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Misreporting on American cities has been a thing for my whole life. There are literally millions of people who saw their home communities disparaged and vilified through bad-faith narratives and underreporting for decades. Talk to anyone from Detroit, St. Louis, Memphis, etc. 1/6
By misreporting I mean--a focus on the characters of mayhem rather than the systemic features that enable them. The story of a city is not a heroic narrative, it's a collective one. Look at the budgets aligned with the social compact or you are not looking at anything at all. 2/6
Understand how the map works for and against the people in the city's economy. What does it cost a person in time and money to get to work on foot, by public transport, by car? Or to get groceries, to get their children to school (in fairer days)?3/6
Understand how crime statistics work in a given region. How often they are politically undersdcored. Look at any community's income and property taxes and see where they go. Are those taxes serving the community they come from? By what percentage? 4/6
Also cities change really fast. They are not the same places they were six months ago. Even in the best of times. This is why we need local reporters. This is why we need citizen journalists. This is why we need a layered methodology to covering city problems. 5/6
Anyways, this is my peeve. The narratives that are out there are so much bigger than the ones we are catching. Parts of them are tedious. Oh well, so is care. So is survival. So is building or sustaining financial stability. Thanks for coming to my show. 6/6
