I’ve been working in the vacant space the media has left unfilled for all the years I’ve been the Public Information Officer of Lakewood. Coverage of my city was never very good even in the “good old days.” A struggling weekly made some attempt to be hyper-local. It disappeared into a chain. The chain disappeared. Radio? TV? Only crime, traffic mayhem, heartwarming sentiment, or pop-cultural oddity. The Long Beach Press-Telegram and the Los Angeles Times had various tone-deaf zone schemes designed by ad departments. They never lasted. Reporters marking time at the beginning or ending of careers had Lakewood-Bellflower-Paramount as their beat. They never lasted.
Locality and the media have a conflicted relationship. You want the media to tell you when the Little League bake sale opens and you want the media to tell you the implications of monetary policy in Kyrgyzstan. And some form of media today will tell you – media that is cloud sourced, user provided, edited, pay, free, traditional, blogged, twittered, or pinned to a bulletin board. Between the bake sale and Kyrgyzstan – between the disposably useful and the merely interesting – lies the empty space of your neighborhood, your community, your small town. Not all of the news there is immediately useful. But you’ll need it eventually. Not much is interesting. But all of it – all of the everyday and all of the tedious – bears on your fate.
A few journalists made a career at the neighborhood level in places like mine. And now there are no careers in journalism to be made. The local never delivers much, except enough of what you need to live.
The ambiguity of locality in Los Angeles – the uncertainty of where we are – bewilders the media. That distorts citizenship. Being a citizen – not a consumer or client or someone serviced – isn’t easy. And we’re so easily entertained, amused, distracted.
Your city has information to impart, choices to present that have costs and gains that often cannot be calculated or painted in stark contrast or turned into a slogan. And none of the information is neutral; it’s always in a context, in a story, in the story of the place where you live, a place where some important choices were made decades ago by people whom today you would find appalling. Choices that can’t be unmade, like the grid of streets outside your door.
Citizenship comes with that bitter, grownup knowledge. And the news, sadly, is for grownups.
The image on this page was taken by Flickr user Peter Rukavina. It was used under a Creative Commons license.
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