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Misdirected Anger
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Business New Haven
10/28/2002
By: BNH
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The media itself became a news story in Connecticut earlier this month when it dared to do its job.
Beginning on Sunday, October 21, the Hartford Courant published a week-long series of article detailing heroin use in the northeastern Connecticut community of Willimantic.
The first installment, headlined “Heroin Town,” ran in the Sunday Courant, which (like virtually every other daily newspaper) has a higher circulation and readership than the weekday paper. The page-one photograph showed three young women injecting themselves with heroin simultaneously while sitting, for all the world to see, in the gazebo on the Willimantic green. Nearby (as the photo caption explained), children were playing soccer, blissfully unaware.
The photo was shocking - and was intended to be. The editorial purpose of the series was to illustrate how heroin use is by no means confined to dirty alleyways in seedy ghettos - but can instead be found in “nice” towns, like yours and ours, and among “nice” people, just like you and us.
For unveiling these unpleasant truths, the Courant took it from both barrels. “What the article amounts to is city-bashing under the guise of news…for the purpose of selling newspapers,” wrote one reader. Another called the series “ridiculous…clearly the worst possible characteristic a newspaper can possess.” Still another reader from Willimantic, perhaps more honest than most, expressed fear that the coverage would “negatively impact” her property values, “frighten people and damage the reputation of a town that has much to offer.”
One reader went so far as to suggest, “Why didn't the Courant place a picture and story on page one of the Simsbury/Granby Boundless Playground opening that occurred Saturday?”
This reaction is a classic example of “kill the messenger” from people - and there are many of them - who would prefer to live in a world of their imagining, rather than the world as it is.
Why is their anger not directed, for example, at the Willimantic police, for their obvious indifference to addicts shooting up in the center of town?
In this past this publication has frequently been critical of the Courant, as the state's self-proclaimed “paper of record,” for a host of sins, most notably its failure to confront the individuals and institutions responsible for Hartford's political and socioeconomic descent into Third World status.
But in this instance, the organization that bills itself (inelegantly) as the “oldest continuously published newspaper in America” has done comfortable Connecticut a considerable service precisely by making it uncomfortable.
It may be a sad comment on our society that we define newsworthiness by how bad an event or situation is. And news organizations exploit negativity to attract attention - witness the national media's performance during the Washington sniper crisis, which we join all Americans in hoping may draw to a close following the October 23 arrest (as this edition of BNH went to press) of John Allen Mohammed and his 17-year-old stepson. Playground openings simply are not interesting or important enough to most people.
To suggest that the Courant was out to “get” Willimantic is preposterous. The purpose of the paper's reporting was to illustrate how drug abuse can infect the lives of troubled people in places like Willimantic - or Glastonbury, or North Haven.
It is sometimes painful but nevertheless true that shining light on a negative situation is often the first step toward finding a remedy to it. No educated Courant reader is likely to infer that Willimantic is alone in its distress. The point is that individuals in all towns and from all backgrounds may and do abuse substances. These is no simple explanation - and certainly no simple cure.
The Hartford Courant is to be commended for spotlighting the prevalence of heroin abuse - not just in “bad” places, but in perfectly “nice” ones, too. Places just like Willimantic.
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