Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 4 · column 3 of 5 · from the scan, no model involved
By JOHN GOOLRICK
What’s the beef?
The Washington Post printed a long.story recently about Republican gubernatorial nominee George Allen’s attendance at an event called the Amelia Beef Festival.
The upshot of the article was that proceeds from the festival went to help fund a small private school in Amelia County.
The article quoted Allen as saying he didn’t know who sponsored the event and was there to meet people and try to gain votes. GOP lieutenant governor nominee Mike Farris, who was also present, echoed those words.
A spokesperson for Democratic gubernatorial nominee Mary Sue Terry was quoted as saying she would have liked to attend the event but had other commitments.
Since the private school was one started years ago when desegregation of public schools was ordered by the courts and since the school still has no blacks attending, the Post said that Allen and Farris were participating in fund raising for a segregated school.
The article was par for the course in the way the Post covers Virginia politics, always preferring to give short shift to substance when it can find what it considers even a tiny whiff of scandal. Thus the people of Northern Virginia, the state’s most densely populated region, get their major coverage of state politics from a paper that does not provide either indepth or fair reporting.
The space given to the beef festival story certainly seems inordinate when one considers that Allen or Farris, (or Ms. Terry) had no knowledge of the festival’s sponsor and, like most statewide candidates — Democrat or Republican — try to get to various events celebrating shad, oysters, crabs, pork, poultry or whatever to gain visibility, attract media attention and work the crowd.
Beyond that, the private school in question has no policy prohibiting blacks or members of any other racial group from attending and with its much smaller enrollment than in the past certainly poses no threat to public education.
As a further example of this kind of cheap-shot journalism, the story did not mention that there were
86.5%