Amid a clumsy, partisan struggle for the American presidency, Desperately Seeking the News finds no dearth of deserving targets. We have the networks that depressed turnout for George W. Bush by their premature projection of Florida’s 25 electoral votes for Gore. We have Dan Rather, who on election night uttered so many zany analogies about the tight presidential race he should be writing songs for Music Row. We have those conveniently errant voters of Palm Beach, who as CNN’s Mary Matalin pointed out, can fill out a bingo card but somehow can’t follow the trace of an arrow.
DSN thought about writing on the media’s coverage of our loony presidential race and the crazy cast of characters involved. But with all the punditry out there, that would be like adding sand at a beach. So instead we’ve prepared an exclusive quiz about our local press, with the hopes of at least temporarily diverting your attention from our current mess.
Rage against the machine
:Gannett’s new Rage, a sweet-tempered entertainment pamphlet with maybe a dozen ads, has introduced readers to a unique strain of corporate casual speak. Under this new linguistic enterprise, Rage writers use offbeat language to connect with that elusive 18-24 demographic. To test your fluency of their new dialect, we’ve included a few authentic passages of past Rage issues along with one that DSN fabricated out of whole cloth. Find the phony one.
A) “Those light, loopy, Beat-poet radio ads he wrote and narrated through the years to plug his many restaurants should have been a tip-off. If you didn’t know before, you know now—Jody Faison’s got a groove goin’.”
B) “Say it ain’t so, lads! Dang.”
C) “Blah, blah, blah, what else can I say? The jigga man’s latest effort is quite disappointing.”
D) “If you wander around Old Hickory—and let’s face it, who hasn’t—you’ll find Johnny Mack’s, a crisp, smoking, red-hot blues joint with jammin’ music so rich it will cash out the poorest soul.”
E) “The verses, rhymes, flows, and lyrical bebops tripping into hip-hop that are reaching a simmering crescendo in this, the Music City, where the spoken word is re-establishing and reinventing itself after the demise of The Spot (an urban entertainment showcase) in December 1999.”
F) “This Brooklyn artist has spent the last several years making collages and corrugated love poems out of corrugated cardboard and assorted materials which she transforms from visual to audio through interpretive readings.”
The race card
Tennessean op-ed columnist Dwight Lewis recently wrote that George W. Bush should not call for a quick resolution to the Florida voting fiasco, but instead should remember which historical event?
A) The 1215 enactment of the Magna Carta, the visionary British document that laid the groundwork for various democratic principles including trials by juries
B) The discriminatory treatment Brooklyn Dodger and Hall-of-Famer Jackie Robinson received at the hands of his teammates when he became the first black major league baseball player in 1947
C) The 1992 acquittal of the LAPD officers caught on videotape kicking and punching Rodney King
D) The 1955 beating death of Lamar Smith, a black voter organizer in Brookhaven, Miss.
Spooky little girl
In a recent “news” story about a haunted library in Franklin, WZTV-Channel 17 anchor Laura Faber interviewed how many sources on camera for her report?
A) One girl, one ghost
B) Two girls, one ghost, and a guy
C) Two ghosts, a girl, and a pizza place
D) One girl, no ghost
Right-wing conspiracies
WLAC’s Phil Valentine, who hosts a conservative drive-time radio show, recently reported what unsubstantiated and incredibly irresponsible allegation against Al Gore?
A) One night, while reporting a story about biker gangs for The Tennessean, the future vice president of the United States smoked pot, drank lots of alcohol, fired a pistol inside a house, and spent hours alone with a biker girl less than two years after he married the fetching Tipper.
B) While at Harvard, Al Gore was addicted to porn.
C) Al Gore knew of Bill Clinton’s relationship with fleshy White House intern Monica Lewinsky but promised the president he’d keep quiet so long as Clinton helped raise at least $10 million for Gore’s 2000 presidential race.
D) Much like Hillary and Bill, Al and Tipper enjoy an open marriage. One of Al’s ladies: TIME’s foxy Margaret Carlson.
Mixed media
The Tennessean dispatched staff writer Peter Cooper to cover the final days of the Bush presidential campaign, based on his previous reporting of what area beat?
A) High school sports
B) Tennessee’s congressional delegation
C) Pop and country music
D) North Nashville
E-mail more quiz questions to Mpulle@nashvillescene.com.
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