"Here & Now" The public radio station out of Ann Arbor will be reviewing the TIME inc. project in a few minutes. 10/1/2009 at 1:10 you might want to tune in.
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"Here & Now" The public radio station out of Ann Arbor will be reviewing the TIME inc. project in a few minutes. 10/1/2009 at 1:10 you might want to tune in.
The interviewee is Mr. Okrent who is repeating almost word for word what he wrote including the same myths, minus devil's night so far. I wrote this previously.
Some of the usual simplistic gloss-overs are there too-- the 67 riot gets profiled as the impetus for a flight pattern that was fifteen years in motion with hundreds of thousands having already moved since population peak. No mention is made of its acceleration by tax advantages, public financed expressways that destroyed houses, businesses and chopped up neighborhoods in Detroit while easing movement to tax subsidized new factories, houses and plain old space and country air.
Then the ghost of Coleman Young gets resurrected, reamed and all but called racist while L. Brooks who did as much to stoke that divide gets a half paragraph of marshmallows tossed at him. None of the many other antagonists of that circular firing squad are called to task.
Oh he skipped L Brooks mention this time...
Disappointing. They have been here for a few weeks and are still reporting in the same shallow manner.
No mention of Devil's Night as some journalist will be saving that installment for the end of the month. Needless to say the publication is ignoring all the organizing efforts of neighborhood watch & angels night actions.
Don't know what people expected. They are here to show how crazy things are. Their storyline for the next year is "Detroit is a disaster - here's a few dozen things that illustrate that." They'll throw in a so-called positive story here and there, but it will be just to show the odds against which the do-gooders are struggling.Quote:
Disappointing. They have been here for a few weeks and are still reporting in the same shallow manner.
Just wait until Devil's night approaches...
I just wrote Robbin Young, host of Here and Now, an e-mail about the unbalanced radio interview - http://www.hereandnow.org/
letters AT hereandnow . org
Detroit is getting the same below the belt coverage as in the past. These media folks seem to be reading the same script over and over again.
It is so easy to criticize our critics and not listen to what they are telling us.
To quote Salinger, "most of the time the faces we face are not the other guys' but our own faces. And it's the worst kind of yellowness to be so scared of yourself you put blindfolds on rather than deal with yourself..."
The hard thing is to face ourselves. How do we change so that people stop writing about the worst parts of our history?
Dan Oklan "Detroit was most prosperous after WW2" I agree the government sent money to Detroit to build the WW2 war machine.
Then the federal government threw money at the 'cold war' machine. During the 80's in particular the contracts were directed outside of Michigan. Plus the best engineering minds went to the building of this war machine not focusing on developing more fuel efficient cars.
RJ: these journalists are bashing the Big 3 & the UAW. These four entities are not blameless in the fall of domestic auto production. But why don't people talk about the huge burden of health care costs that the domestic companies pay for. The Chinese manufactures do not have to cover this. The unfair trade policies developed in the 90's.