The Arkansas Editorial of Me!

It must have been a slow news day at The Morning News of Northwest Arkansas. The newspaper, which serves residents in the area of the future home of Alice Walton‘s planned Crystal Bridges Museum, devoted more than half of a 630-word editorial to deploring and extensively quoting my Wall Street Journal article about the Wal-Mart heiress’ collecting activities.
The editorial writers declare:
We heard a snob talking down to Walton, to Crystal Bridges and to us.
I meant no insult to Walton, her museum or Arkansas (even though everyone knows that New York is universally regarded as the center of the universe). I think the intention to create a first-class museum of American art is laudable. All I said is that Walton’s money and her manner of deploying it are, as the headline says, roiling the art world, causing some major and disturbing dislocations. I didn’t even mention the other major impact of the Walton Effect—the inflation of prices in the American art market, making purchases even further out of reach of established museums. That’s a story in itself. Dare I go there?
Still, I don’t mind what they say about me, as long as they spell my name right. But wait, they DIDN’T! Now if you Google “Lee Rosembaum,” you get, “Did you mean ‘Lee Rosenbaum’?” and then a link to the opinion piece in the Morning News. Do you think that Walton’s lawyers, who repeatedly referred to “Steiglitz” in their Fisk letter to Tennessee’s attorney general, also authored the Arkansas editorial?
I demand a correction!