Money can't buy the kind of publicity Eureka Springs got last week from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Stewart is winding down his time as anchor of the satirical news broadcast, so viewership is particularly high right now. Eureka Springs got the benefit of even greater exposure than if this little story had run earlier on the Comedy Central program.
The segment aired on Wednesday, elevating a couple of people in Eureka to some sort of celebrity status while focusing Stewart's huge audience's attention on the uniqueness of Eureka Springs.
Stewart pronounced before the segment that he would leave his post "knowing most of the world's problems have been solved by us, The Daily Show."
"But," he said, "sadly, there are still some dark corners that our broom of justice has not reached yet -- until now."
The comment led into the report from Eureka Springs, described in the piece as "one stubborn town in rural red-state Arkansas" where discrimination is on the rise, allegedly against Christians, who make up "a meager 86 percent" of the state's population.
The trigger for the five-minute segment, "reported" from Eureka Springs by Jordan Klepper of The Daily Show, was the city's strong anti-discrimination ordinance.
The Eureka Springs City Council in February adopted an ordinance to protect gay and transgender people in housing, employment and other situations. City voters overwhelmingly approved it in a citywide vote in May. A conflicting state law that just became effective is intended to keep cities and counties from having such local laws, but the city still plans to enforce its ordinance.
There's a strong rift between those for and against the ordinance, but the issue offered easy fodder for The Daily Show, which sent Klepper to Northwest Arkansas in June to interview several people for the segment.
Interviews with two -- Joyce Zeller, who is a City Council member, and Randall Christy, president of The Great Passion Play near Eureka Springs -- made the broadcast. Both played along and are experiencing new celebrity.
Zeller, a white-haired 83-year-old who unequivocally supports the ordinance, said the day after the broadcast that she was overwhelmed by the attention she had gotten.
"I'm getting emails from all over the United States," she told a Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reporter, noting how positive the comments had been.
Her dead-pan defense of the ordinance and position of tolerance for anyone, including gays and transgender people, clearly resounded with Stewart's followers.
"We do not discriminate in Eureka Springs. Everybody is accepted for who they are," said Zeller. "If you're a seven-foot-tall man and you want to parade in town bare-footed wearing a purple dress, that's fine."
Even Christy, who pastors a Baptist church in Ada, Okla., and is a major foe of Eureka Springs' ordinance, thought the segment was funny.
"We were rolling with laughter at my house," said Christy, who talked in the segment of his being discriminated against as a Christian.
Although he said his comments were edited and misrepresented, clearly for comic effect, Christy said he had a sense of humor and welcomed the opportunity to expose millions to Eureka Springs, the Great Passion Play and the Christ of the Ozarks statue.
Remember, he is in the full-time business of promoting Eureka Springs.
So, along with the comic jabs, the folks in Eureka Springs will happily take all this exposure of iconic sights and scenes as valuable publicity, a fact that Christy and Mayor Robert "Butch" Berry can agree upon.
Berry said he was happy with the way the city was portrayed and that Zeller represented Eureka well. He figures the segment was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in positive advertising.
Both the Passion Play and the Christ of the Ozarks were featured in the segment, as were street scenes from downtown Eureka.
In one, correspondent Klepper emerged from a shop licking a large rainbow-colored lollipop as his voiceover declared that Christians there are contending with "the nightmarish hellscape sin palace thunderdome of gay that is Eureka Springs."
The images, of course, suggested something else, illustrating Eureka as a quiet tourist mecca ready to welcome Stewart's viewers to tred those same streets, visit the attractions and leave their tourist dollars there.
View the segment online at http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/ifkeox/anti-christian-discrimination-in-arkansas
Brenda Blagg is a freelance columnist and longtime journalist in Northwest Arkansas. Email her at [email protected].
Commentary on 08/02/2015