Archived Writing

<< back to the search results

Reporting Home, not-so-Sweet Home

Thursday, February 19, 2009

DATELINE: Atlanta, Georgia -- Taking my lead from the President, I fled the ECME (that infamous East Coast Media Elite) in time for his fanfared “foreclosures fix”.

While Barack Obama, having already ceremonially signed the overall “stimulus” legislation in far-flung Colorado, traveled even further to Arizona to announce the $75 billion housing aid package, I got only as far as Georgia to hear it.

 

And actually, I’ve hardly escaped the clutches of the communications mainstream. CNN’s headquarters are just eight blocks away from where I write, the redoubtable Atlanta Journal-Constitution is a mere six blocks away, and I’m currently crammed among 200 or so PBS television and public radio executives who’ve gathered from around the country for a New Media conference in this capital of the New South.

 

But Atlanta, GA is as apt a homeland listening post as Mesa, AZ - or possibly even more apt.

 

In that hard-to-ignore, mat-thumping manner with which Old Media can often arrive, the Journal-Constitution appeared on my hotel room's threshold loudly proclaiming its headline news: Atlanta’s metropolitan area is now the “3rd WORST IN EMPTY HOMES”. And that’s largely because of foreclosures.

 

(This city follows Detroit and - top of the saddening list - the formerly fast-filling, now fast-emptying population center of Las Vegas. The stats come from recent US Census Bureau work).

 

In the welcome practice of good local journalists, the J-C’s reporters looked for on-the-ground facts that lie behind the national downturn. In Atlanta’s case, the city’s population is still growing, even as properties are falling empty … so – as Professor Frank Alexander, real estate expert at the city’s Emory University, told the newspaper – people’s everyday lives are being changed in a very concrete, specific way.

 

What the data reveals, Alexander points out, is that “the population is moving into units with other people. We’re increasing density.”

 

Such is ordinary people’s reality … at the end of an economic fantasy on the part of brokers and dealers.

 

 

** EVERY WEEK CONNECTICUT'S NPR STATION, WHDD (ROBIN HOOD RADIO) AIRS A DISCUSSION BASED ON THIS COLUMN - Fridays at 7.35 am, and Saturdays at 4.45 pm.**

 

Listen to THE MEDIA BEAT podcasts by clicking HERE.

 

 

 

THE PUBLIC BROADCASTERS ASSEMBLED HERE have been, to their credit, working hard to find local ways of reacting effectively to the national economic turmoil – not least its disastrous housing dimension.

 

St Louis, Missouri is graced with a lively member-supported local TV station, KECT. Marrying its traditional broadcast platform to a freshly vitalized website, it has been offering (since as long ago as last June, notably) a multi-faceted service called “Facing the Financial Crisis”.  It’s also been helped by the St Louis Beacon, an online newspaper created by laid-off journalists from the St Louis Post Dispatch (above left: the innovative outfits' combined, somewhat busy logo).

 

As well as carrying sharply-reported stories in its one-hour on-air specials, and many segments in its weekly magazine-shows, KECT has been guiding people, through constantly repeated announcements (interstitial spots, as they’re called so horribly in the broadcasters’ vernacular) and through links on its dedicated webpages, to where they can get tips, advice and practical professional help if they are in housing finance trouble.

 

Since the service began, surveys have shown an astonishing 400% rise in phone-calls to the local helpline, operated by the United Way, which gives help on foreclosures. Some rise would have happened anyway, given the worsening crisis, but the speed and steepness of this increase is remarkable, and individuated spikes in the response can be directly related to the timing of specific broadcasts.

 

Gratifyingly, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in Washington (the media system's main governmental funding agency) is impressed enough that, by the end of this week, it will be offering the St Louis template to 30 other public stations around the nation - plus a grant of CPB cash to make it work.

 

I’m also glad to report that when I talked with Milton Clipper, the Chief Executive of Public Broadcasting Atlanta (which combines a TV and two radio stations) he said he’s already the first to be signing up. The other 29 won’t be far behind.

  

  

 

IT WASN’T JUST THE USA THAT CHANGED presidents recently. Way down at the other end of the economic scale (among the world’s poorest 20 countries, in fact) the Indian Ocean island cluster of the Maldives Republic has a new president, called Mohamed Nasheed. And among his first acts in office, he is vigorously getting rid of the excesses of his predecessor, the country’s virtual dictator for 30 years, Maumoon Gayoom.

 

The best reporting I’ve seen on this Augean Stables clean-up comes from the generally reliable BBC, in the form of radio, TV and web stories by correspondent Chris Morris (who got to know Nasheed – then a persecuted opposition figure - when based in South Asia in the late 1980s).

 

Now, I have to say  …  the BBC has changed greatly since the days when intellectual snobs nicknamed it “Auntie Beeb”, for its once hard-to-shake embodiment of suburban, middle-England values, notably the tut-tutting capacity to be "shocked, shocked". But a detail caught my eye and ear in Morris’ story on the former leader's luxurious trappings of power - one that felt oddly familiar in tone.

 

The tacky indulgences included a $7.5 million presidential yacht, now to be auctioned off, a private island (of course) and in the ex-president’s office a “gold-plated toilet” that was singled out by the reporter. “How blatant is that?” asked Morris.

 

His image choices did seem to fixate on bathroom fixtures (above right, the presidential tub). And so I couldn’t help recalling an example from Auntie Beeb’s opposite number in print, that famously middle-class, conservative newspaper, The Daily Telegraph. It used to - unwittingly, I think - provide a telling daily commentary on social attitudes with its almost obsessively detailed reports from the criminal courts.

 

For me the Telegraph’s most redolent headline was coined for a case involving a cheating financier: “FRAUDSTER HAD ROLLS-ROYCE, MISTRESS, AND GOLD BATH-TAPS". 

 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -