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Hard feelings linger in an Oklahoma town, after newspaper endorsed Clinton

Nick Oxford
/
New York Times

Oklahoma residents are having trouble forgiving an Oklahoma newspaper that endorsed Hillary Clinton during the election.

As The New York Times reports, The Enid News & Eagle is a small regional newspaper with a circulation of just 10,000. But 162 of those subscribers defected after the paper endorsed the Democratic nominee this year. Eleven of the paper’s advertisers pulled their ads. A Trump supporter even threatened to physically assault the paper’s editor while he was dining with his wife at the local Western Sizzlin steakhouse.

Before this year, the News & Eagle hadn’t endorsed a Democratic candidate for president in the entire modern history of the paper, dating back to 1893. The paper’s editor knew he was walking into a hornet’s nest by endorsing Clinton. But he wrote the editorial anyway.

As one journalism professor in Oklahoma City put it, “It takes guts to do that in Enid, Oklahoma.”