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Thursday, March 23, 2006Tonight, AOL asks us: Is the media too negative?They're referring to pushback on the Iraq war, but... I grew up in Michigan in the 1980s. Thanks to a stable of folksy columnists and a few good sports writers, the Detroit Free Press was Michigan's newspaper of record at the time. And the best of what it offered was pretty good. The front page was not so good. Detroit was a basket-case at the time. Almost war-ravaged. And there's no question about where the newspaper stood: it was with the insurgents all the way. If a young man robbed a liquor store, and shot the man behind the counter, we'd hear for a week about how this senseless tragedy had broken a mama's heart - because her oldest boy was going to prison instead of college. Wives deprived of husbands, children deprived of fathers, families robbed of their incomes... it barely made a blip. What made the editorial and front pages were pleas for understanding of why young men were killing perfect strangers for money, followed by pleas for the stingy Reagan administration to spend more money on this, that or the other thing so the young men wouldn't have to kill anyone anymore. Likewise, police shootings did not bring forth stories about the nightmare situations the cops faced. Did not testify to the heroism of those who laid their lives on the line to make the streets a little safer while the mayor's cronies drew the top salaries in the department. The focus of the Detroit Free Press with which I grew up was that all Detroit needed was for the poor to find a decent way to surrender their livelihoods and luxuries with sufficient grace that they wouldn't get killed. That way, their perpetual victimization could be relegated to the police blotter instead of putting Detroit on everyone's front page again. My major exposure to media as a lad, then, was learning that reporters who lived in the suburbs or at least in better neighborhoods thought the solution to crime was to find root causes other than the thinking and actions of the criminals, blame the Republicans and shake the head sadly. Is the Iraq story any different? 
posted by gbarto at 9:24 PM |
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