The first was from the television. Any discerning youngster could see that denigrating Southerners was the daily fare of the national news. Nothing very good was ever said about that corner of America. TV reporters were more polite then than they are now, but even back in the day, there was something both explicitly and implicitly New York–ish about the evening news. New York was where the networks lived. The South was a place reporters visited after they had prepared themselves by reporting from a war zone or a third-world country for a while. It was a land where police dogs were set loose on black children and liberal activists as a matter of course. Where obese and narrow-minded sheriffs refought the Civil War from their beat-up cruisers. Where nothing was ever produced to the country's general account but brutish oppression and inbred misery. This was the South I saw on television in the late sixties and early seventies. This was the South that television invented.
-Rurik
