We're Not Gonna Take It
We've noticed lately that there seems to be a little more Howard Beale inside some of the smaller media outlets out there -- instead of taking a pass on responding to critics, they've been firing back.
When national reporters got all fired up about learning of Vice President Cheney's hunting accident only after the tiny Corpus Christi Caller Times heard it first, the Texas paper told them to stop whining. One advertiser whose spots criticized the media for only covering bad news in Iraq was told by a local Minneapolis station to sell their complaints – which the station regarded as being false – somewhere else.
Well, those pesky small timers are at it again.
Managers of the Dayton Daily News have received more than 1,000 e-mails from fans of Fox News talk show host Bill O'Reilly after O'Reilly's Web site and television program slammed the paper for an editorial that he says makes it "the most friendly (newspaper) to child rapists" in America.To which the newspaper's editor replied:
They say only two things happen when you wrestle a pig: You get muddy and the pig enjoys it. So it's tempting to just let this pass, but, really, what O'Reilly has said on his Web site is so outrageous and such a distortion that I can't.And that was just the first paragraph.
Who else is mad as hell? John Winn Miller of the The Olympian of Washington state. No, really. That's what he said when a critic "trotted out that stale cliche that newspapers like mine are undermined by what you claim is a liberal bias":
Cal Thomas, you've made me mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore. I'm tired of hearing radical columnists like you besmirch the good men and women who struggle daily to put out the very best newspaper they can.I always thought people out West were laid back and friendly, but them's fightin' words.