the several months it was morphing into old news while sitting on an editor's desk. Ah shucks! I had wondered if the AC-T was talking about the kind of content it had selected for its April 1st 2006 issue, where a citizen living in the area with a B.S. degree (no pun intended) from the University of Wisconsin (no surprise) reported that the farts from cows and humans that eat meat were polluting the earth’s environment. Isn’t it enough Rolling Stones Magazine had named Asheville the Freakiest City in America? Locals just hate it! Yet in this same April issue, the AC-T boldly placed above the fold a story that at least six willing men had traveled from abroad and across the nation to come to the secular-progressive area to be castrated in “Master Rick’s” dungeon. I bet the developers promoting those expensive condos at “The Cliffs,” using full-color double-truck ads in the AC-T, just loved their prospects reading this story on the newspaper’s front page. The article went on to report; “ -- the [voluntary] surgical removal of the testicles -- is a form of sex change for some people.” The AC-T could have used the more condensed and better-written Associated Press version and parked it on page three. Don’t you just love living in these progressive mountains? Then, oh my God (pardon my loss for secular words), again in the same issue an editorial complained of the lack of ethics reform in the U.S. Congress, listing Republicans who had taken funds. Yet the name of a leading Democrat in Washington, who had received funds indirectly from the now famous Abramoffs but had said he wasn’t going to give back the money, was left out of the story. Ah, shucks. The editor didn’t even mention that under the leadership of the Democrat Governor of North Carolina, there had been no ethics legislation to make North Carolina lawmakers accountable, as reported by Matt Mittan host of the 570 A.M. program, “Take a Stand.” Matt had attributed the recent abuses of Speaker Jim Black to the lack of ethics legislation in state government, the AC-T in another editorial not even giving Mittan credit for his being the only one in the media to push the issue to the front of the news, Mittan so aggressive that fifteen state newspapers could no longer ignore the story, including the AC-T, which had come to the party late. Need readers be reminded that the AC-T wouldn’t print the picture of a captured Saddam Hussein . . . that the newspaper had buried near its comics a 2004 press release from the prestigious Center for Disease Control (CDC), warning that STDs could come in contact with 50% of today’s teenage population . . . that this newspaper used an entire front page to report that Hollywood director Steven Spielberg might be (could be, should be) buying a condo in Asheville . . . that in December 2005 the AC-T had run a large article titled. “The Beat still resonates,” reporting on a local reading of Allen Ginsberg’s “The Howl.” The article warned, “You wouldn’t want your children to come across it.” Would anyone believe that while the AC-T glorified Ginsberg, it had somehow forgotten to advise its readers that Ginsberg was an active supporter of the North American Love Boy Association (NAMBLA), Camille Paglia of Salon.com writing about Ginsberg on her Web site:
The Asheville Citizen Times even lacked simple class when reporting a recent marriage of the popular Hollywood actress, Andie McDowell, who lives in the area. An editor wrote in a lead-in McDowell would be marrying a used-car salesman. Wouldn’t you think an award-winning newspaper owned by the Gannett Publishing Empire, might instead report, “Andie McDowell to marry successful Asheville businessman?” But what can one expect from reported articles published on April Fools Day? You can’t make this stuff up. |