23 June 2009

Thanks Mainstream Media... for nothing.

You know it is one thing to have to deal with misperceptions from folks outside of the area, but I would love to see our local news sources dig deeper into stories before passing out distorted information. The latest instance? Walletpop.com ranked a "neighborhood" in Cincinnati as the most dangerous in the nation. This was picked up by local news sources as:
All of these headlines are terrible. The area in question is a piece of OTR and the West End. It is bounded in the south by Liberty Street, goes a couple blocks west of Central Parkway and then bounded my W. McMicken in the north and Vine street in the east. I don't think there are a lot of residents in this area (feel free to comment on that). If I work back the statistics the 457 incidents working out to 266.94 per 1,000 yields 1,712 residents. One article I read (see below) pointed out that OTR is home to over 7,000 people. I would love to see an analysis of those crimes. The area seems to attract dealers and buyers from outside the area. How many of those crimes affected residents? How many were caused by the increased attention law enforcement gave to the area? Attention that made things better, but may have caused a spike in recorded incidents. But no, instead we have inflammatory headlines.

I don't blame the web site. It uses an automated data analysis. They have no idea what constitutes a neighborhood. I am just frustrated by the lack of depth in local reporting. Cincinnati.com and WLWT at least gave passing mention that it was just a part of OTR, but the headlines don't say that.

Thankfully there are quite a few local bloggers that ARE willing to look behind the numbers.


2 comments:

Quimbob said...

Brian over at Cincinnati Blog is taking it on, too.

McEwan said...

Thanks for pointing this out. It really pissed me and my husband off when OTR got such a dishonest critique. I'm glad to see that other people are sharing the truth. Cheers!