The Pride of Pine Hill
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Your well-being is worth it, and now it's within reach. Visit BetterHelp.com slash criminal to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash criminal. What was going on during the 1996 campaign season here in North Carolina? Who was running? So in 1996, there were two candidates for governor. One was Jim Hunt, who was the incumbent.

He was a Democrat. He was well-respected, well-loved. He was a champion of kids. He was also somebody who was very mainstream establishment. This is journalist Barry Yeoman. And then he was being challenged by Robin Hayes, who was a Republican who was most famous for a sex education bill when he was in the state legislature that...

required the state to adopt a curriculum that, among other things, suggested that kids wash their genital regions after having sex. Robin Hayes also suggested that people could use Lysol to prevent STDs, leading some people to refer to him as Lysol Man.

His mother had contributed a million dollars to his gubernatorial campaign and an additional $500,000 to the Republican National Committee, telling a reporter that she made the donation because, quote, At the time, Barry Yeoman was working for an alt-weekly based in Durham, North Carolina, called the Independent Weekly. The newspaper was covering the governor's race closely.

In 1996, Barry's editor was Bob Moser. Bob had started out as the calendar and arts editor. He was only 32 when he became the editor-in-chief. And we were having a staff meeting, figuring out how would we cover the elections in a way that other newspapers didn't. And Bob said, I'm going to walk out of the room and you all figure it out, and I'm not coming back until you have an idea. So what were some of the ideas?

There may have been more ideas, but I only remember one because it's the one we chose, which was if we had two candidates who we were not crazy about, that we would make up one of our own. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. So when you went back to Bob Moser and said, OK, you wanted us to come up with something, here's what we came up with. We're going to create our own candidate. What did he say?

He was both excited and nervous. He was excited because it was bolder than what we normally do. And it would be fun. And he was nervous because it wasn't what we normally did. And we were striving every week for credibility. As an alternative weekly, we had one strike against us automatically, which was that we were viewed as biased.

This was the end of the golden era of alt-weeklies, alternative weeklies, which were weekly newspapers that very intentionally tried to zig left as the rest of the media zig right.

We were always looking for the way that we can fill the gap in the mainstream press. The first Alt Weekly in America is generally considered to be The Village Voice, which was first published in New York City in October of 1955.

New York Times book critic Dwight Garner wrote, quote, Here is a dispatch from another, better planet. There is nothing else like it. Dan Wolfe, the editor and co-founder, said, quote,

The Village Voice was originally conceived as a living, breathing attempt to demolish the notion that one needs to be a professional to accomplish something in a field as purportedly technical as journalism. The Village Voice didn't take itself too seriously. The first edition included a short piece by a four-year-old titled A Joke by Philip. It read, "'A horse can't say yes or no, but a donkey can.'" But the paper didn't hold back.

They ranked the worst landlords in New York City. They reported on abortion suits in the 1960s before Roe v. Wade, covering the most famous abortion doctor on the East Coast. To cover an anti-prostitution measure in New York that said that women could not be served at bars and restaurants if they were not in a group that included men, a group of women voice reporters went from restaurant to restaurant and demanded to be served.

When a bartender seemed to panic about the big group of women at the bar, the author of the article wrote, What do you think we are? A whorehouse on a field trip? And, yeah, I mean, I think that that was the secret sauce that made The Village Voice so influential. This is Tricia Romano. She started as an intern at The Village Voice in 1997 and worked as a writer and fact-checker there for many years. Because...

Instead of pretending that they're not a person, they're a robot, and they don't have opinions, or they can't, you know, really tell you what they're seeing, they just said it, you know. You're not going to say, like, the sources say that it might be raining outside. You just say it's raining. I saw the rain, you know. She published an oral history about the village voice. In it, she writes...

I wanted to tell the story of how media overall has been hampered by greedy, imperious, and or incompetent management. These factors have shrunk the media landscape, whittling it down to the largest, most powerful publications, leaving a void most largely felt in local and independent news. Barry Yeoman says at The Independent, the writers and editors wore their values on their sleeves, for better or for worse.

We were viewed as not neutral. And people called our journalism in to question as a result of that. And we were doing great journalism. We were doing really strong investigative reporting. And the way that we got our word out, because we were a small paper, was we relied on other publications who would serve as amplifiers. And Bob was afraid that

If we had something that they perceived as a stunt, as fake news, that we would lose their credibility, we would lose their respect, and that that careful relationship that we had built would be threatened. But still he said go ahead with it. But still he said go ahead with it, yes. Tell me a little bit about the character, the politician that you created. Who was she?

So her name was Jolene Strickland, and she was the mayor of Pine Hill, North Carolina, which, according to our very first article, is so small that there's no trace of it on the state's own maps. And she was the daughter of a tobacco farmer who had gotten...

lung cancer. She was a retired educator. She was active in her community. She was a lapsed evangelical Christian who had become an active Methodist. She represented rural North Carolina at its most progressive. She was

outspoken, she was funny, she also had all the problems that every working-class person in North Carolina had. Money was tight, she clipped coupons, she knew the cost of bread because she budgeted her household budget that closely, and she was somebody who articulated the values that we wanted to articulate but in very homespun ways. She would be perfect.

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Check out squarespace.com slash criminal for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code criminal to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Every day, thousands of Comcast engineers and technologists like Kunle put people at the heart of everything they create. In the average household, there are dozens of connected devices. Here in the Comcast family, we're building an integrated in-home Wi-Fi solution for millions of families like my own.

It brings people together in meaningful ways. Kuhnle and his team are building a Wi-Fi experience that connects one billion devices every year. Learn more about how Comcast is redefining the future of connectivity at comcastcorporation.com slash Wi-Fi. The first draft of the first article about Jolene Strickland was written by a journalist at The Independent named Melinda Rooley. Barry Yeoman says that the hope was that, quote, everybody would know that this was fictional.

But they would have this really happy place where they could go and just dream about what an election would look like with a candidate who actually spoke to their needs. But he says the first draft was so believable that he and the other journalists at The Independent worried that readers wouldn't be able to tell that this wasn't an actual candidate for governor.

And then she crafted and crafted and crafted the story until we thought we had the balance right, that readers would love this character, but they would know she was a character. And how would they know? Well, for example, she lived on Big Bluffs Road, and her campaign slogan was, "'Too good to be true.'" And the phrase, "'Too good to be true," was littered throughout the story.

They realized they needed to include a photograph of their candidate, so they had to find someone who looked like a retired schoolteacher from a small town. Barry Yeoman said he knew the perfect person. She was the mother of a friend of his named Joanna McClay. Joanna McClay was a professor at the University of Illinois, but was in North Carolina that spring on sabbatical.

And she really looked the part. Back then, one of the real political stars in the country was Ann Richards, the governor of Texas, who was this charismatic populist public speaker. And Dr. McClay looked a lot like Ann Richards. She was in her...

middle-aged, she had silver hair, she was tall, and she looked very rural, and so she was willing to be the face of Jolene Strickland. So you set up a photo shoot?

We set up many photo shoots. We basically sent our photographer, MJ Sharp, out with her. She posed in front of the governor's mansion. She went to a Durham Bulls baseball game. She went to a popular restaurant in Raleigh where a lot of politicians and lobbyists hang out. It was run by a husband and wife team, this particular diner.

a restaurant. Joanna McClay, speaking to Barry Yeoman in August of last year. And we were in there eating, me and the photographer, and she was taking pictures of me while we ate. And so it was full. It was really full with lots of guys and they're having lunch. Figured most of them were politicians, probably.

Or wannabes. And so we're still there and the restaurant's starting to kind of thin out. And the wife comes up from the back and she said, we were getting ready to leave. And I said, thank you. It was lovely. You posed so good and all that stuff. And she said,

I just, I need to ask you something, if you don't mind. And I said, sure. And she said, are you? My husband and I were talking about it. We kind of think maybe you are. Are you somebody? And I looked at her and I said, well, I sure am. They even found a dog for her to pose with. They decided Jolene Strickland would have a dog.

Do you remember the night before the story was going to be published, thinking, well, this is exciting. I wonder how this is going to go over. Oh, we were all really excited. Our editor, Bob Moser, he told me much later that right before the story ran, he was driving to work and he pulled over his car and just started crying because he was so scared that something would go wrong. He was excited, but...

But he was afraid that people wouldn't get the joke, or they would get the joke and they would be angry at us, or some reader reaction would not go as expected. In May of 1996, the issue went to print. The whole cover was a picture of Joanna McClay as Jolene Strickland. Standing in front of the governor's mansion, she's in a red suit, has a red blazer, she's wearing...

A dog would boot in air. She's looking directly at the camera. Her head is tilted. And it said, move over, Jim Hunt. And there's a smaller subhead that said, independent candidate Jolene Strickland takes aim at the governor's mansion. And how long was the profile inside? I mean, this wasn't a short article. No, this went on for pages and pages. I mean, this was really like a life story. It was a biography. It went on thousands of words.

Jolene Strickland was 48. She always wore red. She once told her mother she hoped that someday she wouldn't have to clip coupons. And her mother said, Joe, you stop practicing thrift and the devil will move into your kitchen. Her campaign manager told The Independent that they'd returned a $10,000 campaign contribution because Joe believes the governor of North Carolina should be elected, not bought.

She had a husband named Bob and a son named Bobby. The dog was named Mercy Me. Jolene met Bob when she was 18, on her way home from her job at the Utterly Butterly Dairy Barn. Bob was participating in a strike for better working conditions at a poultry plant. They dated for five years. She joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and got her teaching certificate from UNC.

They got married, and her parents gave them a book of baby names and a year's supply of ground chalk. She described teaching public school during the day and watching news from Vietnam at night. Quote, anyone not in a coma was getting the political lesson of a lifetime. Bob is quoted as saying, Jolene can smell a pile of you-know-what from a mile away, and she doesn't rest until it's cleaned up.

She went on to become the mayor of the, quote, storybook town, Pine Hill. And one of the things she focused on in her campaign to challenge Jim Hunt and Robin Hayes and the governor's race was crime. She said building new prisons was a wasteful and useless so-called solution to a serious problem. She wanted job programs for nonviolent offenders, drug rehabilitation, and education programs. She was quoted as saying...

Crime does not pay is such a tired cliché. We've got to teach kids that a life well lived does pay. She wanted clean rivers, affordable health care, and strict rules about money and politics.

What was the reaction? Incredibly positive, but there was no indication that people understood that it wasn't real. So people were really excited about her as a candidate. We began receiving phone calls at The Independent. Remember, this is real.

Basically, pre-email, it's 1996, so a few people have internet, but mostly this is entirely non-digital. We got phone calls. We got letters. People really wanted to send her campaign contributions, but they didn't know where to send them, so they sent us campaign contributions.

We also had an ad for bumper stickers and buttons and T-shirts, and people ordered all of those things. There was this real excitement about having a candidate who people really believed in her values. Did anyone say, oh, no, they're sending in contributions and they're buying buttons? What are we going to do? So we weren't worried about the buttons, but we were very worried about the contributions.

The buttons, we thought, meant that people were in on the joke and they wanted to spread the news of this mythical candidate. When we began getting contributions, there was this oh-no light bulb that went off over our head. So it was starting to become apparent to us that we didn't lay it on quite as thick as we had hoped to. Two weeks after the article about Jolene Strickland ran, The Independent published a follow-up article titled,

They dropped more obvious hints, reiterating her campaign slogan, Too Good to Be True, and saying outright that her campaign was conveniently headquartered here at the Independent. They quoted three readers who said they doubted that there was a real Jolene Strickland. They repeatedly referred to her as the Independent candidate. But they also published Jolene Strickland's response to her skeptics.

And her response to it was something that we thought all but confirmed that she was not real. She said, my campaign is about giving people a way to imagine just how good our government can be. She said, quote, I'm as real as any other candidate in this race. And my daddy once said that too many politicians are like that monster Dr. Frankenstein brought to life, loud, scary, and held together by some rich guy's money.

The paper sought comments from her opponents. A spokesperson for the Republican candidate, Robin Hayes, said, "She's for universal health care and she's very pro-abortion." He went on to say, "If she does the right things, she might catch on." The press secretary for the sitting Democratic governor, Jim Hunt, said that the governor would be willing to debate Jolene Strickland. And neither of them suggested that they knew that Strickland was a fake.

And so we published their comments because we figured if they're not doing their due diligence, we'll bet on them. The follow-up article also announced that there would be a press conference on May 30th at the state legislature so that Jolene Strickland could answer questions in person. It would be the first time that Joanna McClay would be in front of other journalists and have to respond to their questions in real time.

Barry remembers that they gave her a list of talking points and a statement to read, but that was about it in the way of prep. Still, everyone was confident that she could make it seem believable. She was a scholar of Southern accents. So she had been studying Southern accents, and she was an actor. And so she knew how to perform Southern accents, and in fact had done some of her studying in North Carolina. They also hired someone to play the part of her press secretary.

By all accounts, it went well in the beginning. She was very good on the policy talking points, and there were a bunch of reporters there. There are photos from that day, so we can see that there were a bunch of reporters. And she delivered her talking points really well, and the guy we hired as her press secretary stood by her. But then the journalists began asking her questions, and they were all

All questions that were designed to ferret out if she was real. One journalist asked about her claim that her town, Pine Hill, wasn't on any maps because it was too small. Jolene Strickland said, Well, you know maps. You know mapmakers. You know, they're not perfect. Someone asked how long she'd been mayor of Pine Hill. She said since 1986. But her own campaign had printed her election date as 1993.

The reporters kept asking questions. Why is there no record of Harris having graduated from the University of North Carolina? What highways run through Pine Hill?

And she began panicking, and she knew she was going to panic. She had told us the day before that she was not prepared for this. And my editors reassured her that she'd be fine, and she was not fine. She looked to the guy who had been hired as her press secretary. He didn't have answers, and she just panicked. That was...

I was unhappy, okay? Joanna McLean. Because I was like, ah, I'm not ready to do a press conference, guys. I don't have enough information. And they told me, listen, you'll be fine because Bob will pick up any, Bob will deflect any problems. He's really good at this. Well,

He didn't. Joanna McClay remembered finally telling one reporter, look, all these questions you're asking, it sounds like you're trying to say that I'm not real. The reporter said, that's right. After the press conference, we had this real reckoning. And we tried to figure out what do we do because this felt like

It was worth doing. It was a great idea. And so what we decided that we would do is that we would issue a mea culpa, that in the next issue we would come clean, very clearly. It would be signed by Bob Moser, the editor, because at our fundamental core we were deeply, painfully earnest. The column read, We Made Her Up. Jolene was one of those inspired ideas that springs from frustration—

We wanted to address real issues. How to have universal health care. How to give everyone a fair chance at a prosperous life. How could we address such complicated issues without putting everyone to sleep? If you believed in Jolene, you're an awfully good company. Not only the company of a couple of astute political reporters and a bunch of shrewd readers, but also the offices of the actual gubernatorial candidates.

Maybe we made Jolene too believable. And maybe in the process, we eroded your trust in the basic factuality of what we report. If so, we sincerely apologize. And then we urged them to believe in Jolene the idea, if not Jolene the person. And we ran about a dozen more stories that had a disclaimer at the bottom.

The disclaimer read, And they kept writing about her. In one article, the reporter described Jolene Strickland's visit to a polluted river where she waded through dead fish and picked up trash, fortified by a glass of iced tea and a cheese sandwich.

and gave a statement. Quote, The pieces were a mix of policy and personal details. Jolene speaking about the loss of generational family farms to land developers while putting peanuts in her Coke.

Jolene speaking against tax deductions for corporations in front of the Piggly Wiggly grocery store. A reference to her cousin Donna's You Pick Strawberry Farm in the middle of a piece about the state's Department of Transportation. Jolene at a fiddle festival. How did the other politicians and their campaigns react when they realized this was all a stunt? They spoke to other newspapers and they accused us of deception.

The other campaigns definitely put on a show of righteous anger. When other reporters from other newspapers reported on the press conference, they called both the Hunt campaign and the Hayes campaign. And for example, Hunt's spokesman said, there are better ways to discuss substantive issues than to mislead your readers. I think there was a little bit of embarrassment that earlier on they had not picked up that it was a fake. And so they were definitely...

They were definitely putting on the righteous anger. And did you get any strong criticism from anyone else, from other newspapers, from, you know, people writing in saying, why would you do this? I don't trust you anymore. We heard from readers who felt like their trust had been violated. One reader named Jim Emery from Chapel Hill wrote in a letter to the paper, boy, do I feel deflated. This profile was exhilarating to read, and it stirred up a lot of talk.

But how will we know if future stories are truth or fiction? It goes on to say, The overall feeling I'm left with is like a bad taste in my mouth. Sign me a hurt admirer of your paper. The Augusta Chronicle in Georgia wrote an article about Jolene saying, Faster than you could say liar, liar, pants on fire. The newspaper's senior staff writer admitted that it was not factual reporting, but a stunt to bring out certain issues during the summer's campaign.

The article quoted Barry Yeoman, who said, "'Newspapers have a lot of functions. One of them is reporting what happens in government. One of them is helping readers imagine the possibilities.'" He was also quoted saying, "'Every politician is in some way fictitious.'" The Augusta Chronicle wrote, "'Mr. Yeoman is, of course, full of it. Real newspapers don't make up candidates. They do their best to expose bad ones.'"

But we also got praise. And it took a while after that press conference before we got praise. The first time that we saw some vindication was a couple of weeks later from the Greensboro News and Record that—

That said, that a specialized newspaper like The Independent is freer to experiment and that, in fact, what we were doing was well in the tradition of literary journalism, which is true. Newspapers in the late 18th century and the early 19th century used parody, used satire much more frequently. And it wasn't until the Greensboro News Journal

and Record wrote its column that anybody acknowledged that there was real value to what we were doing. That piece reads, "Irony is a marvelous tool, but its uses are regrettably limited in a modern newspaper. A specialized publication like The Independent is freer to experiment.

And by supplying a foil for the real politicians, a fictional Jolene Strickland has the potential to clarify what the race for governor is really all about. The writer said, I think Jolene was a stroke of genius. We'll be right back.

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Yes. Yes. In North Carolina, you can't be a write-in candidate unless you register as a write-in candidate. And so we don't know for sure how many people wrote her in. But here's what we know. After the election, somebody who was involved in the vote counting in Wake County, which is the county seat of Raleigh,

the state capitol, said that as they were counting the votes, there was one name that came up over and over, which is Jolene Strickland. And by our calculations, in that one county, she probably got dozens of votes. Was everyone glad they did this? I think by and large, we were glad that we did it.

We did it wrong, clearly. We didn't drop enough hints. We panicked when we were exposed. We didn't prepare our actress well enough. There were a lot of things that we made mistakes on. But I think that by and large,

that all of us feel glad that we did it. There was a place for alternative weeklies to challenge the kind of stenographic reporting that the press did to help readers see the possibilities. And so for us, having this vehicle of this likable, relatable character felt like the right thing

even if we did parts of the operation wrong. Having Jolene Strickland as this upbeat candidate allowed us to tackle these issues without...

saying, Jim Hunt, you are a tool of big corporations who include polluters who are funding your campaign. We never had to say that. We never had to say, Robin Hayes, you are bringing your own personal morality into a sphere where personal sexual morality has no place. We were able to do this in a way that was friendly and upbeat.

Jim Hunt won re-election in the 1996 North Carolina governor's race. He went on to be the longest-serving governor in the state's history. Robin Hayes, the Republican candidate, went on to become the chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party. In 2019, he was accused of bribery and pled guilty to lying to the FBI. He was later pardoned by President Trump. Barry Yeoman remained friends with Joanna McClay.

And one of the things she told me was that she was finally moving her residence from Illinois to North Carolina so she could vote for governor of North Carolina in 2024. She was 86 years old. She voted for governor of North Carolina. And then on election day, she was diagnosed with cancer and she passed away right before Thanksgiving. There was...

Standing on her desk in Illinois, there was a picture of her as Jolene from that period, a 28-year-old photo. I loved doing Jolene so much, and I was so reluctant to do it because I thought, I can't pull this off. And I said, ooh, that sounds like fun. I don't think I could do it, but it would be a role of a lifetime. Yeah.

Are you nostalgic at all for a time when Alt Weeklys were more of an institution? I am so nostalgic for Alt Weeklys. You know, Alt Weeklys were killed by Craigslist and the internet because what funded us were classified ads and personal ads. And those moved off of print, online, as soon as there was a Craigslist.

And we lost our base of advertising, we meaning all Alt Weeklys around the country. In the gap, what we've seen are much less credible online sources. People are turning to Reddit. People are turning to truly fake news journalism that pretends that it's real news. And

That era that ran really from the 1970s until the 90s, it feels really precious, and I am deeply sad that it's gone. Barry Yeoman wrote the last piece about Jolene Strickland for The Independent. It's set on election night, 1996, and describes the scene at her campaign headquarters. 200 people crowded together eating ham biscuits, macaroni, and lemon chess pie. He described everyone watching the results roll in.

and then Strickland, giving a concession speech. She tells her supporters it's impossible to get elected in North Carolina unless you have lots of your own cash or know how to kowtow to those who do. At the end of her speech, she says, the struggle continues. Besides, there's plenty of food left, and Bob and I don't have enough Tupperware to take it all home. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me.

Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Zajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter.

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We're on Facebook at Criminal Show and Instagram and TikTok at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.