That's just the way it ain't

I got annoyed watching CBS's Sunday Morning yesterday. They had a bit where a guy was putting a golf ball across Scotland. Putting? Why not driving? It seems like he would have covered a lot more territory a lot more quickly that way. But I know next to nothing about golf, and I digress.

Anyway. His journey started with a sendoff by a group of dour-looking bagpipers. Yayyyy, bagpipes. Who doesn't love them? And then he proceeded to travel through storybook Scottish countryside, and meet stereotypical Scotsmen in stereotypical Scottish garb. Now, I've never been to Scotland, but I got a creeping feeling as I watched this that none of this represented what Scotland is really like. At all.

Too often it seems like when a piece is done focusing on a particular area, the broad outlines are drawn before any field research is done. It's kinda like saying, "OK, we're going to do a piece on New York City. We'll find a mugger, a hooker, and a peep show, then jump in a cab with an authentic New York cabbie - no foreigners, dammit! - and go to Central Park and ride in a horse and buggy to go see the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty." None of this necessarily represents what the city is about, but instead reflects a whole lot of prejudgements and stereotypes - and then selects supporting evidence to make it seem real.

I'm seeing a lot of that as national attention turns to Pennsylvania in the runup to next Tuesday's Democratic Primary. News reports present a cartoon version of Pennsylvania, slices of it presented to support a particular storyline. Let's go to a cheesesteak shop in Philadelphia and talk to all the funny people with their funny accents! Let's go to Pittsburgh and showcase the blue collar crowd! Here we are in Amish country with its horses and buggies and simple folk and their simple ways!

Northeastern Pennsylvania was given this treatment a few weeks ago. As Michelle reported, ABC's Good Morning America did a story on Wilkes-Barre that presented the city in a highly unfavorable light. Much of what it presented was, in fact, true, but it was presented in such a way that it made things look much worse than they really are. It's not hard to do.

In my A Blog of Nanticoke, I try to present my hometown in the most favorable light possible. Guess what? It ain't all sweetness and sunshine here. It would be very easy to show only the dark side of things - the squalor, the vacant houses, the rundown buildings that used to be major businesses, the potholes, the filth, the decay. And that's pretty much what ABC did to Wilkes-Barre, because those images supported the thesis they were trying to present. They told the truth, but they did not tell the whole truth.

I've been to Ireland, and it's not all Leprechauns and rolling green fields and "top o' the mornin' to ya!" It's a real place with real people. It's complex. It has a past, a present, and a future. Most of it doesn't fit into the cartoony version of Ireland that is presented to us on television.

Similarly, I do not expect that any real version of Scotland resembles the stage-managed place I saw on CBS this past Sunday morning. Nor is Wilkes-Barre completely represented in the piece on Good Morning America. So I am reminded to take with a huge grain of salt any presentation of any place anywhere on TV. They may be telling the truth, but not the whole truth. They may be showing you images of things as they are, but your overall impression may be of things as they ain't.