I’m still not exactly sure how or why it happened, but for some reason the folks at radio station 104.5 The Zone in Nashville have decided to launch an attack campaign on the Southern Standard in particular and the greater Warren County community in general.

Anyone who listens to the radio broadcasts can tell you we have been a prominent topic of conversation every day this week. We have been mocked and ridiculed, laughed at and criticized.
If there’s a silver lining to all this it’s that very few people listen to this radio station. I tried to pick it up earlier this week, but the reception was so poor I couldn’t get a signal. Someone told me it doesn’t extend much past Antioch but I don’t know if that’s accurate.

Since I haven’t been able to hear that many of these broadcasts first hand, I’ve had to pick up bits and pieces of what’s been said from other people. From what I can gather, the criticism started from our coverage of the Titans Caravan, which was somehow considered lacking. It escalated from there.

The radio onslaught started on Monday, but I didn’t hear about it until Tuesday when the show began broadcasting again. It was at that time one of the show’s handful of listeners called to tell me the radio hosts had dogged the Standard all day yesterday and were dogging us again today.
For lack of intelligent stories to discuss, this Nashville radio station someone found my Twitter account and started joking about my lack of tweets. Yes, this is late-breaking news.

I admit I haven’t been tweeting very often, but I hardly consider this newsworthy. But maybe it is. Maybe their vast North American listening audience would be curious to know how many emails I send too.
So I decided to dust off the Twitter account and send my first tweet in over a year. “What’s the difference between a radio host and a trampoline?” I asked. “You take your shoes off before jumping on a trampoline.”
I followed this by posing a new version of an age-old question: “If 104.5 radio hosts started talking in the forest with nobody listening, would it be any different than when they talk on the air?”

These harmless little tweets hit a nerve in Music City and our fine talk show hosts began unleashing a series of attacks on our fine community. What they said doesn’t deserve repeating because I don’t share their views of the greater Warren County area.

In the face of this adversity, I did what any normal newspaper editor would do. I sent them a heart-felt invitation to our annual Banana Day celebration coming up June 8. I figured some free ice cream and warm, Southern hospitality would be a great way to introduce them to our fine town. Then they could see for themselves McMinnville is a nice place to call home.

I’m sure they’ll make fun of this invitation, which I fully expected when I made the offer. But that won’t bother me.

I find their simple-minded humor mildly entertaining even if nobody is listening.

James Clark is editor of the Standard. He can be reached at 473-2191.