RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER

Where now?

Don’t ask me why, but last night my TV was tuned into the Fox 29 10:00 news. It was mostly background noise until a story came on about a rape in “South Philadelphia.” From the visual, I saw that they were talking about last week’s fucked up story about the girl who jumped out of her window at 3rd and South. She did it to avoid an attacker.

Horrible story aside, South Street has been in Center City for at least 30 years. South Philadelphia it isn’t.

Local news is notorious for misrepresenting neighborhoods, especially when something good or bad happens. Rash of muggings on Penn Campus? Call it West Philadelphia. New brewpub at 50th and Baltimore? Call it University City. Rape on South Street? Suddenly it’s South Philadelphia.

This is common. It’s flawed, damaging, dangerous and acts like a cancer in the minds of an already deeply divided and distrustful Philadelphia population, but we’re all pretty much used to it. Everyone knows and expects the news to carve up neighborhoods by race and class rather than anything crazy like physical geography. It annoys us when it happens in our own neighborhood, but mostly we ignore it…

…Unless that misrepresentation is so glaring that you’re inspired to write about it and point it out to people over the internet. Like this:

On February 25th, some students at a highly esteemed public school are attacked in front of that school at 17th and Spring Garden. The Daily News’ Mensah Dean writes an article including the quote:

Green, who teaches at another city school, Kensington Culinary Arts High School, said he wanted a greater show of city police around the Center City school, starting today.

“What I want the city to do is protect these kids, coming and going to and from school,” Green said while standing in front of the school, which in November was ranked the nation’s 53rd best public high school by U.S. News and World Report magazine.

One week later, the Daily News’ Mensah Dean writes a follow-up, this time profiling one of the kids arrested in the attack. He attended Benjamin Franklin High at Broad and Spring Garden. Just as in the first article, she interviewed and quoted an employee at a neighboring school.

“It’s typical of what occurs in Philadelphia schools,” said Veronica Joyner, chief administrative officer of the Mathematics, Civics and Sciences Charter School, at Broad and Hamilton Streets, in North Philadelphia. “Administrators don’t report incidents because they don’t want to look bad.”

“They continue to groom criminals. When they stop grooming them, that’s when we’ll stop having them,” she said.

Let’s review then. Two articles written by the same journalist and reporting on the same incident. The articles are separated by one week. In article one, Masterman is in Center City. In article two, the MCSC Charter School (and by inference nearby Ben Franklin High) are in North Philadelphia.

Just in case you’re unfamiliar with the geography, Masterman is exactly as far north as Ben Franklin High. The schools are on the same east/west street, less than 3 blocks apart. The MCSC Charter school is about a block and a half south of both of them. Worst of all, MCSC is directly adjacent to the Daily News offices at Broad and Callowhill.

Mensah Dean could have gotten her North Philly quote by leaning out her Center City office window… or vice versa. No matter if she wrote in the neighborhood name herself, or an editor changed it to better reflect the stereotypes and fears of the DN readership, it’s still flat out wrong to describe Masterman as Center City and Ben Franklin as North Philly.

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Just to end, I understand that neighborhood names are a matter of perspective. Any random citizen on the street might call the area, Fairmount, Art Museum Area, North Philly, Spring Garden, Center City, The Loft District or Chinatown North. A Masterman student might say they go to school in Center City and a Ben Franklin kid might say they go to school in North Philly.

Neighborhood boundaries – especially in Philadelphia – aren’t set in stone. With that said, although this story played out in a neighborhood with many potential names, it did play out in one of those neighborhoods. The names reported carry very different connotations. In this case, word choice can only be described as bias. Theoretically, bias is something newspapers attempt to avoid.