Photo by Dani Fresh
Pennsylvania is on the national political map in 2016. Many pundits believe that the race for president will be close in PA, and the candidates have been paying attention. The Democrats hosted their convention in Philadelphia in late July, while Donald Trump campaigned in Scranton the same week.
Immediately following the DNC, Hillary Clinton staged one of her first rallies of the general election campaign in Midtown Harrisburg, right in front of the Broad Street Market. Not to be outdone, Donald Trump arrived a few days later for a rally at Cumberland Valley High School.
For a brief moment, it looked like the Harrisburg region had an opportunity to put its best foot forward, as the candidates and the national media turned their spotlight here. But instead of an opportunity for us to shine, things turned ugly quickly when Trump, while campaigning the day after his visit, said that Harrisburg “looked like a war zone” from his plane. Almost immediately, the offhand comment was put up on PennLive as the lead story, and, just as quickly, online trolls came out to vent their sympathetic loathing of Harrisburg in the comments section of the article.
The comments, more than 700 of them, shot the story to the top of the “active discussion” list, where it remained for several days. As expected of a story of such controversy, it generated a significant number of related stories, each with its own angle or opinion on the matter—and each with a new opportunity for anonymous posters to bash Harrisburg.
I happened to be on a cross-country flight when the story broke, so I took time to read through many of these comments. It’s safe to say that anyone from outside the region reading through them would come away with a very bleak view of the people and area where we live and work.
To their credit, columnists John Micek and Nancy Eshelman wrote pieces condemning Trump’s flippant comment and offering more positive and accurate views of the city. Despite these efforts, as Micek’s engagement with the negative posters in the comment section of his own article illustrate, they still couldn’t escape the cycle of negativity and controversy that PennLive, and most of today’s media, is ultimately built upon.
Each and every article that appeared on Trump’s comment, whatever its content, served to sustain the negative headline about our community, generate clicks and provide further forum to all of the cynics and haters about all things Harrisburg, no doubt to the delight and benefit of PennLive’s advertisers and its owners, based in Manhattan, who depend on those advertisers for their income.
How else does one explain the headline, “Was Trump right about the Harrisburg ‘war zone’?” when the answer is so inherently obvious to anyone who lives here? In a sense, it’s not a dissimilar model from the one that Trump employs himself: It doesn’t matter what is said, as long as everyone talks about it, watches it and clicks on it—and the owner of the platform gets paid (in his case, Trump is the platform).
The problem with this model is that real damage is done to a community when the headlines and the anonymous online commentary are repetitively sensational, cynical and destructive. As I’ve often said, when the story we tell about ourselves to ourselves is relentlessly negative and bleak, our beliefs and actions eventually begin to fall into accordance with that view, whatever the reality might be, which is usually orders of magnitude better than what the headlines project. So, people may not buy a home or locate a business or rent an apartment or eat at a restaurant due to relentless and unfair negative media coverage. That community’s real and potential wealth then is destroyed.
But that’s only the half of it. There’s a flip side, and it’s that, while a community’s wealth is being destroyed by unnecessarily sensational and negative headlines, a billion-dollar media corporation’s wealth is being enhanced by the clicks and comments and advertising dollars that those headlines generate. I think it’s not too far of a stretch to state that every time we witness sensationalized and negative news coverage of Harrisburg on PennLive, a transfer of wealth occurs from a relatively low-income community to a billion-dollar corporation in Manhattan. Perhaps it’s indirect, hidden and hard to measure, but it’s no less real and right before our eyes (quite literally) with every headline we read.
Good and honest people, like the folks, I suspect, who work at PennLive, may try to dispute this reasoning by saying that they only report and write about what happens (they didn’t make Trump’s comment, he did), and that they only publish and promote the stories that people want to read, essentially by “voting with their clicks.”
While perhaps true, it misses the larger truth, where the real and fundamental logic of a privately owned, profit-driven media corporation exists—and that is to make money. However much the journalists and editors on the ground may try to work against this logic, it’s always there, in every sensational headline and every angry comment we read. And if the logic of making money requires sensationalized headlines and negative articles about Harrisburg—because it’s what drives comments and clicks and advertising dollars—then that’s what we’ll continue to see, to our own community’s detriment.
So what to do in response to this state of affairs? Well, perhaps lots of things, but let’s start by stating three.
First, and most immediately as it relates to Trump’s comments—let’s bluntly set the record straight. Harrisburg is not a war zone and doesn’t look like one. The comment is ridiculous on its face. Like so many things Trump has said, it was designed to garner headlines and focus on him, not to be an accurate statement of reality. In contrast, a more nuanced and accurate statement would have gained little attention. Sarcastic or not, the statement achieved exactly what it was intended to do—get people talking about Donald Trump.
Second, as it relates to the comments section on PennLive, it’s clear that the people in our region who habitually hate on Harrisburg have no idea what they’re talking about or what goes on in the city on a daily basis, except for what they may read or watch from the suburban media outlets. Readers of TheBurg know full well what I mean when I say there is a separate reality out there that exists for media outlets that continually report on crime and dysfunction in order to make money and another reality entirely—where 95 percent of daily life unfolds—that is quite different, quite enjoyable and well-worth reporting on.
Third, and on that point, I travel regularly both around the country and internationally, and I have seen many places that offer both more and much less than what Harrisburg has to offer. I’ve come to the conclusion that, whatever its flaws, Harrisburg and its region offer a relatively unique combination of affordability, opportunity, openness and compassion, natural beauty and accessibility to the wider world. We offer values like family, hard work, stability, charity and self-reliance with an important historical past.
Perhaps most importantly, we have a stunning, livable city, along a beautiful, scenic river, with wonderful architecture, thriving businesses and amazing, diverse residents. I love it here, and I know most of you do, too. Because of that, we at TheBurg, thanks to the support of our community publishers and advertisers, look forward to delivering that message and news to you each and every month.
J. Alex Hartzler is publisher of TheBurg.
