What We Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate
A confession: I realize I know virtually nothing about the daily life of my own community. If I didn't walk my dogs an hour every morning, literally get out and see the landscape, I'd know even less. This is frustrating, as it would be for any resident in Inglewood, but it's particularly frustrating to me because I do consider myself in the know. I'm a journalist. I'm an L.A. native who spent many of my formative years in and around Inglewood. I consider myself the eyes and ears of my part of town. And yet I struggle to figure out what the hell's going on. A big part of the problem is local media. There is none. The L.A. Times gave up on local reporting some time ago, and the first casualties were small towns like mine that aren't technically Los Angeles. Though really, the Times never figured out to properly cover the greater L.A. area anyway; the economy and predicted demise of print journalism gave them reasons to stop trying. In my neighborhood there are smaller papers like the Wave and the Watts Times and the Sentinel. But they all have their limitations, mostly in resources and vision. Some of them are more concerned with targeting ethnic niches than with delivering news and analysis (not that you can't do both, but...) There seems to be nothing replacing local reporting on the Internet, which, despite its global reach (or because of it), doesn't report from a street level. There are lots of bloggers, but it's hard to sort through them regularly and determine who's credible and who's not. Reporting and blogging are just not the same thing--one takes resources to do, the other doesn't. Not that the two can't converge, but it's hard to know when they do. Most people aren't going to spend the energy trying to figure it out.
Then there are problems of expectation. In Inglewood (and South Central and other middle to low income black and brown areas), people are so used to getting minimal and/or skewed media coverage of where they live, they've normalized it. They don't get mad about what they see or don't see in the paper or on the Internet, they just shrug their shoulders and go on about their business. It's a self-image problem that goes beyond a lack of media, but a lack of media certainly a symptom of the self-image problem. What people around here do expect is the media to show up when there's an "urban" crisis--shooting, crime, etc. It's not that such incidents shouldn't be covered, but when they're covered exclusively, that's not only unbalanced, it reinforces a community's own low opinion of itself. It also limits positive action: bad news makes people lock their doors instead of come out of their houses. It makes them retreat rather than reach out. Without action, of course, there's no activism. The overall lack of communication has created one great, ongoing episode of depression in the city: everybody is inert, unmotivated, indifferent, and can't get out of bed and get their feet moving.
The image associated with this post was taken by Flickr user Leopoly. It was used under Creative Commons license.
