Lance Turner of Arkansas Business is getting some pretty good responses to his Tweet on the head-smacking lead headline on the Biden victory in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

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This is the same paper that turned over three pages to Tucker Carlson’s bogus Hunter Biden fantasies. But that was nominally the opinion section.

This was the news section. You know, in the paper that repeats daily its “core values.” Such as:

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Credibility is the greatest asset of any news medium, and impartiality is the greatest source of credibility.

The point here is that the D-G used a poorly worded passive voice headline to avoid the verdict delivered by everyone from the New York Times to Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post.

Nor was this the only odd decision in the D-G coverage.

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There was a nearly endless story, beginning above the fold on Page One, recounting every talking-point-factory quote from Arkansas Republicans saying it’s not over until it’s over. In paragraph 16 emerged a quote from a Democrat. The headline and story were built on the losers. I thought the winners got to write the history. You may be sure when the DOG won the newspaper war in 1991 that the reaction story didn’t lead with quote after quote from the jobless losers.

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Even crazier was another front-page story. The headline:

In LR, across country, Trump backers vent their frustration

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True. Generally small groups of Trump dead-enders, many carrying assault weapons, assembled at state capitols, including about 50 of them in Little Rock. This was more an illustration of a failed organizing effort by the Trump fake election campaign than a noteworthy national outpouring.

I’d be willing to bet the 50-state pro-Trump demonstrations (one was said to have drawn about a thousand people) were eclipsed in participation by a single gathering in Washington Square Park in New York, to name but one.

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The reaction story of the day was in massive throngs celebrating in major cities all over America, as I noted yesterday. Not to mention church bells ringing, fireworks and other mass demonstrations in countries the world over. The D-G did run a photo inside of the huge crowd that danced and sang “Sweet Caroline” and “YMCA” outside the White House. The Internet is full of video like this from Washington.

 The D-G’s treatment today of the declaration of Biden’s victory and the national reaction doesn’t burnish the newspaper’s claim of impartiality. I hope it only reflects a sensitivity to the publisher’s Republican leanings, as its school coverage often does. It would be worse if it reflected fear of its readers. Newspaper readership is dwindling, after all, and Arkansas DOES love Donald Trump.

Perhaps the newspaper can begin a campaign to put Trump’s presidential library in Arkansas. Searcy or Benton maybe. That’s as close as you can get to the state’s biggest airport without verging into Biden country.

Here’s how a couple of real newspapers and a former stalwart Trump-backing paper played the story today.

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