Ken Byerly, Sr.

I just ran across a good quote from the late newspaperman, Ken Byerly, Sr., of Montana and UNC/Chapel Hill.
"A dog fight on Main Street is more important than a revolution in Bulgaria." This seems to speak very directly to the difficulty the newspaper business in having adapting to the demands and resources for information of the 21st Century. Byerly had made a success operating small newspapers in Montana before he returned to his wife's native North Carolina to teach. Two of his sons were successful in the operation of small newspapers in Virginia and Montana and such newspapers concentrated on the "dog fight on Main Street." The American public is clearly transitioning in the way they depend on getting their news and the newspaper may become to the internet what radio became to TV.

Congressional embarrassment

Since she first ran for Congress I have followed Rep Virginia Foxx because she represented a district which adjoined my own, a district in which I grew up, North Carolina's 5th. My first reaction to her was, "where did she come from?" Out of the 5th District, which includes Winston-Salem, could they not do better? Sooner or later, old milk curdles. Virginia Foxx is old milk and she has finally curdled. So absurd were her comments before Congress yesterday, 4/29, concerning HR 1913 that they were picked up by the national media and the talking heads as fodder for the extreme right and pure horse manure for the left. She was heard characterizing the most egregious hate crime in recent memory, the beating and stringing on a fence to die of University of Wyoming student, Matthew Shepard (1998), as a "HOAX." Rep. Foxx said this in her statement before Congress and ironically before Matthew's mother who was in the gallery for the deliberation on a new hate crime law which bore her son's name. The right of Rep. Foxx to make any claim that she wishes is sacrosanct but such speech as she exhibited yesterday exposes an ignorant, bigoted spokesperson for the very "hate crimes" that the Congress, by a vote of 249 to 175 agreed to appropriately criminalize. The report of Mark Binker in the Greensboro News & Record headlines "Foxx Irks Gays with Comment on Killing."
I'm not gay and I'm outraged.
NOTE: This blog appeared as a Counterpoint column in the Greensboro News & Record, May 6th.