You are so right about how the people you meet at gas stations or Costco don't match the media portrayals, which tend to reduce Southerners to caricatures.

Apart from the issues in fiction: We live in an age of what some critics call "diner journalism." Whenever there's an election, reporters drop into a diner, interview a few people in MAGA caps, and hold them up as representative of the South.

I don't blame the reporters: When so many newspapers have died or shrunk and TV networks want sound bites, it's hard for them to tell complex stories. But the way news from the South is being reported these days isn't really helping, alas.