Life imitates The Onion:

The Onion had fun with the cover of this week's edition, deliberately ignoring* Obama's win and, instead, headlining the win of a district alderman:

Which is very much like this story:

Newspaper in Terrell, Texas, doesn't think Obama's win was any big deal

At least that's the impression many readers got when they opened their copies of Wednesday morning's Terrell Tribune to see an inch-high headline saying, "Jackson defeats Schoen".

Seems the paper's editors decided the local county commissioner's race was a bigger deal for their readers than the election of the first black president in American hsitory.

Not only did the Tribune not put Barack Obama's election on Page One -- there was, according to Byron Harris of WFAA-TV (Channel 8), "no story devoted to the presidential victory" anywhere in the paper.

Publisher Bill Jordan had this to say to readers who complained that the paper should have preserved this historic moment:

"We run a newspaper, not a memory book service. We covered the local commissioner's race. We thought that was more important."

Terrell, population 13,606, is labout 30 miles east of Dallas.

* actually, it appears the edition was set-for-print on election day or before, so they may not have been ignoring an Obama (or McCain) win. But it's pretty clear that was the impression they were trying to make.


posted by Quiddity at 11/08/2008 09:05:00 AM