Surveys of print and Web media's sought-after "alpha" readers repeatedly show they are fed up with the press's superficial horse-race, ambulance-chase habits of covering the news. They want investigation -- to be informed about not just what's going on, but why, and how it affects their lives.
When I write about politics, I also write about history -- and vice versa. I give readers both the close-up details and the wide-angle context to a story, which I lucidly distill for them from the in-depth, no-stone-unturned research I do. (I always tell my news sources to give me copies of all the documents, not just the press release.)
(Clips are listed in reverse chronological
order, with lead paragraphs or cover blurbs. Click on links for
full text.)
Who's
in charge?
CIBO candidates dominate local air board appointments
Mountain Xpress, Dec. 7, 2005 (cover
story)
An oil executive's appointment
to the board that regulates air pollution in Asheville and Buncombe
County raises questions about conflict of interest and
reveals the lobbying clout of the Council of Independent Business
Owners.
The
boss
How an autocratic city manager ran Asheville
Mountain Xpress, June 22, 2005
(cover story)
As Gary Jackson, Asheville's
new city manager, steps into the city's most influential office,
he'll be shadowed by the ghost of the most powerful city manager
in Asheville's history -- Weldon Weir.
Sidebar: From
steamrolling to bridge building [with Brian Sarzynski]
"'Road-roller' methods
were employed by the city council in the Rigsby election,"
the Asheville Citizen observed back in 1931. The city's
influential unions complained that R.W. Rigsby, Asheville's very
first full-time city manager, had acquired a reputation for being
unfair to organized labor ...
Three-quarters of a century
later, disputes between developers and neighborhoods have replaced
labor/management strife as the leading source of conflict in
City Council's chambers.
Council
to interview city manager hopefuls
Mountain Xpress, May 11, 2005
The selection process
for Asheville's most powerful unelected official will take another
step forward on May 19, when City Council members interview seven
applicants seeking to take retiring City Manager Jim Westbrook's
place. The list is being whittled down from the 18 whom management
consultant Bob Slavin culled from an unexpectedly large pool
of 92 applicants.
Paying to play?
Donors, dollars and local democracy
Mountain Xpress, Nov. 3, 2004 ( cover story;
includes graphs showing interest groups' and candidates' campaign-finance
patterns)
In recent months,
private citizens and political action committees alike have once
again succumbed to election fever, opening their wallets in hopes
of securing the winning candidates' support for the donors' particular
concerns. Of course, purse strings are not necessarily puppet
strings, and elected officials have been known to favor conscience
over contributions. Still, following the money can help illuminate
the landscape of political influence.
Sidebar: Bellamy
and the billboard magnate
Why would a nationally
known media executive in Augusta, Ga., send a $200 check to Council
member Terry Bellamy's re-election campaign in Asheville?
Sidebar: Newman
vs. Newman
The red-white-and-blue
attack ad appeared in Asheville voters' mailboxes just a couple
of days before Election Day 2003.
Sidebar: Different
race, same bettors
Although the final
reports on the 2004 campaigns aren't due till late January, the
early evidence suggests that things haven't changed much from
last year.
In this year's race for chairman
of the Buncombe County Board of Commissioners, the real-estate
industry appears to have been by far the biggest funder, according
to preliminary campaign-finance reports ...
Grassroots voter
registration
Activists pound the pavement to get out the vote
Mountain Xpress, Sept. 29, 2004 (cover story)
Apathy? That's
so September 10. Voting is what's hot now -- so hot that a voter-registration
movement has spontaneously erupted locally, if not nationally.
In fact, enough grassroots registrars have taken it upon themselves
to help their fellow citizens prepare for the Nov. 2 day of reckoning
that North Carolina officials have had trouble keeping up with
the demand for registration forms.
Sidebar: Friends don't let friends fail to vote
Local activist
Adam Cohen is co-founder of the grassroots, Internet-based Spread
The Vote. Here, in his own words, are "five simple things
that everyone can do to make a difference ...
Sidebar: An insider's guide to voting
Avoid the rush
-- vote early: ...
Woodfin
residents make waves
Mountain Xpress, Oct. 22, 2003
Rip Van Woodfin
is waking up. On the eve of the elections, the hamlet that long
seemed to slumber obscurely in Asheville's shadow is being roused
by noisy controversies.
Vital signs [occasional
feature]
It's
the 21st century -- do you know where your ancestors are?
Mountain Xpress, Oct. 22, 2003
He looks so much
like me, my aunt is convinced I'm his reincarnation. Take away
the beard, and it's my face staring out from the antique, sepia-toned
photograph. But who are those equally dark-complexioned men standing
next to him, all of them wearing those little white caps? Could
the old family rumor be true? Was my great-grandfather really
a wandering Spanish Jew who violated racist Victorian taboos
by eloping with a woman descended from English nobility?
The urge to solve the mystery of
my own roots comes over me every time I peer through the window
of the Old Buncombe County Genealogical Society.
Asheville's monument
to tolerance
Confederates, Jews join hands on Vance's birthday
Mountain Xpress, May 7, 2003 (cover story)
Reprinted in Finding Asheville, by Cecil Bothwell and
Betsy Ball (publ. 2005)
Rising skyward
from the busy downtown crossroads of this Appalachian mountain
town is an elegant spire of rough-hewn granite: the Vance Monument.
Recently, Asheville's answer to the Washington Monument has been
a focal point for controversy over nation-sized issues of war
and freedom of speech, after police and city officials clamped
down on the peace protests that, for months, had swirled around
this memorial to North Carolina's own reluctant rebel.
Founder
of assisted-suicide movement comes to Asheville
Mountain Xpress, April 23, 2003
"Death
has a way of ringing the bell on all procrastination. ... It
is because of the presence of death with us on our life's journey
that we do not fail to take the opportunity to say 'I love you,'
to invest ourselves in primary relationships, to do what needs
to be done now, not tomorrow, to build a better world now. ...
We make life precious by embracing the reality of death, not
by repressing it or denying it."
--
Bishop John Shelby Spong,
address
to the national Hemlock Society
Derek Humphry knows what it's
like to help a suffering loved one take her own life. In 1975,
the man who would go on to launch a worldwide right-to-die movement
agreed to help his wife, Jean, carry out her considered decision
to end her long and painful struggle with terminal cancer.
"It's a strenuous task helping
somebody to die," the founder of the Hemlock Society told
Mountain Xpress. "You've got to be in tune with one
another. ..."
Spit and polish
Conscience, memory and the roots of war
Mountain Xpress, March 19, 2003 (part of cover-story
investigation, "Making the news")
A couple of months
ago, says Asheville photographer Kermit Sprinkles, a pair of
soldiers wearing dress uniforms came into his Biltmore Square
Mall portrait studio in a very agitated state. They told him
they'd just been taunted and spat at by "some people"
in downtown Asheville's City/County Plaza, he recalls.
Book of
revelations
Was the Bush Administration complicit in 9/11?
Written for Mountain Xpress, Sept. 11, 2002
-- editor withheld from publication
[Review of] The
War On Freedom: How & Why America was Attacked, September
11th, 2001, by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed (Tree of Life Publications,
2002).
Did the Bush Administration allow
or even instigate the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon?
It's a question I've heard more
and more people asking, as our leaders use the tragedy of 9/11
to justify everything from suspending Constitutional protections,
to pre-emptively nuking and assassinating foreign leaders, to
expanding their power to spy on citizens while cloaking themselves
in secrecy ... in short, to administer a year's worth of almost
daily body blows to traditional notions of world peace and domestic
freedom in the name of the War on Terror.
A knock on the door
Racist rumors fuel anti-terrorist dragnet
Mountain Xpress, Feb. 20, 2002 (cover story)
"It takes
courage for individuals to come forward in situations like this,
and I urge anyone with information that may be useful and helpful
to authorities to use this opportunity."
--
U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, Sept. 11, 2001
Squeaky's Convenience Store
in downtown Black Mountain has a flag in its front window and
little flags on its counter; bits of red, white and blue antenna
streamers litter the edge of its parking lot. Behind the counter
inside sits a crib and some chairs where, for nearly three months,
Black Mountain native Rachel Lone and her mom and sister took
turns caring for Rachel's two daughters (the infant Sultona and
5-year-old Samantha) while tending to the busy store's unceasing
stream of customers.
Sidebar: Citizen
informants
On Sept. 11, hours
after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
Attorney General John Ashcroft urged Americans to give the FBI
"any information they know about these crimes." Ashcroft
later ordered the Justice Department to follow up on every one
of those tips.
Sidebar: It's
the law
Is it illegal to
turn your back on the flag, as Saleh Abou-Saleh was accused of
doing? Can you be fined or jailed for refusing to say the pledge
of allegiance? How about burning the U.S. flag in protest --
is that against the law?
Freedom
of speech vs. freedom from insult
Mountain Xpress, Feb. 13, 2002 (part of cover-story
series, "Who's afraid of public access TV?")
The U.S. Constitution
figures prominently in just about any discussion of public-access
TV.
"The First Amendment is a
wonderful thing, and everybody's for it -- until somebody says
something they don't like," observes David Vogel, longtime
general manager of Community TV of Knoxville.
The
Pagan pilgrim: Thomas Morton of Merrymount
Intellectual "heathen" remains an inspiration
Mountain Xpress, Nov. 21, 2001
Expanded reprint on www.oldenwilde.org
Those dour Puritans
who kneeled in thanksgiving at Plymouth Rock before marching
forth to conquer the wilderness and its native inhabitants with
Bibles and guns weren't the only Pilgrims to seek spiritual freedom
on the New World's shores. Just a few leagues up the Massachusetts
coast from Plymouth's fortress of fundamentalist conformity,
a poet and lawyer named Thomas Morton founded a colony that,
had it survived Puritan persecution, might have spawned a far
more Earth-friendly and egalitarian history of America than the
one that's come down to us.
Mr.
Mulford taught me tolerance
Mountain Xpress, Sept. 5, 2001 (part of a series,
"My most memorable teacher")
Mr. Mulford had
a scary face. It was covered with scars, I think from a burn
accident, and his lips seemed fearsomely fleshy to my 9-year-old
eyes. But my fright quickly gave way to fascination on that opening
day of school when I entered fourth grade. It was 1967, and Mr.
Mulford had been one of the early volunteers in the Peace Corps
-- serving in Africa, no less.