Possibly the best part of last night’s NBC interview with Steve Bloom about his Atlantic piece was (besides when he raised his hands and called Willie Geist “Willie”) when this blog scrolled across the screen!
Still, I think media have missed a lot of other, more important aspects of this story, which you can flip through my blog to see.
Published this week: Iowa City is safe, but don’t worry — it’s not that safe. (And at least it’s better than Keokuk.)
Recent uproar (and I will let you find it yourself, cause I’m a bit burnt-out on the Bloom topic) has, I hope, led people to talk about how we talk about spaces and places – communities, neighborhoods, states, and nations. Continue reading
Maybe it’s not Bloom. Maybe the Atlantic has always had it out for Iowa. Continue reading
Just got an email from the editor of the Stephen Bloom article who notes the corrections, clarifications, and responses to the article and that “We’ll probably run more in the days ahead.”
Nice to hear Atlantic taking this seriously.
From the story:
* Corrections and clarifications 12/14/12. This article originally incorrectly stated that Iowa is 96 percent white; the 2010 Census data reports it as 91.3 percent white. It incorrectly said that gay marriage in the state would be subjected to a repeal referendum, but, in fact, that would only happen if Republicans take control of the state Senate this fall. And a 1994 newspaper headline both Prof. Bloom and his wife recall is different from the one on the edition of the Cedar Rapids Gazetteunearthed by a reporter for the paper from its archives. The story has been updated to reflect these facts.
A number of commenters have argued that Obama was talking about Pennsylvania and not Iowa in his April 2008 remarks on guns and religion; the audio of his remarks published on the Huffington Post reflects him talking about small towns in both Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the Midwest: “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
It also includes this rewrite to include more details about the HE HAS RISEN headline:
When my family and I first moved to Iowa, my wife and I recall, our first Easter morning the second-largest newspaper in the state (the Cedar Rapids Gazette) had this headline splashed across Page One of the edition we got in Iowa City: HE HAS RISEN. The headline broke all the rules I was trying to teach my young journalism students: the event was neither breaking nor could it be corroborated by two independent sources. An archived edition of the paper shows it with a verse from Matthew 28:5-6 above-the-fold on Page One, along with an illustration of three crosses. The front-page verse (which in its entirety read, “And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified. He is not here: for he is risen, as he said.”) took up two columns and was played against a story about the murders of six people in the Iowa town of Norwalk.*