Journalism of the worst sort

Every so often, news websites looking for hits run some variant of the "Ten (or twenty or fifty or whatever) Crappiest Cities in America" article. Newsweek is the latest offender. And they didn't even bother to grab a picture from Wikipeida. Slackers.

It's worth noting that all of these features share one thing in common: a slideshow format. Perhaps you are aware, but when you click through a web slideshow, each page you view is counted as a hit. So when you click through a ten-page slideshow, as far as advertisers are concerned Newsweek got ten hits. Even though you spent no more time on the site and thus exposed to ads. This makes them money. And, of course, any slideshow about how bad some cities are gets hits. Because the only thing people like more than defending their hometown is piling on towns they've never been to.

If you read through the Newsweek article linked above (for the record, entitled "America's Dying Cities") you find very quickly that essentially no research went into it. At all. The very presence of Grand Rapids on the list proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that about the only statistic they used was population loss. This is roughly equivalent, I think, to making a list called "The Ten Worst Hitters in Baseball History" and using career strikeouts as the only statistic. While this list would include none of the true immortals, it does include four Hall of Famers (Reggie Jackson, Willie Stargell, Mick Schmidt and Tony Perez) and six other guys who had long and to varying degrees distinguished careers including at least one trip to the All-Star Game each.

It might be tempting, therefore, to write this genre off. The problem, though, is that we live in an era where urban policy is important, yet we like to ignore it. The political climate today is dominated primarily by the interests of the suburban and rural middle class and coastal elites, in either case they're white. Rush Limbaugh can call for the bulldozing of an entire American city and no one blinks. Because, really, the people that live in the cities that most-often show up on this list are usually minorities, and they're always poor. They don't count.

Obviously, the organizations that write these odious pieces didn't give it that much thought. They never stop to consider the effect the constant background drone of "these places are awful don't go there they don't matter" has on American society and policymaking. These towns have it tough enough. Have the decency to not say anything, if you can't say something nice.