The "wacko, ultra-paranoid neurotics" at Spokane's newer, smaller alt-weekly admit that "they whine more than anyone in town." But that doesn't stop the folks at Local Planet Weekly from issuing a warning: "(W)hen you fuck with our ideas, we're going to go psycho on your ass." And psycho they went when they picked up last week's issue of Pacific Northwest Inlander and found that the cover story, "The State of Radio," employed the same title that LPW had previously used for an award-winning series.
New Times Broward-Palm Beach columnist Bob Norman ignited the Internet last week when he revealed what is already common knowledge among "political and media types": That Palm Beach County Republican Congressman Mark Foley (see photo) is gay. The column was immediately posted on at least 20 Web sites, and the story was then picked up by gay newspapers and received a mention in Hotline, a popular inside-the-beltway political fixation. Now even mainstream local papers like the Sun-Sentinel appear to be closing in.
Noel Black heads to cowboy church, one of the fastest-growing religious phenomena in the world. "God showed me cowboys hung up on bulls with fire beneath them," Glenn Smith, who founded a cowboy ministry after this vision, tells Black. "He said they were dying and going to hell. [He told me the] next morning I was to sell all my worldly possessions and he would provide for me to minister to cowboys. So I did."
In a column on both mainstream and alternative media's tangles with plagiarism, Westword's Michael Roberts reveals a couple of AAN member papers' own most embarrassing moments. One is a case where Boulder Weekly had to apologize to Salt Lake City Weekly about publishing a barely rewritten story, and a couple of times Westword's writers deviated from the truth.
Arnold Friedman, the subject of Andrew Jarecki’s award-winning documentary "Capturing the Friedmans," was a pedophile, but did he molest children? Friend of the family Debbie Nathan revisits the case and explores the nature of pedophilia and memory. She takes us inside the family through son David, a/k/a Silly Billy, the city's most famous children's birthday party clown. Silly Billy has been featured in fluffy articles and numbers celebrities like Susan Sarandon among his clients. "But there are things about his family's past that are not fluffy at all," Nathan writes.
