Voices From Skid Row
Monday, January 30th, 2006
I’m originally from Baltimore, Maryland. Now, I’m hardly from the mean streets of Baltimore, but any city resident knows how gritty the city can be, and growing up the son of a prosecutor, I knew it acutely. And one of the things I knew growing up was that our newspaper, The Baltimore Sun, sometimes pushed the hard realities of the city off its pages. The murder of a well-to-do white person is almost always news in Baltimore, but the Sun barely ever takes notice of the murder of a less well-off black person, and certainly almost never mentions it on the front page.
One of the reasons I’m fascinated by, and so happy to see, the rise of personal media is that sometimes our “Old Media” keeps the historically voiceless silent. Personal media is a way for all of us to circumvent the media filter, sure, but for the people who almost never find their way through the filter, personal media can be absolutely vital when used properly.
In Los Angeles, it’s kids who are leading the way, showing their elders how the stories of people traditionally ignored by society can now be told.
Franklin Arburtha was just 13 when he saw a friend’s mother stabbed to death. Afterwards, he went down to a vigil being held for the slain woman and, video camera in hand, asked people in his “Skid Row” community their feelings about the murder. That was the genesis for a 25-minute documentary he calls We’re Not Bad Kids. I caught a brief piece on Arburtha, now 14, on CNN.com — you can read an interview with him here.
While Alex is right that personal media allows for stories that are, for a host of reasons, ignored by “old media,” he also assumes that people left off the pages of the Baltimore Sun actually have access to “new” media. I think it’s a poor inference that residents of impoverished neighborhoods like West Baltimore can hop online and blog away about local concerns. While more egalitarian than the traditional press, “new” media is still really largely exclusive to the educated and propertied members of the middle and upper classes.
Ben,
I don’t know that I implied that everyone in poor communities can do something like Arburtha did; if I did, I didn’t mean to, because you’re right. The limitation of personal media is exactly that: people still have to be able to afford it. Obviously, a $150 camcorder is cheaper than, say, a printing press or a major network, but that doesn’t make it anything more than comparatively cheap. I worry, too, that what we’re seeing in blogs is the same division of have vs. have-not, elite vs. not. I know I personally visit my usual big-name blogs every day, the same way a reader of the Times might settle in and not pick up one of New York’s newer, smaller papers.
Having said that, though - some voice is better than none, I’d say, and projects like this give some voice to people who historically have had theirs ignored by the rest of society.