Sunday, July 10, 2011

Oak Park's "War on Veggies" goes viral

This morning, I added the following update to Oak Park Woman plants vegetable garden; city objects.
Welcome all of you coming over here from Oak Park Hates Veggies! You've made this entry the most popular post of the week for two weeks running as well as making it the fourth most popular of all time with a bullet. Thank you!
That was only a few hours ago. The post is now the third most viewed in the history of this blog, in addition to being the most popular of the current day, week, and month. I wasn' t kidding when I said it was "fourth...with a bullet." How did this happen?

Simple, Drudge happened. A couple of days ago, Matt Drudge placed a link to The Agitator's post on his front page with the headline "Woman faces 93 days in jail for planting garden in front yard..." Since then, the story has spread like wildfire. Here is a list of the media sources I've found covering this story with links to their articles (Hat/tip to April Alexander at Urban Homestead Diaries for compiling most of these).

Grist: Michigan woman could face jail time for growing a garden

Treehugger: Michigan Woman Faces 93 Days in Jail for Planting a Vegetable Garden

Huffington Post: Woman Could Be Jailed For Vegetable Garden

Washington Post: Julie Bass may face jail time for planting vegetables

Look at that progression. Not only are the environmental publications and the avowedly liberal Huffington Post on board, one of the two national papers of record, The Washington Post, is now covering this story. The issue has even attracted attention from overseas.

The Daily Mail (UK): Woman faces jail for growing vegetables in her front yard

A check of Google News shows 66 results for "Juile Bass", all of which are about this story and are all from July 8th or later. Behold the power of Drudge.

The most recent of those 66 stories right now is from The Detroit News. As far as I can tell, this is the first time this story has made the local papers, even though two of the local TV stations covered the story a week and a half ago. It figures that it would take the story going international before it got the local attention it deserved.

On the subject of local coverage, the Washington Post embedded this video from Fox 2 Detroit's segment on this story. Since I used the Channel 7 embed in my first post on the topic, I should now be "fair and balanced" (after all, this is Fox).







Speaking of going viral, remember the petition I posted yesterday? Julie Alexander updated her readers on its status Friday.
The petition for Julie is now up to 4,400 signatures in just a few days, and the urban homesteading activists have only just begun.

2 comments:

  1. RE: The Oak Park Outlaw Poem

    If you'd like to post my verse
    At Crazy Eddie's News,
    I say, "Why Not? Go Ahead."
    For how could I refuse?

    I ask for attribution
    And with the poem a link:
    thebardofmurdock.com
    A fair exchange, I think.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you. I also found the link to your poem, which I see you've revised for proper diction.

    http://www.thebardofmurdock.com/2011/07/oak-park-outlaw.html

    I'll do as you request, and give you and Julie double billing as bloggers swimming against the stream on Tuesday.

    ReplyDelete