WSJ: Newspaper War Disturbs the Peace In a Summer Haven

 

Remember how the Reagans and Bushes vacationed at their own homes and worked around the yard?

Please, don't submit us again to the ridiculousness of political celebrity and all its detritus.

P.S.  Richard Reston, son of  The New York Times' late Scotty Reston, owns the Vineyard Gazette.  It's one of the country's best papers.

"The Vineyard Gazette, a coffee-table-sized broadsheet, welcomed the president with a 16-page special section headlined: "From Our Island to Our President."

"In a front-page open letter to the president, Gazette editor Julia Wells wrote: "There is promise, Mr. President, that you may actually get ... downtime with your family, at Blue Heron Farm in Chilmark, a town that still counts its ballots in a wooden hand-cranked ballot box. A town that voted overwhelmingly for you."'

"The tabloid Martha's Vineyard Times teed off on its competitor. In a column titled "Obama Beat: Why Democrats find Martha's Vineyard, oh, so special," the paper's managing editor, Nelson Sigelman, wrote: "The press has adopted a story line of an Island inhabited by happy, clam-raking yeomen." He singled out the broadsheet's editor by name, saying Ms. Wells "led the navel-gazing pack."'

"The journalistic trash-talking reflects long-standing friction on an island where wealthy people vacation, and the less-wealthy people make a living mainly by servicing them. The island's seasonal occupants earn twice as much, on average, as its permanent ones, according to a local survey."