I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
What an interesting twist, the Oct. 30 Wall Street Journal’s interpretation of the effects of our headline, which is how we decided to endorse Barack Obama.
I presume a few voracious readers also saw the CNN articles over the past few days about our paper, New Mexico Sun News, headlining: OBAMA WINS! It was written by the CNN Senior Correspondent, John King, and I am grateful for the coverage, not at all because of the 600 comments running the usual crazy range from thoughtful to enraged, but more because it has led to further coverage by many U.S. newspapers, notably the L.A. Times, two London Dailies (the Mirror and the Telegraph), newspapers in India, Romania, Taiwan and Pakistan, loads of U.S. TV station little brief stories, etc, from Bangor, Maine, to Colorado, and now the mighty Wall Street Journal.
However, the CNN article was conceptually flawed and lent itself to a kind of sensationalist interpretation of what we did and why, which then gets carried on in a weird way.
(I hesitate to say viral, as six months of Obama campaigning have made me instantly skeptical of that word).
It is unfortunate that the original CNN story didn’t mention the 14-page article that was a compendium of the 38 best editorial page endorsements from all over the United States, and neglected to mention, as we did in the article, that we were justified in saying Obama won because he had just won the Scholastic Magazine election by mostly sixth-graders.
These 38 endorsements, plus about 20 more, are posted at mybarackobama.com in my personal blog, listed under Stephen Fox. They are also posted in seven very long articles at opednews.com, for the real scholars and ultra wonks.
This was not a stunt, whatsoever. There was absolutely nothing in jest in my article, but perhaps a bit of tongue-in-cheek stance in our managing editor’s statement, Jerry Greenker, whose idea this actually was, and I was very proud to support this great idea.
Our next issue comes out four days after the election, and his victory would be old news by then. We are not seers nor fortune tellers, but we are, like many Americans, poli sci wonks, historical scholars with keen focus on political journalism, and Democratic strategists.
I personally have been concentrating on making happen the editorial page endorsement avalanche for Obama we are seeing now, and like a gardener, I am very very proud to hold up the first fruits of victory, even if we are a bit ahead of the hounds and ahead of the vote counters.
The comparison with the Chicago Tribune and the infamous Nov. 3, 1948, “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline is absurd, extraneous, and totally irrelevant. They printed several hundred copies the night of the election thinking Thomas E. Dewey had won. We printed 11,000 copies 10 days before the election, sure that Obama will win. We are proud of endorsing him in this way, to just declare him the winner, which apparently you would have known if you were still in sixth grade.
We would do it again in a second, with no regrets, except for a bit of hate mail from some very angry Americans, ready to fly off the handle at just about anything.
If you don’t know how nuts Americans really are, just read through 600 comments on CNN sometime.
By making this out to be a “stunt” or a “prank,” CNN’s senior political correspondent dismissed our motivation. Nonetheless, we are glad we did what we did, and certainly not “just to be first.”
The endorsements are at mybarackobama.com at my blog site: read them in succession, and by doing so, I truly believe you will comprehend more clearly our effort and its integrity.
Stephen Fox is the contributing editor of the New Mexico Sun News.
