NASCAR’s free advertisement on an editorial page. Really?
…And of course with this writing, their acronym’d corporate body receives another search engine prize. Richard Childress, from his remote North Carolina home, gave us some socially conscious, conservation-friendly head patting and sage-like reassurance in his column below… he took off his multi-logo’d racing leather jacket and gave us a sweet raceway-side, fireside-like chat.
To read conservation(ists) in the same line as NASCAR gave me more than one chuckle. Have you seen those full page ads in newspapers that don’t appear like an ad, yet with a small print header on the page as “advertisement”? That’s clever marketing but the purveyor pays for the pages. NASCAR received a freebie with the cost of his advertising passed to the newspaper reader. Bad business.
Forums like this promote free speech. Has MidWest Voices taken the “free” a lap further by making this a forum for free advertisement? Bad form.
Bad business + bad form = absurd
Miriam Pepper
1 year, 1 month agoTom: The As I See It forum welcomes differing points of view, and NASCAR’s Richard Childress offered a piece that disagrees with the editorial position of The Star. The paper has been critical of E15 and ethanol mandates, specifically. This is another view. It’s all part of the free exchange of opinions we promote. Your chuckle with NASCAR and conservation was just his point. And the local angle to the timing of publication is the Sunday race at the Kansas Speedway. I thought he offered a detailed explanation of how ethanol has improved over time. He need not convince you, but he wrote a piece worth reading.
Miriam Pepper Editorial Page Editor
Tom Ryan
Crossroads, Kansas City
1 year, 1 month agoMiriam: Yes, his point drew his intended chuckle from me. We read many endorsements on this page for candidates, ideas, and issues. But in Richard’s case, his “endorsement” read like a NASCAR commercial. In that commercial sense, I worry that we can blur this page easily; creating a marketplace for products rather than a forum space of ideas. Take his column, place it on a full page with amber waves of grain and a few zooming cars as background, and you have a lovely full page advertisement for which I’m sure The Star could receive revenue… Besides being misplaced in the editorial section, it was a lost opportunity for the business office.
Kent Mueller
1 year agoTom, was your first comment deleted? If so, why?
Kent Mueller
1 year agoSorry, I realize now that nothing was deleted. My mistake…