Just wanted to echo the inability of the daily press to do nuance…take the Metro section of the Washington Post for example. Their reporters take a real paint-by-numbers approach to stuff like crime or gentrification. I remember about a year ago they did a piece on my neighborhood (H Street) where the reporter dragged out all the usual black-white BS to the point I literally had to look up a piece from a few years back talking about another DC neighborhood (Columbia Heights) to see if the reporter hadn’t copied the thing almost verbatim. So amongst other examples of culture clash, the article on H Street comes up with a story where a local black bartender was verbally abused because of her race…then it turns out on a local blog that the whole situation didn’t break down at all like the reporter said and the victim even chimed in to say how unfairly the article portrayed race relations in our area. Every person I talked to in my neighborhood was pissed about the piece and how it didn’t really reflect anyone’s experience.

Anyhow, I guess my point is that it was a lot easier for that reporter to go in to the story thinking she knows what people actually feel and twisted the story to reflect this. The fact is that you can take a social phenomenon (like gentrification) and it’s going to play out differently even in different parts of the same city because of the mix of people involved.