George Carlin and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram

My one long time reader may remember me making mention of an extremely weird oddity in my local inept newspaper of record. That being that if there is any remote connection between a person in the news and a location in north Texas, especially Fort Worth, the Star-Telegram will let you know that important fact, no matter how tenuous the connection may be. Like a person on American Idol may have visited Fort Worth at some point in time. This paper will let you know that important fact.

So, on Sunday George Carlin died. In an example of how hard it is for newspapers to compete with TV and the Internet, timeliness-wise, the George Carlin obit did not show up in the Star-Telegram til today.

That is understandable. What is not understandable is the Star-Telegram George Carlin obit's inclusion of the weirdest example yet of this paper's twisted need to make that all important Fort Worth connection.

Here's the Star-Telegram's front page George Carlin obit.....

"Comic George Carlin, who's being remembered as a counterculture hero, died Sunday of heart failure at age 71 after a long career on stage and in TV and film. But he had Fort Worth connections that predate his fame: He honed his act here in the late 1950s, when he was a DJ at the now defunct radio station KXOL."

He died. But he had Fort Worth connections? I am not making this up. The above paragraph is word for word what is on the front page of this failing newspaper. My longtime reader may remember that I heard from the guy who writes about TV for this paper. He told me the Star-Telegram does this type idiocy so as to give its readers a local connection to a story, unlike that evil paper in that evil town 30 miles to the east.

In reaction to one of my previous diatribes on this subject someone emailed me that "Fort Worth seems to have a small town mentality, which would seem to be like some sort of civic mental illness in a city of almost 700,000 population."

I couldn't have said it better.