We will never apologize for being a rural community newspaper.
Here at the Daily Times Herald we have no problem being challenged or criticized for what we print and where we place it in the newspaper.
This is a community forum and both the city and our business improve with criticism. We welcome it.
What's more, we absorb readers' comments in letters to the editor or phone calls, generally giving them the last word. I've followed that policy for years with the "Taking Note" column.
But some comments cross the line.
One rather high-profile attack on the Daily Times Herald last week came from the snarky Washington, D.C., gossip Web site Wonkette.
Wonkette took issue with our coverage of Carroll woman Deloris Nissen's clever advertisement in which she sought (successfully, as it turns out) to sell two televisions because the 78-year-old retired nurses' aide thinks President Obama is on the air too much.
"Okay, maybe this 'Daily Times Herald of Carroll, Iowa' article plays it up a bit much: She's an old lady with three teevees, so she bought an ad (in this same Daily Times Herald, coincidentally, instead of the crosstown rival, Politico) to sell two smaller, older ones," Wonkette writes in a story about our story.
More than 70 people offered comments to the Wonkette piece.
Much of what Wonkette posts is sweating with anti-rural sentiment, attacking, for example, our newspaper for not being a major urban daily (thank God, because unlike the Seattle Post Intelligencer or Chicago Sun-Times, which Wonkette would no doubt respect, we can still turn a profit).
We know what we are: a newspaper that devotes front-page stories not only to city council coverage and presidential politics, but to 8-man football, car shows and cancer-fighting fund-raisers.
Unlike the increasingly narrow niche audiences on the Web, where people with staunch political points of view go for ideological breastfeeding, our newspaper offers stories of general interest, that at times can bring the entire Carroll area around people and issues.
Wonkette uses the term "Carroll County, Iowa," like a punchline, as if all things rural are the stuff of humor.
We are a paper of rural America and proud to publish in a place where people know when you're sick and care when you die (one way or another).
The Daily Times Herald doesn't pretend to be Politico, a Washington-based news organization, or The Des Moines Register.
When Wonkette and its followers smack us, it is with urban irony and a preposterous sense of superiority, a metropolitan condescension that colors our politics and cultural landscape more and more.
Wonkette's liberal minions are so focused on the quicksilver quip for a blog post that they forget it is rural Iowa, not New York City, that launched the barrier-breaking presidency of Barack Obama. It is rural Iowa, not California, where gay couples can legally be married for but a $35 fee at the county courthouses in reaches like Denison or Red Oak.
Most of the urban snark comes from people on blogs who don't use their real names, something we hicks take seriously. Deloris's name and mine are right with that story.
One lesson Nissen did provide: a just-folks senior with some cleverness and wit can indeed have her voice heard.
The original Nissen story generated about 150,000 hits on the Daily Times Herald Web site and was picked up around the world. I even read a couple of versions of the Nissen story in Spanish.
While we take issue with the anti-rural bias in the Wonkette coverage, one of the comments on the site stands out as legitimately hilarious.
A reader of Nissen's take about Obama being overexposed in the media suggests that the following item could no doubt be found in our archives:
"Daily Times Herald, December 8, 1941: Ten-year-old Carroll County resident Deloris Nissen is selling her radio because she is tired of hearing President Roosevelt's voice."
