Who has the Image Responsibility

On Thursday we almost had a full-house at Congreso’s E3Center on Germantown Avenue – so thanks. I know these ‘field trips” can be difficult for some. I think its one more opportunity to see what some are doing in the neighborhoods, and a chance to see the flip side of life – as Stephen Schaeffer said, people came into the Center with a “lot of layers” and some pretty tough ones at that…drugs…parental abuse. You name it. The one theme that ran through all of what Stephen Schaeffer recounted from their clients is that their kids hear….heard constantly from a parent or someone else responsible for them, “you’ll never amount to anything.” I think Stephen mentioned that a few times when he talked about some of the young people who have come in the Center. There’s this sense that the negative is constantly pounded into these kids...maybe there’s a neighborhood parallel here. If a neighborhood constantly hears how bad it is, or nothing but the negative…then it lives up to the negative. As someone pointed out in our session, there’s a certain cache to say “hey, I survived the ‘bad lands.’” Does that make sense? My entire Journalism life has been dedicated to a sense of balance and peeling back the layers on a story, and I’ve never considered myself a “happy news,” or social engineer kinda’guy, but as I think about the impact on imagine that news lays on a neighborhood, I wonder – how do you change the media image of the neighborhoods and while maintaining my sense of balance and accuracy. There are tons of problems in neighborhood. They’re real. Crime is on the rise nationwide. Gangs and drugs are everywhere – not just in North Philadelphia, but in the far Northeast, West Philadelphia. It's everywhere. If we close our eyes to it, we ignore our responsibility to report the news accurately, so maybe it’s simply about fairness and balancing some of the bad with the good. But, what stinks about that, you get into a numbers game. One bad story here, so let’s put in one good story there. Perhaps more importantly, maybe the neighborhoods should be taking a more active roll in making the image change…maybe this is an argument for citizen journalism. Is there too much pressure on the media to be the “good guys” and are we letting the residents off the hook? If you look at the Latino organizations and Hispanic population in Philadelphia, you can’t help but be impressed by its sense of community and willingness to take care of its own population. Should we expect this from all the neighborhoods…from all the people who want to make their communities livable and safe?
Who do you think? What did you think of our E3Center visit?