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Archive for June 11th, 2009

The national news media do not love us

Add comment June 11th, 2009

When will Rock River Valley locals stop allowing themselves to be patronized by the parachute national broadcasters and print media? How many times do we let ourselves be portrayed as poverty-stricken dumb clucks before we tell them to take a hike?

In the past week, one of the national television news shows did a hatchet job on Rockford, comparing us to Greenville, S.C. The Rockford segment showed Mayor Larry Morrissey (the celebrity broadcaster called him Lawrence Morris) fighting the wind and cold along Main Street. Same celebrity broadcaster said the city’s population was 175,000 (nope, we top out at 150,000-ish) and that we had never recovered from the demise of the auto manufacturing industry. Nope. Wrong again.

The segment on Greenville was a song of delight. We’re dead. Greenville reborn. I know Greenville. Depends on who is asking.

Then there’s the Wall Street Journal’s online “Main Street” project. Touted as the Journal’s local news effort to track how “Rockford, a quintessential, beaten-down Midwest manufacturing city of 150,000″ was managing the recession, they must must have declared victory and moved on because the last post was April 21.

I know the national media dote on Rockford. We’re an easy hop from O’Hare, we’re smack in the middle of the “heartland” and our demographics pretty much match the country as a whole. We’re a decently solid reflection of the real world.

But, for heaven sakes, stop welcoming these people. Or, if we have to be nice, then at least be suspicious of their motives. They aren’t here to make us look good. If they were, the television crew would have filmed from the East State Street bridge to City Hall rather than along two blocks of Main Street.

Nope, this celebrity dude wanted a dead town and a live one. We got to be the dead one.