An MTSU sophomore, Danielle Ross, was quoted on MSNBC in an article on racism in the current political primary process. She too off from college to campaign for Barack Obama and was in Muncie, IN, working the people on street corners and at a Wal-Mart.

“The first person I encountered was like, ‘I’ll never vote for a black person,’ ” recalled Ross, who is white and just turned 20. “People just weren’t receptive.”

The article goes on to discuss other examples where name-calling was the most pleasant aspect.

Brendan Loy, however, doesn’t think that if West Virginia goes heavily for Clinton that racism is necessarily the reason for it. I agree with Brendan. I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve wondered how reporters seem to find so many people to interview that sound so yokel and have more fingers than teeth.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that, if you’re a reporter, and you conduct enough man-on-the-street interviews, you can find some idiot to say “Obama’s a Muslim” — or even “Obama’s a n***er” — anywhere. You can find racists and xenophobes and conspiratorial crazies in California, New York, Texas, Illinois; you can find ‘em all over the damn country.

Can you find them more easily in West Virginia? Perhaps. But you’re also much more likely to publish their quotes in a story about West Virginia, because it fits the storyline perfectly. Indeed, such a quote is precisely what these reporters are looking forwhen they start conducting the interviews in West Virginia. Whereas in California or New York, they’d probably ignore the random racist quote, in West Virginia they go out, they turn on the yokel-detecting radar, they hold up a microphone to the redneckiest-lookin’ redneck they can find, and — voila! — journalistic magic happens.