Posted on 04/07/2006 3:55:50 PM PDT by LK44-40
'Gritty?' Come here punk; I'll show you "gritty." Under most circumstances, talking to the television set will get you a padded room at the Hoo Hoo Hotel.
An angry monologue was the only response, though, when the ABC News "Nightline" segment on the Duke University lacrosse scandal opened last week with a shot of three obscure, ramshackle buildings that the narrator used to illustrate Durham's deteriorated state.
"Durham," a reporter intoned, "is a gritty city that has seen its better days."
Why, you dirty ... .
At the same time I was whispering unsweet expletives at the screen, across town Reyn Bowman was watching the same show and, he said, "jumping right out of my seat."
"It was gratuitous," Bowman, president of the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau, said of the slap. "Any show that significant should do its homework. We've had people following up trying to make sure that image doesn't infect" all reports.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsobserver.com ...
Really, I don't mind seeing its name smeared a bit on network television, as has happened. What gets my motor running is to see network coverage of something that I have personal knowledge of and seeing how that coverage is a string of ridiculous clichés that have no resemblance whatsoever to reality.
The N&O column here makes a point about the pathetic shanties that ABC found somewhere to provide a visual image of Durham. CBS did exactly the same thing.
I sputter with exasperation in trying to convey how utterly false and absurd this is. These images looked like something from Haiti, or perhaps Cameroon.
You wanna hear something funny: The BBC anchored a newscast from Durham a few months ago -- just taking their show on the road -- and they were absolutely agog at what a chic place Durham is, filled, according to the BBC's account, with upscale lofts, fashionable eateries, etc. It was a laughable as the ABC/CBS images, but in utterly the opposite direction.
Is Durham gritty? Durham was mostly a factory town -- tobacco and textiles -- back in the post-WWII years when Duke University was about to begin its ascendancy to world class status. Durham also had a large black population, was a center of black culture and economic success, but was also home to a lot of black poverty.
As Duke was on the rise, the Research Triangle Park was created, mostly in Durham County, and IBM moved into the community in a big way to be followed by many prestigious companies, especially in data technology and pharmaceuticals. Meantime, the old blue-collar industrial base of Durham was shutting down. It is true that many old tobacco and textile factory and warehouse buildings are now filled with fashionable condos and such. There is nothing whatever left of Durham as a "gritty factory town."
What does remain as a blight on Durham is a large residue of militant and impoverished black people (as well as plenty of prosperous and successful black people). The university community is huge and, of course, very liberal. Those folks have often combined with the permanently aggrieved black segment to make it difficult for Durham to recognize fully its success and prosperity. The schools, particularly, are a problem as the school board includes at least one vicious black racist along with some liberals. In spite of the prosperity all around Durham, middle class folks do not want to send their kids to these schools where the black gangsta' style has such a grip.
And, in general, Durham has a major problem with black drug dealers and out-of-control black children with guns. It also has a black-dominated city government which is only marginally competent and sometimes corrupt.
So here is Durham: A town with many hip, educated, and prosperous people with all of the restaurants, boutiques, and condos needed to support them. There is also sizable, mostly black part of Durham that is like a nasty area in L.A.
What there is NOT in Durham, is any "gritty" factory workers. And you would have to look long and hard to find the shanties used by ABC and CBS to represent the place.
The networks might as well be filing their reports from Mars.
"Certainly, Duke is Duke...they're on TV more than 'Leave it to Beaver' reruns..."
You bring me back to the larger story about Duke and its Lacross team/animal house element.
None of it had anything whatsoever to do with the rundown parts of Durham used to illustrate the newtwork coverage.
It is just this: "Gritty" is the cliché description of Durham. Some limo driver or somebody described it that way to the network teams and they went to work to get the video. They had no clue.
For those who may not know, Barry Saunders is black, and, for the most part, liberal. He's a sharp dresser, wears hats, and wrote a column against restaurants that offer unsweet tea but not sweet tea that I agreed with 100%. That's about the only column of his I agreed with, until now. What he says about Durham is true, both the good and the bad, and I'm glad he pointed out how national networks can come into a place and portray it to the rest of the country in a way that everybody who lives in or near the place knows darn well isn't true.
ping.
OK, let's see what we can do to arrange that. Maybe convince them that the evidence needed to impeach Bush was sent there by a secret rocketship piloted by Karl Rove.
Now just a minute here. Maybe I am from North Carolina and likely I wasn't there, but there is something strange going on here I really ought to know more about...
I always enjoy hearing when liberals have one of these "Aha!" moments. Of course it's unrealistic to expect him to start thinking like a conservative, but at least his eyes may be opening a little bit.
The South and Southerners are the most stereotyped region and people in this country by the liberal media. They love referring to this area as "Tobacco Road" which, as anyone familiar with the novel realizes, is a tremendous slur. Some of the worst offenders in peddling these stereotypes are white southern liberal journalists who move up north and act like they are ashamed to be from the South when around their "northern betters."
And yet there he was, the other night, on MSNBC stirring the pot on Rita's show.
I once heard Ed Koch say about Arkansas on television, "Don't they all marry their cousins down there?"
Although I did not personally care, this remark is easily the bigotry equivalent of "New York is hymietown" but I never detected that anyone was at all troubled by the mayor's remark.
I don't read him often but this column and the famous sweet tea column are, to my knowledge, not the only occasions when he has been right.
You will remember that a few months ago we sent a very corrupt, black, North Carolina congress critter (Frank Ballance) to jail. Predictably, some of "the community" held a fawning farewell party for their hero. To his great credit, Barry crossed the racial divide to drop the rhetorical hammer on this black sleezebag.
What is the problem here? The whole South is "gritty."
You sound like some ignorant yank who don't know the difference between "grit" and "grits!" ;
Is there a good stretch twix 'em? Or is liberal whiny azzvictimhood the new call of the South? Wink at your own, then, smile at the others...
I agree. The Raleigh-Durham area is full of leftists, but it is not "gritty" by any stretch. This just proves that unless it's Manhatten (just Manhatten, not the rest of NYC), Boston, DC, LA, Chicago or San Francisco, it's just "flyover country" full of "backwoods hicks."
I went to a conference in Durham a few years back. The conference was held at a "downtown" hotel (Holiday Inn?) and I stayed there as well. I got a terrible impression of Durham. Poor, ugly, and boring, with plenty of bad attitude from the locals. I'm sure there are great people there, and nice areas of town. But from what I saw the tiny downtown area is boring and unpleasant and nearly abandoned. There are questionable characters abounding with too few apparently decent folks for a visitor to try to blend in among. There were carloads of young black gangbanger-looking folks driving around glowering at all and sundry. The taxis were heaps and the drivers rude and unprofessional. I felt I got a lot of attitude from staff at the hotel and elsewhere. All-in-all I was very glad to leave and would not choose to return.
I recognize the truth in everything you say and was glad to leave Durham for nearby Raleigh.
Nowadays, all these old brick factory buildings are teeming with chic eateries and such, as I have said.
There is plenty of money and hip energy around Durham that has been trying for years to transform the crappy downtown (there are some nice old art deco buildings) into a hip urban center, not just in spots, as now, but throughout. You exactly nailed the problem: Durham is just a little too full of gang-bangin' diversity to really make it happen.
But what I am confident that you saw in the dead and unappealling downtown is not what was presented on ABC/CBS. Both of them did quick shots of what looked to be abandoned, falling-down buildings to generally set the scene in Durham and then they moved on to shots around Duke related specifically to the story. I am confident that you would have refused to leave your cab if he had taken you to such a place, and you would have used your cell phone to call 911 if he had insisted that you get out there.
It was four or five years ago, I'd guess. There were cool old brick buildings, sure, just nothing in them. There was one cool bar, called "Ringside" if I remember correctly, that was gay. I recall thinking that this was what Durham needed, a bunch of gay yuppies to come in and gentrify the joint. Durham is the only place I've ever seen "The Final Call", the "Black Muslim" rag, sold from a coin-operated box on the sidewalk. And this was right in front of the main Post Office (or was it a courthouse?). If Durham has gotten better, then that's great. I don't begrudge the good people of Durham anything. But disfunction, decrepitude, and nasty attitude I just don't need. If I want that, I can just hop on BART and go to Oakland.
That's because we have a sense of humor about ourselves. If I had been there, I would have told him, "Hey, second cousins don't count!"
I'll agree with a liberal if he happens to say something that's actually true.
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