It's been 40 years since a New York Times reporter breezed into town to follow a story I'd published as editor of the Newport Daily Independent.
She conducted a few interviews in Newport, spoke with me for some basic background, and was gone by late afternoon. When her story appeared, I counted no fewer than 13 factual errors in a story that ran no longer than 10 inches. This mess was published by THE New York Times.
Robert Samuels, a personable young black reporter for the Washington Post, showed up in Harrison the other day and interviewed members of the Town House Cafe's daily morning coffee group for his paper's special series, "Looking for America." I warned the fellas around the table not to hold high expectations for accuracy or context.
In my hometown of Harrison, population 13,000, the outside press has spent years fostering an unfair, even false, image of backwoods mountain racists based largely on the nearby presence of Klan leader Thomas Robb, who lives 20 miles away in the hamlet of Zinc. Yet his radical beliefs continually reflect on Harrison.
Having reported for two of the nation's largest papers during the 1980s, I understood firsthand how stories at many metropolitan newspapers can wind up edited and slanted with discernible bias. That's especially true at the biggest newspapers who view the world through their obviously liberal lens.
My revealing experience with the inaccuracies by that Times reporter in 1972 had shown clearly that mainstream reporters who parachute into the hinterland for such quick-hit stories can get plenty factually wrong or out of context without ever feeling consequences.
On this final morning of Samuels' 35-day-long national quest, we'd warmly invited him to the table where those gathered around honestly answered his questions.
A week later, the Post hired a photographer to snap photos of the Harrison group. That made it clear a story would be coming in the paper's series led and co-written by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and Post associate editor David Maraniss.
Sure enough, the piece on Harrison appeared. And, as predicted, it contained everything from inaccuracies to garbled quotes and a caring community characterized as "independent, and proud to call themselves mountain folk" upset with government (and pretty much everything else). Not mentioned was the fact that around the table with Samuels (and on most days) weren't agitated mountain folk (aka hillbillies), but accomplished people with some impressive resumes.
For instance, Col. David Fitton, 93, is a decorated West Point graduate who as a jet pilot during World War II flew numerous combat missions. There's also another former jet pilot and legislator as well as a former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.
There's also a retired Department of Defense educator/administrator for military schools overseas. Another spent eight years managing hotels in New Zealand. There's a lifelong insurance executive, a Methodist minister and a ne'er-do-well newspaper columnist who's practiced his craft across six states. The local school district superintendent also attends. Thirteen-term Congressman John Paul Hammerschmidt was a regular at the table until his passing last year.
Eugene Cady, a retired supervisor with Halliburton Inc., in Samuel's reporting somehow became George Cady, a former truck driver. Cady shook his head after reading it. If that weren't bad enough, the quote attributed to "George Cady" was partial and out of context.
David Fitton III was quoted saying: "Even when you send people with good intentions, they get up in Washington, D.C. and they get a lot in the club." Fitton uttered "huh" after reading that garble.
The underlying tone of references to Harrison were evident to me that, yet again, one of America's finest small towns was falsely set up to appear to be a community of racists.
Samuels also seemed to report that former Mayor Jeff Crockett basically was responsible for bringing a group of black youths to Harrison in 2014, despite concerns of their worried parents, where together they symbolically buried hatred.
The fact is the Martin Luther King Jr. Commission in Little Rock elected to hold its annual "Nonviolence Youth Summit" in Harrison during 2014 for a second year, aided by Crockett and many others, including the city's Task Force on Race Relations. The commission even awarded Harrison its coveted "Dream Keepers Award" for sustained efforts at promoting race relations. No mention of that relevant fact.
Then there was the locally despised sign reading: "'Diversity' is a code word for #whitegenocide" that a still-unknown person paid to have placed along U.S. 412 on the outskirts of town. The cutline beneath its Post picture wrongly placed it along "State Road 412."
Bottom line for all you proud and independent mountain folk: Jest 'cause sumptin's bigger and blows in from outta the East shore don't mean it's neither better ner accurate.
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Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected].
Editorial on 03/29/2016