It's Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town

The billboard that WQOM Catholic Radio posted earlier this month has gotten the local station plenty of attention.

Start with this report in the Boston Pilot:

Radio station launches ‘Try God’ billboard campaign

BOSTON — 1060 AM WQOM Catholic Radio is launching a billboard campaign with the message “Try God: 1060 AM Catholic Radio” across the greater Boston area.

According to a [WQOM] press release, the goal of the billboard campaign “is to reach the widest possible audience in a broad cross-section of the Boston community as a way to expand the station’s current evangelization efforts and bring the ‘good news’ of the Gospel message to even more people in the region.”

The bad news, though, is that people in the region can’t stop mucking with the message.

A week or so ago the Boston Globe featured this Dan Wasserman cartoon:

Now comes today’s Boston Herald with a new alteration. (From our Credit Where Credit’s Due bureau: Fox25 had the story Friday. The dicey local tabloid failed to mention that.)

Pranksters aim billboard barb at higher authority

A religious billboard with a little attitude and humor aimed at Mass Pike drivers captured the attention of clandestine critics who went to great lengths to change its message with a barb of their own that looked like the original script.

Chris Kelley, station manager of three-year-old WQOM Catholic Radio, said listeners called early Thursday morning reporting that the big black billboard suggesting: “Try God,” with the text “1060 AM Catholic Radio” underneath had grown a new punch line with the words “The Other White Meat” replacing the station’s call letters.

Scot Landry, host of “The Good Catholic Life” radio program on WQOM, was not in an especially forgiving mood about the edit. “This act of vandalism was certainly not a prank,” he told the Herald. “It should cause us to reflect on the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that hostility is increasing against the practice of faith and against religious expression.”

But Kelley tried to spin it into a higher good:

This act . . . is an indication that the ‘Try God’ billboard campaign is attracting attention and making people reflect on the role of God in our lives.

Or at least in our dinners.