The National Media Hilariously Misunderstands Texas Geography

[Elderberry]

Texas Monthly by Dan Solomon 11/4/2019

All the news from the ”Dallas suburb” of Marfa and the ”adjacent” regions of El Paso and the Rio Grande Valley.

Texas is big. It’s bigger than France or Spain. It’s as big as much of the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest. Houston alone is roughly the size of the island of Oahu. Considering the media’s favorite cliche about our state (“everything’s bigger…”), this size would seem to be well-known. Yet when people—even reporters, whose jobs are to verify and convey facts—attempt to explain Texas, the vastness of the landscape somehow escapes them.

This happened again today. The Poynter Institute, a venerable journalism school and research organization in St. Petersburg, Florida, reported on the growth taking place in public radio newsrooms. It’s a positive development for the industry, and Texas is at the heart of it. If you’d like to learn about that, go ahead and read reporter Rick Edmonds’s piece about what’s happening. Just don’t read it to gain any understanding of Texas geography.



Describing Marfa as a Dallas suburb is ridiculous, of course. The two cities are more than five hundred miles apart. That’s like describing Cleveland as a suburb of Manhattan. (Plus, everybody knows that Marfa is really a suburb of Brooklyn.) But it’s also the sort of easy-to-make brain fart that happens sometimes, as much as reporters try to avoid those.

More: https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/poynter-institute-texas-geography-mistakes/

[thackney]

Dang, Dallas is really spreading out.  How long is the average commute these days?

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Marfa,+Texas+79843/Dallas,+Texas/@31.4440574,-104.9012811,6z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x86efb0a37f4025ff:0x720e0d3e89d4c90!2m2!1d-104.020623!2d30.3094622!1m5!1m1!1s0x864c19f77b45974b:0xb9ec9ba4f647678f!2m2!1d-96.7969879!2d32.7766642!3e0

[PeteS in CA]

I'd love to laugh - it was fun using Google Maps to locate Marfa, and then zooming out, and out, and out, until I saw Dallas - but the ignorance of California geography I've seen posted by conservatives on conservative discussion sites chokes down my laughter at the MSM's ignorance of the part of the US between the Appalachian Mountains and the Coast Range Mountains.