A newspaper in Minnesota has parted ways with a fat-shaming columnist who detailed his recent experience flying next to an overweight passenger — saying airlines should consider selling “tickets by the pound.”
Alan Linda, an unpaid columnist for the Fargus Falls Daily Journal, has sounded off on a wide range of topics during his 30 years writing for the newspaper – politics, his children, telephone companies and appliances, to name a few – but his Feb. 10 cringe-worthy column on sitting next to a 300-pound Georgia man during a flight will be his last.
“Not only did this offend many of our readers, it offended us,” the newspaper announced last week, cutting ties with Linda, of New York Mills. “Bullying others is not OK. Body shaming is not OK. Racist views are not OK. Homophobia is not OK. The list goes on, but you get the picture. Let’s debate the issues, not make personal attacks on people.”
The column — entitled “Taking notice of the size of people in today’s world” – has since been taken down. It began by arguing how much “bigger” and “wider” and “thicker” people are nowadays. Linda then recalls a recent flight during which he was forced to sit next to an overweight man.
“He looked at me, kind of grimaced,” Linda wrote of his failed attempt to put his arm rest down between him and the man’s girth. “And when a 300-plus guy has you effectively pinned in and you can’t even run for it, when they grimace at you, your first thought is: ‘Oh, man. He looks hungry.’”
Linda continued by poking fun of the man’s Southern accent, and made a joke when the man got up to use the bathroom.
“You know the size of the bathroom at the back of the plane? And the door into it ain’t hardly a foot wide,” Linda wrote, according to a cached version of the column. “I kind of wanted to foller him back air, watch if that worked, him getting hisself in there. (You gotta love that language.) In the meantime, I ate my peanuts afore he were back.”
On Monday, the newspaper’s editor and publisher, Tim Engstrom, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune he’s received an “overwhelmingly positive response” over his decision to part ways with Linda.
Engstrom said body-shaming may have been acceptable at one time, but no longer.
“Personally, I think it’s a generational thing,” he said. “I think at one point you could talk about someone wearing glasses as a ‘four-eye,’ or make fun of a person’s weight or the color of their hair. Now people are, ‘No bullying, no body-shaming.’
“It all goes into the category of what’s acceptable these days, along with racism and homophobia. They’re kind of asking adults not to act like children.”
A column in the newspaper last week said Linda’s column ran, in part, because Engstrom had pneumonia.
“The staff ran the column because it was routine — Alan Linda was in that spot every Friday,” according to the Daily Journal editorial. “His column, ‘The Prairie Spy,’ has been there for years. And meanwhile, the staff was busy withholding the publication of a letter to the editor with a fake name they had discovered.
“In other words, they had two pucks coming at the goalie that day, and they stopped only one.”
Linda told the Minneapolis Star Tribune in an email that he wasn’t sure what the fuss was all about when reached by the newspaper.
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