The head of the Detroit branch of the NAACP blasted the broadcast. “When they attack Detroit, they attack everyone in the region,“ said the Reverend Wendell Anthony.
The mayor’s office called the story “disappointingly shallow.” Civic and social leaders in Detroit urged citizens to complain. Today, Chris Hansen, the lead Dateline reporter, was supposed to meet with the Rev. Horace Sheffield, a prominent Detroit pastor, and hear his complaints about the “unbalanced” report.
Some Detroiters were especially upset at Hansen, since he grew up in the suburbs and, as they see it, should have known better.
What was interesting, however, was what you didn’t hear. You didn’t hear anyone saying there were factual errors in the Dateline report, right down to the man who eats raccoons to stay alive.
But what I found most dismaying was what I haven’t heard much of over the last week. Which would have been voices all across this state saying, well, all right: Dateline showed us what we’ve been trying to ignore: We have a terrible problem. All of us do.
We have what amounts to an impoverished, third-world city in the middle of Michigan. So - now that our dirty linen has been aired, we all have to pull together and fix it.
That’s what the reaction should have been.
To her credit, Detroit Free Press columnist Rochelle Riley did pretty much say that. She said Detroit and Michigan should treat this report as a call to action. Riley mentioned, accurately, that there are a lot of good things about Detroit that Dateline didn’t mention.
But she acknowledged the bad as well, and said “Rather than try to hide it, why do we keep accepting it?”
That’s a good question. By the way, I have an office in the city of Detroit, and live only minutes from the city limits.
I am in the city every day, and consider myself a Detroiter.
But the way in which Detroiters reacted to the airing of their dirty linen reminds me of the old Soviet Union. Marvin Kalb, who was NBC’s Moscow bureau chief, once got in trouble for showing scenes of poverty not far from the Kremlin.
“You are supposed to show things not as they are, but as they are supposed to be,” the authorities told him. Well, the fact is this.
Journalists are supposed to show things as they are. In my experience, that’s the only way you can ever hope to change things, and maybe move the world towards what is supposed to be.
We who do not live in Detroit also have a responsibility to our largest city. I was in Berlin soon after the wall came down. East Berlin was an impoverished mess, worse in some ways than Detroit is now.
West Berlin looked like a combination of Grand Rapids and Manhattan. Yet without a second thought, the west poured money in to fix up the east. That investment was worth it. Today, Germany is even more of an economic powerhouse than ever.
Everyone in Michigan might do well to think about that.
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