Headline: Landfalls ducks
Landfall woman irked by duck hunters
Is this a sly joke at Landfall’s expense or self-parody on the Star News’ part? Or a joke at our expense? The lead story in today’s paper is about a handful of residents in posh Landfall (map) who don’t like the sound of duck hunters nearby but don’t have any legal recourse.
Matt Born/Wilmington Star-News
I don’t love the sound either. We wear our vacuum cleaners and Spotbots plum out cleaning up all the pee our neurotic and gun-shy black lab Sampson makes on the carpet in January. But I wouldn’t expect to see this grievance in the headlines of the Landfall HOA’s weekly newsletter, much less the paper of record for this whole area.
And on Page 1 no less! I guess that’s what you call a slow news day. Or, as they say around here, a Star-News day.
I’m curious as an out-of-state participant in the Grove Project, do you (Ian & Ranald in particular) only cite the hard copy of the Star-News, the dot.com edition, or both? Also, isn’t it pitch black at 6am in your part of the world? It is where we live thereby making the practice of duck hunting (or any other hunting) at least a public health & safety concern.
I saw this particular story in both the print edition and the online version, though the website is even lamer than the paper.
My boss hunts ducks, and that’s apparently the time to go — in the dark. He hunts a few hours north of here and is typically out there from about 4am till a little after dawn.
Today’s follow-up story maintains that development is to blame for encroaching on what was formerly hunting land. Bang.
Have y’all missed the complementary flipside followup, ridiculing the hunters almost equally?
http://www.starnewsonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080118/NEWS/801180374/0/BREAKING
Somehow, this kind of inflammatory-both-ways approach is not what I ever had in mind when I learned about journalistic objectivity.
The funniest thing about it, once one wipes away the tears of disappointment at the level of discourse in the public square these days, is the denizens of the Star-News forums, who tend to favor such slobberingly divisive topics as cop-killings and missing pregnant ladies from Aruba to Jacksonville (while allowing relevant, issue-oriented comments about the events of the day to die unnoted). They were almost pavlovian in their responses, making fun of the whiny yankee lady the first day and the redneck hunters the second day. I didn’t track the individual posters all that closely, but I swear some even did their own 180 from the first day to the second.
Then in come the newcomers to the forums who either know one of the people featured in the stories or merely saw themselves in the word portrait, with embarrassingly aggressive defenses of the behavior (on one side or the other)combined with broad-brushed insults to everyone else …. it’s enough to keep you chortling for minutes on end.
I just browsed and got the flavor of the thread you linked to, Susan, and as you say it ain’t good.
Ranald mentioned this follow-up article the other night. R, did you see the “dialog” that sprung up around that?:
Hunters defend rights
I don’t often wade into the Jerry Springer section of the S-N, but I did see this topic go through the ringer. Not only did the reporter not do her homework on a sensitive issue, but she focused on far too few people on either side of the debate. Let’s hear from more homeowners, a few more hunters, and maybe get some historical perspective on the area — going back to when good ol’ Pembroke Jones owned the whole place. Were she to do this she may have discovered that it’s not a story afterall, certainly not a story for Page 1 (on consecutive days, no less).
It’d be refreshing to debate an issue like this without the knee-jerk “Yankee” and “Redneck” labels attached to the cast of characters.