“Welcome to Texas!” says Al-Jazeera reporter Gabriel Elizono. The Brazilian garnered a roadtrip, decided to find out what rural Texas was all about. Click the links to read the *ahem* reporter’s story, but make sure you read the school superintendent’s  response. [Source: Kate Shellnutt/Houston Chronicle]

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Al Jazeera reporter not welcomed at Texas football game

An Al Jazeera reporter from Brazil ended up in the Texas panhandle to report on post-9/11 America. He wrote about how an “obviously furious” high school principal denied him the opportunity to film at a football game.

Gabriel Elizono’s blog entry is titled “Welcome to Texas! Unless you’re Al Jazeera.”

After chronicling about the saga (which the school official corrected and clarified), he ends with this:

I got back in the car, and ponder how interesting it would have been to cut through the red tape of [the principal] and talk to the people at the game. How had 9/11 affected them? Do they feel safer now than they did on September 10, 2001? How would this All American town commemorate the 10 year anniversary?

I unwittingly get my answer to the last question, and I don’t need Mr Lee’s permission on this one.  On a main intersection in Booker a little sign reads: “Gun Show. Sept. 10 – 11. Legion Hall.”

Well, I guess that’s my spin on this whole story.

The implication in Elizono’s story and its coverage on Gawker is that a decade after 9/11, Texans are suspicious of the name Al Jazeera and a bunch of gun-toting xenophobes. Or that they love football so much that they’d only talk to a reporter at a football game and not, say, the parking lot, a local restaurant or anywhere else in town.

I can’t speak to Booker, Texas, but on behalf of Houston—the most diverse city in the American South—I give this notion a great big eye roll.

[More here.]