This Is America's Most Uninformed Article About Flint, And You've Probably Never Heard Of It

     ...Here we go again. Another outsider who's probably never even set foot in Michigan, telling us what a post-apocalyptic nightmare we're living in.

     If you live in or around Flint, you've probably already been linked several times to an article posted on the website PolicyMic, which appears to have all the journalistic integrity and substance as Buzzfeed, Upworthy, or other similar 'news' sites that do little more than take whatever photos they can find in the public domain, add a couple lines of vapid commentary between each one, and call it a day. And the actual writing is about as self-centered and unaware as your average Thought Catalog rant. Essentially, upper-class twentysomethings assuming they know how the world works, without ever having had to work for anything. And in fact that would appear to sum up the author of the piece in question, Laura Dimon, whose father just happens to be the CEO of JPMorgan Chase.

     With the very title of her piece, the author makes you aware that she believes she's somehow breaking new ground: "This Is America's Most Violent, Apocalyptic City, And You've Probably Never Heard Of It." Because clearly nobody has ever written about what a hellhole Flint is before. Not like Flint is already known nationally as "Murdertown, USA" or anything. And god knows, it's not like a fairly well known documentary was made about the decline of the city and it's most well-known industry either. Maybe you've never heard of it if you have been living under a rock for the last 25 years, or in New York, apparently. Note, by the way, that the title of the article has since been changed since they were called out on it.

     Now, mind you, I don't currently live in Flint, nor have I ever. But I've spent plenty of time and money there over the last several years, attended college there, and as a born-and-raised Detroiter, I know a thing or two about the media making a national punchline out of your hometown. And naturally, the writer starts out with a couple digs at my "dwindling, deteriorating," financially insolvent city, before getting into tearing a new one into a city that she's never actually set foot in. (Apparently, BuzzMic doesn't have much of a budget for sending it's "reporters" to cover their stories worth a damn.)

     What I love most about this piece is the fact that the primary source quoted in the article has spent a lot of time lately distancing himself from and condemning the article as publicly as possible. Gordon Young, Flint native, actual journalist, and author of Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City, posted this in regard to another article about the PolicyFeed piece: "In this particular case, I wish the author would have devoted less space to all the negative statistics and old news about Flint's decline, and more to the inspiring residents of my hometown who are using innovative approaches to improve the city." He goes on to mention a few of said residents he suggested Dimon interview for the piece, which of course she didn't.

     After several paragraphs of the usual statistics about Flint in decline, shots at the Midwest in general ("the hell that has become most of the Rust Belt"), pictures of the desolation of Flint that looked more like shots from the east side of Detroit and Israel (because, go figure, they were shots of Detroit and Israel) and a choice quote or two from Michael Moore (gee, and I thought you were treading new ground here), Dimon devotes a whole 150 words to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, all hope is not yet lost for Flint.

     And it doesn't end there. There's a companion piece, "16 Portraits Of Everyday People Who Refuse To Let Their Hometown Be Defeated," which rehashes the stats from the previous article, then presents 16 photos she says "depict the stories of the everyday people who are fighting for a better Flint." Except, y'know, without actually fucking telling the stories. Dimon then presents 16 completely context-free stock photos, without even identifying the people in them, much less tell any story. This is even more disingenuous than the original article; like you're doing some great service by posting a bunch of photos you copied from AP or a photographer's Flickr stream without giving any of the context or backstory behind them. Hell, how do we know these aren't just more photos of Detroit, Baghdad, or wherever, seeing how PolicyWorthy clearly doesn't fact check anything until they get called out by it?

     This is the problem with journalism in the 21st century. The media assumes we don't have the attention span to comprehend anything more than three sentences long without pictures to break it up, so they feel the need to dumb things down for us, or worse, try to pass off lazy, barely-researched pieces like this assuming we're too stupid to tell the difference. It's not that you're only telling one side of the story while giving a couple sentences (and 16 photos!) of lip service to the other. It's that you can't even tell that side of the story correctly.