West of the Hudson….

When I was living in Manhattan in 1976, working for the Associated Press, the New Yorker had one of its signature covers.
Half of the country was shown on a map with the Hudson River near the middle, the rest of the world filled up the page.
This said in a far more eloquent way than I ever could how the media bias of the East Coast was so often focused on the rest of the nation.
This morning the country awakened to another blown-out of proportion story. New York City was not the new North Pole.
The thousands of people stranded around the country by pro-actively canceled airline flights may not have been so sanguine about it.
I had lived most of my life in the West, and only moved the Big Apple a couple of years before the Hudson River cover.
I was so ambitious I had been promoted from Seattle to the AP head office in Rockefeller Center.
As part of my initiation I was called into a top editor’s office. He asked me if there was anything about the way things worked that bothered me.
Not realizing I was not supposed to answer I blurted out that there seems to be an East Coast bias. He quickly replied: “I am so tired of hearing that.”
I responded, again without thinking a lot, “Perhaps you hear it so much because it is true.”
Even the New York Times joined in the hype. But the Onion had the sexiest headline: “NYC Mayor: ‘Reconcile Yourselves With Your God, For All Will Perish In The Tempest.'”
Mayor Bill de Blasio “advised advised residents Monday to make peace with whatever higher power they call God, for all shall meet their death in the coming tempest.” He said the lucky residents would die in their sleep.
It was not known if there were cones on the George Washington Bridge. Word of disappearing shore apparently had not reached across the Pond. The BBC's lead story was "New York Shuts down for Blizzard."
As for me I was happy to be able to turn my attention to another East Coast story: Whether the Patriots, no relation to our forefathers, were guilty of deflategate. And what about Climate change?