Jackson Free Press

OK, Snark King, it's your turn.

I've had it in the back of my head to blog about a really offensive post by The Clarion-Ledger's city reporter Brian Eason for weeks now, but it had fallen to the side in the need to report actual news. But while cleaning up my desk today, I started noticing a pattern—first from a clipping of another snarky thing he wrote calling a whole city office stupid, and then I saw a blog post belittling an enterprise story by our staff this week, but without actually saying what was in it or linking to it. So here's my Friday afternoon round-up of what I've been noticing about Mr. Eason's snark, which I assume is meant to be humor, except none of it is funny.

No. 1. Don't dare compare crime to terrorism, dumb little council candidate. After 20-year-old minister Corinthian Sanders decided to get involved enough to run for City Council, he made the mistake of saying that the "terrorism" of crime was one of his top priorities (as if he's the first to ever say that here). Sanders told the Jackson Free Press: "Let’s talk about getting our lawbreakers, criminals—I call them terrorists….(If) you can’t go anywhere without killing someone or robbing someone or terrorizing someone, that’s terror, (and) you’re a terrorist; you’re a domestic terrorist.” The mention of the word terrorism tickled Eason's funny bone. He snarked:

"To my knowledge, no major terrorist attacks have occurred or been planned on our streets, and the Jackson Police Department reported no terrorist incidents in 2012, according to its published crime stats. But maybe that’s what the terrorists want us to think.

"Lest anyone think Sanders is trying to politicize the Boston Marathon bombing, rest assured, his commitment to fighting terrorism on the streets of Jackson predated the explosions at the marathon.

"But while Sanders listed counter-terrorism as his No. 2 priority, right behind “protect, improve and increase affordable housing,” none of his competitors — or, indeed, any other candidates in the entire metro area — mentioned local terrorism as a problem worthy of their consideration.

Eason's blog post shows he later clarified what Sanders meant, and quoted Sanders' above words from the JFP in an addendum to the snark-post, but that nasty horse was out of Eason's barn by then. That's what you get for running for office in Jackson, Corinthian. The ire of a native Dallasonian. And I really don't know what all his references to monkey videos on your Facebook page were about, and don't care.

No. 2. In a post called "Common sense? Not at clerk's office," Eason showed the entire staff of the Jackson city clerk's office not to mess with him, no sir. He was irked that he couldn't get election results from the clerk's office at 11 a.m. the day after the primary. They didn't have certified results available, yet, and gave him a bit of a runaround. OK, it's fair to …

You want to know why people are scared of Chokwe Lumumba? Here's a good place to start.

The headline that appears on a story that the WAPT web site (www.wapt.com) reads, "Lumumba wants to remove Christopher Columbus from history books."

The headline is misleading at best.

I was at the debate last Friday night when Lumumba made the comment that we need to stop teaching our children that Christopher Columbus discovered American in 1492. "Columbus didn't discover America. America wasn't lost, Columbus was," Lumumba is correctly quoted in the story as saying.

What the story doesn't do is put the quote in context. The way it reads, you'd think Lumumba was asked about education and launched into a Christopher Columbus hate-a-thon. He was asked how we can keep students from dropping out of Jackson Public Schools, and he answered that maybe if our black youth was learning a little bit more about black culture and roots, they might be a little more interested in school and have a little bit more self-worth.

Besides, Lumumba is right about Columbus and the wording "Columbus discovered America." You can't be the first person to discover something that someone else has already found. Native Americans lived here before Columbus sailed across the Atlantic Ocean; therefore, he cannot be the first man to "discover" America. Even if you don't believe that African people from the northern part of the continent crossed the Atlantic before Columbus—and some do—you can't deny that Christopher Columbus was not the first man to set foot in the Americas.

But the story on WAPT gets worse. It clumsily tries to explain Lumumba's beliefs, saying that he believes "people from northern Africa had been traveling to the North American continent years before Columbus did in 1492," and my personal favorite line of the story: "In fact, a Google search by 16 WAPT News shows the discovery of America is a widely disputed one."

Well, at least you did your homework.

Reached by phone Thursday afternoon, Lumumba said the headline and the idea that he wants to remove Columbus from the history books is "disappointing."

"I never said that. ... What I was really saying is that we need to add the people who came before ... . I just want the history books to accurately reflect that Columbus opened the Western Hemisphere to Europe," he said. "He did not discover it." Lumumba said he has used that line hundreds of times over the years, and said it was curious that it was just getting publicity now.

The bigger issue is that here we are, two days after Lumumba won the primary runoff, and this is the headline on local news stations. The divisiveness hit Twitter and Facebook as soon as the race was called. It hit comment sections on web sites of the JFP and Clarion-Ledger shortly thereafter. Now it is in a headline on WAPT. Where will it be in a month? A year?

For his part, Lumumba said he's …