Washington Post Detroit essay 1-3-2010

[renf]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?hpid=topnews

[DetroitPlanner]

Why not read it in the Detroit news??? Really this is not even news. Wow people feel that Metro Detroit is falling apart??? AMAZING!

[Patrick]

Yeah this shit is old news, but the coastal media needs more to write about. Detroit is the "it" city for the media...the go-to subject when they run out of stuff to report on. The view that people still see the auto industry as a savior is worn out.

[Lowell]

A couple of items stood out for me in that article. The first reflects my long time view that living in Detroit [meaning international metropolitan Detroit] is like have a front row seat on whatever will happen in the future for post industrial first world cities.

"Michigan is the harbinger," Prestowitz said. "Some think that it is just the auto industry, but the same dynamics that have undercut the auto and manufacturing industries of Michigan are also undercutting the high-tech labs in Silicon Valley and they're also undercutting medical services in Pittsburgh."

The second shows just how thin the ice still is.

Only 38 percent of the area's workforce said it was "not likely at all" that they would lose their job or be laid off in the next 12 months, according to the poll -- a sharp change from 1983, when 61 percent said so.

I think much of the national and international media focus on Detroit is an expression of anxiety, particularly from journalist who are also seeing their industry, position, affluence and self meaning disappearing.

[RealityCheck]

^ Yes. ^

Astute observation, sharply said, in that last sentence, Lowell.

[Patrick]

I think much of the national and international media focus on Detroit is an expression of anxiety, particularly from journalist who are also seeing their industry, position, affluence and self meaning disappearing.

People like to rip on Detroit and the auto industry but they know damn well that the same thing could happpen to their own local economy. They just use Detroit as the scapegoat to make themselves feel better.

[MichMatters]

People like to rip on Detroit and the auto industry but they know damn well that the same thing could happpen to their own local economy. They just use Detroit as the scapegoat to make themselves feel better.

I think you've entirely misjudged the motives of these stories. I think Lowell got it right. Detroit is of interest, because even folks as unperceptive as journalist, these days, are able to see that Detroit may be an exception...only for now. The motive of the media about Detroit is probably as geniune as its ever been. These aren't the salacious, scandalous, hit-and-run stories of old, the stories only of a murder capital, Devil's nights, and other assorted chaos, but stories of a country, state, and business community that failed a city, and a city that subsequently failed itself.

I've been more than critical of what seems like retreaded territory, poor and just plain bad research, and entirely missed and important points that they needed to make, but I don't see this as the usual scapegoating of the past. I'd say if anything good came out of the near-death experience of the local economy in 2009, it's that the media doesn't seem as petty and sensationalist as they once have when it comes to stories on Detroit. They don't seem to get nearly the same amount of joy -- if joy at all -- in reporting on this stuff, anymore, and it's because that Detroit wasn't alone in its near-death experience, for once. Plenty of other communities once thought to be invincible are now in some very precarious positions, themselves, for the first time in their histories. A bad national recession'll do that to you.