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Think back a few days ago to when we learned that Bush's approval rating has fallen to the lowest point in his...well, whatever you want to call it since January 2001.
My local paper covered the entire front page with the first half of a two-page tribute to a 10-year-old child who died of some congenital birth defect. I don't remember the defect, but the entire Page 1 and the entire Page 4 (the Fayetteville Observer's traditional jump page for Page 1 stuff) was covered with this huge story about this child.
When Bush was doing all the Orange Alert shit, they'd find deceased ministers to memorialize. One guy died six years ago.
They celebrated Fitzmas by running a profile on a crack dealer who's in the state pen. (What really pisses me off about this isn't that they're doing stories about crack dealers instead of about Bush. It's that there are black people in this town who are really very fine individuals, who would make really great subjects for features, and who can't get featured because if you are a black adult and you live in Fayetteville, you will never be featured in this piece-of-shit newspaper unless you are (1) a minister, (2) the single mother of at least six children, or (3) a criminal. There's a male RN working at the hospital's emergency room who's shaped like an NFL tackle. He'd be a great person to put in the paper. You know, the role model thing. But they refuse to run a story about this man. I don't know why, except that he's not a preacher, a single mother or a criminal. He's been in the paper--the hospital loves to use him in their ads because all his scrubs are imprinted with Disney cartoon characters, and he has them custom-made at terrific expense because there's not a huge demand for Disney-themed scrubs that fit 350-pound men. He's just the neatest guy.)
And last week, during some atrocity I don't remember because there are too many of them, they covered the front page with reminiscences of the "black professional class" neighborhood along Gillespie Street that was torn down 20 years ago to make way for a closeout lumberyard and a tractor dealership.
Okay, they did cover the front page with Anthony Allen for a few days, and that was justified. Oh, this guy was the scum of the fucking earth. I'm surprised they didn't have to borrow the bulletproof witness stand from the Saddam trial for Anthony Allen.
Yesterday? A two-page article on how Fayetteville and Spring Lake are competing to see who can annex Fort Bragg. (Before anyone writes in, yes you CAN annex federal property--the city of Jacksonville annexed Camp Lejeune a very long time ago.) Two years ago we had the "big bang annexation" (they annexed half the unincorporated area between Fayettenam and the county lines in one whack) that kept Bush off the front page almost all year long.
This stuff is newsworthy. But take the front page section, drop it in the garbage where it belongs, and what do you see? The Local and State section! Yes! A whole 16-page place to put stories about crack dealers, dead children and annexation.
We don't need no stinking Natalee Hollowell or whatever in hell her name was in this town. Half the population of Central Prison in Raleigh is guys who got there by selling crack in Fayetteville, and eventually they'll all make the front page.
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