Anisa Khalifa: It’s Election Week in America — and if you’re like me, you’re probably a little burned out. So we’re offering up something different. Okay, yes, this is an episode about politics. But it’s not what you think. I’m Anisa Khalifa. You’re listening to The Broadside, where we tell stories from our home in North Carolina at the crossroads of the South. This week, we chat with three veteran political reporters and ask them a single question: what’s the most bizarre story you've ever covered? Stick around. Things are about to get weird…
Barry Yeoman: My name is Barry Yeoman, I'm a freelance writer, and I have lived in Durham for almost 40 years. I can't believe it.
Anisa Khalifa: Barry recently joined us to talk about one of the strangest events in the history of American politics. One he had a front row seat to.
Barry Yeoman: So in 1996, there were two major candidates running for governor of North Carolina. You had Democrat Jim Hunt, who was seeking a fourth term, and Hunt was a respected education leader who was also a champion of early childhood education. He was also moving to the right on business issues, especially on tax cuts for corporations. On the Republican side, you had Robin Hayes, who had as part of his campaign the repeal of the food tax, which falls hard on poor people. But most of Hayes's campaign was out of the Christian right playbook. He was very conservative on issues such as sex education and abortion.
And then you had a third candidate. Her name was Jolene Strickland. She was the mayor of Pine Hill, North Carolina. She was a progressive on a whole suite of issues. She was, in many ways, everybody's mom. She was raised on a tobacco farm. by a dad who later died of lung cancer. She was a coupon clipper. She was a member of her Methodist church…. and she didn't exist.
In 1996 I was a senior staff writer at what was then called the Independent Weekly, now called Indie Week. And we were thinking about how we would cover the 1996 elections, especially the governor's race and it didn't feel very inspiring to us. We had a brand new editor. His name was Bob Moser. He challenged us to think of a creative way of covering the election. And we thought, why don't we invent a candidate? So we invented a non-democratic non-republican candidate named Jolene Strickland, who represented the values that we wanted to see in a candidate.
Anisa Khalifa: So how did you come up with this idea? I mean, I know you said you wanted to have a creative way of covering the election but like, it's not sort of the first thing that comes to mind, right, to create a fake candidate.
Barry Yeoman: It's not the first thing, no. And in fact, there have been very few fake candidates in the history of newspapers, but we were an alternative weekly and we knew that our mission was to push the definition of journalism and to not just think about what was, but also what was possible. And it was one of these sort of flashes of genius, the, the genius behind it was my colleague, Eric Bates. He was imagining something more like Lake Wobegon in Prairie Home Companion, something that would be fictional, but everybody would know it was fictional that the reader would be in on the joke that they would have this really happy place where they could go when they thought about the actual election and how nobody really spoke to their needs. They knew that they had this fictional candidate. That's not quite how it worked out though.
Anisa Khalifa: I want to hear about the response, but before we get to that, like, can you tell me, how did you actually pull this off? How did you make it happen?
Barry Yeoman: Yeah. So I had met a woman named Joanna McClay. She was the mother of a friend. We met at a wedding and she was a professor at the University of Illinois and she was an actor. She was also a specialist in Southern dialects. She was from Alabama and she looked the part. She looked kind of like Ann Richards, the famous governor of Texas, silver haired, slightly older, Looked very rural, southern and having a face, having somebody who could actually play the role was a really big start.
And then our secret weapon was a writer who was on our staff named Melinda Rooley, who was just a really brilliant writer and was able to create this backstory of her that was deeply compelling. She was a small town mayor of Pine Hill, North Carolina, which was so small. That the Department of Transportation had left it off the map. She was an educator, she was a NASCAR fan, she grew up on a tobacco farm, but her father had died of lung cancer. She had a backstory that felt very deeply North Carolina. Um, and then Melinda just went to town and wrote this really compelling, funny, vivid story, which before we published it, we went back and we dropped in, or she dropped in, hints that Jolene Strickland was too good to be true.
The biggest hint was her campaign slogan, which was "Too good to be true". But also she lived on Big Bluffs Street and she lived in Pine Hill, which you just have to look at a map and you know that there's no Pine Hill. And there were all of these hints that were dropped in. And then all the other characters in our story felt like they came out of a Southern fever dream. There was a preacher who prayed over the fry baby at one of her fundraisers. And as we dropped in hints, we felt pretty sure that readers would understand that this was a fiction.
Anisa Khalifa: And what actually happened when you published the story?
Barry Yeoman: Readers went wild. They were so happy that there was a candidate who they could really stand behind. We got letters, we got phone calls, we got campaign contributions. There was so much buzz. We sold bumper stickers, we sold t-shirts, we sold buttons. And there were some readers who got the joke immediately, but there were a lot who didn't. And we had kind of an uh-oh moment and a lot of reckoning about how we would deal with this.
And so, we wrote follow ups and we dropped in more hints, but even those didn't quite persuade people that she was fictional. And then finally, two weeks after the first article appeared, she held a press conference at the legislature. We had told her on one day's notice. She said she wasn't prepared. We said, don't worry.
Anisa Khalifa: Oh my goodness.
Barry Yeoman: She wasn't prepared. The press asked her some really tough questions, especially for someone who is not from North Carolina. Like what highways run through Pine Hill? And why, when we called the University of North Carolina, are you not showing up in their records? She did great in terms of policy because she was briefed on policy, but in terms of the personal biographical stories, she panicked. So would have anyone, right? And so then the Charlotte Observer and the News & Observer and AP all published stories about how she was a fiction. And it wasn't for another couple of weeks before the Greensboro paper published a column that acknowledged the value of a fiction, the value of this kind of expansive view of journalism, that anybody in the mainstream press nodded to the fact that this actually served a purpose.
Anisa Khalifa: Do you regret creating a fictional candidate?
Barry Yeoman: I don't. We made an adjustment after she was exposed, and we ran another, I don't know, 14 stories, something like that, but they had at the bottom a little one line notice to readers that she was a fiction and so after that everybody knew and we kept on raising all the issues that we wanted a candidate to talk about such as campaign finance and cigarette advertising and the way that we were recklessly spending money on highway building and not money on highway repair or public transportation and some of the stories were, were, were really good. There was a run in between her and Richard Petty, uh, the NASCAR driver who was running as a Republican for Secretary of State. They talked about cigarette advertising. And so we were able to still be really clever and really thoughtful about the issues.
Um, would I have done it differently? Maybe, but truly, when I put myself back there, and I was just one of a large team, I was not, you know, the primary writer, I wrote a couple of pieces. I don't think that we could have completely predicted how readers would have responded. And should we have been less risk-taking? I don't think so. When you think about what newspapers were like for most of the history of newspapers in America, they were not these really stenographic, objective reporters of the fact and nothing else. That was a pretty modern invention in the history of newspapers. Spoof and parody have always been a part of newspapering, and in a lot of ways, the reason that newspapers in the 1990s had gotten so homogenized was because of the takeover of newspapers by a smaller and smaller number of large corporations that created a much more homogenized product.
And so it was our role as an alternative paper to stretch the imagination, to make readers really think about what journalism can do, not just be a reporter of this press conference or this city council meeting or this legislative hearing, but also raise issues that would otherwise not be raised, spur public conversation, make people dream.
Anisa Khalifa: Do you think that you would do something like that today?
Barry Yeoman: I think it would be harder. Um, for one, there is a lot of actual fake news out there that is not trying to wink at the reader. It's just trying to obfuscate and lie. And so, a fictional candidate might be just viewed as part of that fake news landscape. On the other hand, because we have good fact checking now and the ruse wouldn't last as long as it did, maybe it would pivot really quickly to people rallying behind Jolene Strickland. Um, I spoke with Eric Bates, who was one of my colleagues. He's the one who thought of Jolene Strickland in the first place. And he imagined that in 2024, if we had a fake candidate, people would really embrace her knowing she was fake. There would be a whole, whole online campaign. There might be rallies.
It might be exactly the case that, that Jolene Strickland was ahead of her time and that a 2024 fake candidate who everybody knew was a fake candidate might be a really great vehicle to register our discontent with the relatively narrow views of the Republican and Democratic parties.
Anisa Khalifa: So what did you do with all those campaign donations?
Barry Yeoman: We returned them. Yeah, we did.
Anisa Khalifa: If you want to know more about the fake campaign of Jolene Strickland, check out our show notes. We’ve linked to a story that Barry recently wrote for the Assembly. But stay with us because coming up after a break, we’ve got an ironic music performance at a funeral. And a deep dive into the bipartisan soda culture of North Carolina politics.
Jim Morrill: You know, I don't think I have any particularly good stories.
Anisa Khalifa: This is Jim Morrill. He’s a terrible liar. And a former political reporter.
Jim Morrill: I worked at the Charlotte Observer for almost 40 years. I covered politics pretty exclusively since 1987. Until I retired at the end of 2020.
Anisa Khalifa: Jim covered everything from Harvey Gantt, the first black mayor of a major city in North Carolina, to the powerful and deeply divisive Senator Jesse Helms. Now, we could do an entire show with Jim on Jesse Helms…
Jim Morrill: There was a woman named Carol Moseley Brown, and she was the first Black female Senator in the United States. And she was from Illinois and they found themselves in an elevator one day, I think in the 90s, and he started whistling "Dixie". Which she took as a pretty big insult. You would say he didn't mean it that way. But it, uh, certainly came across to her and other people like that. So, yeah, I think you could fairly call him a racist.
Anisa Khalifa: But when we asked Jim what the weirdest political story he ever covered was, he immediately turned to the meteoric rise and fall of a young politician from his hometown of Charlotte…
Jim Morrill: There was a guy named Andrew Reyes who sort of came out of nowhere and was elected the chairman of the Mecklenburg County Democratic Party. As memory serves, he was only in his 30s, maybe his 20s. I think people were taken by, you know, he had a certain amount of charisma and, you know, but I think it was just financial wherewithal too that got him to be the chairman of the party. Andrew was sort of a big spender. He went to white house state dinners in the Clinton White House. So he was sort of a, a guy to be reckoned with. And it turned out, and this, a lot of this came out later, some of it, we. Sort of uncovered at the paper, but, um, he was a CPA who had a client in, uh, New Hampshire, and he'd been embezzling money from this client.
Which is how he got a lot of this money to kind of throw around and he would donate to the Clinton presidential campaigns and democratic campaigns here and you, you throw enough money around and you get to be elected party chairman in a county, even like Mecklenburg. And when this client died, he was at the funeral and he sang bridge over troubled waters. Which I always thought was pretty funny. The law started to close in on him at one point. I remember going to look for him at his house in East Charlotte and, um, I think I got there right as the moving vans had left and he had disappeared.
Anisa Khalifa: Reyes went on the lam for 18 months… and was eventually arrested in San Diego at the border crossing coming back from Tijuana.
Jim Morrill: But he was later charged with embezzlement and other things. He also served time in prison. And then the next time I talked to him was years later, and he was working in a fast food restaurant in Salt Lake City or something like that.
Anisa Khalifa: That was Jim Morrill, former politics reporter for the Charlotte Observer. And now, we turn to Raleigh, the capital of the great state of North Carolina.
Dawn Vaughan: I'm Dawn Vaughan. I'm the capital bureau chief at the News and Observer, which means I host our Under the Dome podcast.
Anisa Khalifa: And Dawn’s coverage of Governor Roy Cooper has included the smallest of details.
Dawn Vaughan: So Diet Sun Drop is a soda that we're recording in the Legislative Building, and it's something I would see on the desks of lawmakers, primarily House Republicans, for a while, and Diet Sun Drop is kind of a, sort of a lemon soda. It's got a lot of caffeine in it, and it's just kind of an NC poll thing. And so I, um, I began seeing these tweets from the, um, the spokespeople for Governor Cooper, who's a Democrat, um, about Diet Sun Drop and how he, like, constantly has all this, um, drinks Diet Sun Drop all the time. So this has been like months of me seeing, you know, both, um, both sides of the aisle of people that really like Diet Sun Drop. And I've never had it that I remember anyway, you know, if I did, it didn't, it didn't stick with me. So the way this, this ended up being this viral video.
So Cooper will gaggle with reporters after council of state meetings for like five minutes or so. Um, and if people are listening, don't know. It's. Like when reporters stand around like a gaggle of geese and ask, you know, elected official questions for a few minutes. That's what it is. And you make small talk during that time. I do the same thing with Speaker Moore and Senate Leader Berger. It's just, you know, everyone gets their mic set up and then we start talking. And Cooper says to me, you know, kind of off-camera, you don't see me, it's just the video of Cooper saying, I heard you said you're gonna try Diet Sun Drop, because I had tweeted, okay, finally I'm gonna, I'm gonna try this, and then I'm like, what is it, like basically Mountain Dew? And Cooper goes, no, and he gets like very serious, like a professor, like giving a lecture about how, um, like describing the taste of it.
Roy Cooper: It's hard to explain. So mountain dew is sweeter than diet sun drop. Diet Sun Drop has a little bit more of a tart taste.
Dawn Vaughan: And he calls himself a diet soda sommelier.
Roy Cooper: I'm like a diet soda sommelier.
Dawn Vaughan: And this is like maybe 20 seconds and we talked about serious stuff as soon as like the mics were ready, probably Medicaid expansion or something. I think I ended up having to write like a short story about it, um, because of this viral video that, that Travis Fain put out. I mean, like tens of thousands of views and, and interactions. Um, the Democrats capitalized on it, made t-shirts that said Diet Soda Sommelier. Cooper literally changed his Twitter bio to Diet Soda Sommelier. Um, and I ended up getting flack from it from Republicans who thought, you know, oh no, don't write something that's not criticizing, you know, the Democratic governor. And I'm like, I, you guys like Diet Sun Drop too.
Dawn Vaughan: So anyway, Cooper actually like brought one out and I tried it and it's pretty good. It does have a lot of caffeine, so I drink it at like 9:30 in the morning, walking down the street to my car after Council of State. It's not like an everyday soda, but apparently for Governor Cooper it is and for a lot of, um, I believe it's more on the House side of House Republicans.
Anisa Khalifa: 21st century bipartisanship… I guess we’ll take it where we can get it.
Dawn Vaughan: And given the amount of caffeine in Diet Sun Drop, you literally need that to get you through some long committee meetings and everything, and floor sessions, although reporters aren't allowed to have anything to drink on the floor, so we're just watching them drink their Diet Sun Drop from afar.
Anisa Khalifa: Wow, that's harsh.
Dawn Vaughn: Yeah it is.
Anisa Khalifa: This episode of the Broadside was produced by me, Anisa Khalifa, with Charlie Shelton-Ormond, and our editor Jerad Walker. Wilson Sayre is our executive producer. If you want to know more about the stories in this week’s episode, we’ve linked to all of them in our show notes. Special thanks this week goes out to WUNC’s Colin Campbell and Kate Sheppard of The Assembly. The Broadside is a production of WUNC–North Carolina Public Radio and is part of the NPR network. You can email us at broadside@wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend! I’m Anisa Khalifa. Thanks for listening y'all. We'll be back next week.