Nashville Scene | WTVF-TV
The Murfreesboro Post serves the heart of Tennessee’s sixth congressional district, where an acrimonious Republican primary battle rages between tea party activist Lou Ann Zelenik and U.S. Rep. Diane Black. To illustrate just how unpleasant the race has become, the Post took an old image of Zelenik at a shooting range and superimposed Black’s face on the target.
“Black’s campaign went, er, ballistic, yelling at Post managing editor Michelle Willard for 20 minutes on Monday,” Steve Cavendish writes in Nashville Scene. Willard told Cavendish the paper wouldn’t do the cover again if it had the chance.
Was there much conversation about the cover and its implications? “Probably not as much as there should have been,” she said. It’s part of the deadline scramble newspapers sometimes face: Time is short, someone comes up with what they think is a good idea, “groupthink” takes over, Willard said.
Zelenik told Nashville’s WTVF she was “disappointed and outraged” by the photo.
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