(Last month, Alec MacGillis, who was a “Monitor” reporter nearly 20 years ago before moving on to larger news operations, was awarded the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for courage in journalism. Lovejoy, a graduate of Colby College in Waterford, Maine, was a crusading abolitionist editor who was murdered for his stance in 1837. MacGillis accepted the award on Oct. 2 at Colby, where he gave the following speech at the college’s Lorimer Chapel. It has been edited for length.)
It is daunting to win this award for several reasons. The award is named after someone who gave his life in the pursuit of writing and publishing on the greatest cause of his time. Previous recipients include not just some giants of the profession but also people who put themselves at real risk in their reporting. If you are like me, a reporter who operates mostly in the realm of national politics and domestic policy, it is hard to see your work as courageous and anywhere close to the way it is for people who cover strife and upheaval overseas.
But I do recognize that even the work of the domestic investigative political reporter has become more contested in the past year. I see and accept this affirmation on behalf of the profession as a whole. Also, coming here has given me a chance to think about what has tied together the work that I have been doing the past couple of years.
At first glance, the work seems disparate. But what connects it is a notion that explains a lot of what’s going on these days. Namely, that we are suffering greatly in all sorts of ways from the growing gaps between places in this country.
There has been a lot of talk about income inequality, the gaps between the 1 percent and the 99 percent, the 20 percent and the 80 percent. That is a massive problem that poses a real threat to our democracy. But we also need to be focusing more on a related problem, the gaps between places.
We have always had wealthier and poorer places in this country, but, the gaps have been growing bigger in recent years. Cities like New York, Washington and San Francisco all had per capita incomes higher than the national average in 1980. But now it’s a lot higher.
This dynamic shows no sign of reversing even though these places have been getting more and more expensive to live in. GE just moved its headquarters to Boston. Aetna is moving from Hartford to New York. It is a winner take all, a rich-get-richer effect.
Of course, this regional inequality plays out within states as well. My hometown, Pittsfield, Mass., was for most of the 20th century a thriving small city with a strong middle class, thanks partly to the big GE plant in town. Now, GE is gone. Pittsfield’s per capita income is 40 percent below the state average, lightyears behind Boston’s.
I hardly need to be pointing this out here in Waterville. This town is fortunate to have this college. It has so much else going for it. But it’s no secret that economic vitality in the state has disproportionately clustered around Portland in a way that was not the case years ago.
One cause of this regional inequality between winner-take-all places and left-behind ones is that upper-middle-class professionals are choosing to cluster in places with lots of job options and people like themselves. Another is that our economy is becoming increasingly dominated by a handful of giant companies that are drawing wealth into the places where those companies are based.
But rather than the causes, I’m going to focus on the consequences of this regional inequality, which tie into what I have been reporting on.
First, let’s talk about the media – not just because we in the media love to talk about ourselves, which we do, but because the problem of regional inequality is in part about the media.
Two of those giant companies that are drawing wealth into certain pockets of the country are Google and Facebook. You may have heard of them. Those two companies now get a majority of all digital ad revenue in the country. They get every single new dollar of digital ad revenue that is coming in. This contributes to regional inequality by amassing money that used to be spread all around the country in one particular place, Silicon Valley.
But it’s also exacerbating regional imbalance of another sort: news coverage. It is making it even harder for newspapers in small towns and mid-sized metro areas to survive. Over the past decade, one out of every four reporting jobs has vanished across the country. That is a 2013 number. It has gotten worse.
Meanwhile, the number of reporters in Washington has doubled. And as online media jobs have replaced newspaper jobs, 73 percent of all internet publishing jobs are now concentrated in either the Acela corridor or on the West Coast.
This is personal for me. I was raised in a newspaper family, watching my father and his colleagues put out a legendary small paper, the Berkshire Eagle. In my first few years out of college, I worked for three different small papers in New England, starting at a tiny weekly in Northwest Connecticut where it was just two of us putting out the paper each week.
The work at those papers could often seem mundane and lonesome. I was aware how much more exciting life was for my classmates who had ended up in Boston, or Washington, or New York. But I was also constantly aware that if my colleagues and I were not covering this or that particular story, nobody would be. The tree would fall unheard.
Well, that little weekly in Northwest Connecticut where I started out shut down a few weeks ago. The other papers are still hanging on, but with vastly diminished resources.
It’s not just small-town papers either. I spent five years at the Baltimore Sun. I still live in Baltimore. It drives me crazy to see how much in the city goes under-covered because the talented people who are left in that depleted newsroom can only get to so much. It not only upsets me, but it also makes me feel kind of guilty.
I am immensely fortunate to be at an organization that is free of the depressing industry trends – one of the few that has made the nonprofit model work on a large scale. Thank you donors, you can give at ProPublica.org.
Yet I can’t help but wonder sometimes: Why aren’t I still doing my part at one of those mid-sized papers? I have been dealing with my guilt by making sure that as much as possible, I am reporting stories in the places that are not getting the attention they deserve. To the extent that I write about Washington and New York, I try not to be redundant and to find ways to show why those places have drifted so much from the rest of the country.
That is how regional inequality is playing out in the media. That, in turn, relates to what I see happening politically. It’s no secret that the places where President Donald Trump did much better than Republican candidates from the past correlates strongly with places that have been left behind.
We can debate endlessly how much of what drove votes in those areas was economic anxiety per se as opposed to other things. As I saw it, there was a whole lot of stuff mixed together. But there is no getting around the fact that the feeling of being left behind made voters receptive to a certain sort of political message.
It is not just about your own economic situation. This is what is often missed. It is the place where you live. It is seeing things sliding down around you, and seeing families coming apart, and seeing a place become a shadow of what it was when you were a kid or when your parents or grandparents were your age. If you see dependency on safety net programs rising all around you, it is not surprising that you might grow resentful about that, and welcome a governor who says he is going to clamp down on that.
If you see the winner-take-all cities becoming increasingly dominated by one party, which is what has been happening, it is not surprising that you start to feel alienated from that party.
The media play a role in this as well. The coverage gap has political consequences. It’s a lot easier to hate the media if you don’t know anyone in the media. If you don’t see hardworking reporters anymore at your town hall, courthouse, school board meeting or high school football game, the media to you means something totally foreign.
There is also this basic fact: If you don’t have local news, it’s going to affect your politics, whether and how you vote. It’s going to make you feel more disconnected from any sort of community or civic fabric. It’s going to send you in search of information elsewhere.
Take a woman I spent a lot of time talking to in the past year by the name of Tracie, a heavy construction worker who lives in a working-class suburb of Dayton called Miamisburg. Everything about her would make you think that she voted for Hillary. She was raised in a Democratic family. She is a single mom with three grown daughters. She belongs to a union, the Operating Engineers. She has been constantly harassed and discriminated against on the job. She voted for Obama in 2008.
But she couldn’t stand Hillary. When she talked about her, it was this whole welter about Benghazi, and the email scandal and the Wall Street speeches, some of it founded in reality, some not.
I asked Tracie where she gets her news. She does not get the Dayton Daily News. She doesn’t have cable. Mostly she goes online. She surfs the web. She gets a lot of her news from Facebook. When the Trump campaign, and the Russians, and whoever else was sending out the anti-Hillary stuff on Facebook, which was lucrative for Facebook, it was hitting its intended target in Tracie, a swing voter in a swing state.
Here is the poignant thing. Tracie is aware of what an easy mark she was, how shaky her information sources were.
“No one that’s voting knows all of the facts,” she told me. “It’s a shame. They keep us so bleeping busy and poor that we don’t have the time.”
Now, another issue: heroin. The opiate epidemic has touched all levels of society, but it has been especially deadly in the left-behind places. It began a decade and a half ago in what is probably our most left behind place of all, Central Appalachia. It radiated out from there.
Here in New England, it’s hitting hardest not in Hanover, but in Manchester; in Fall River, Mass., not Framingham.
Here is what the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston reported last year: “The 20 New England counties that have had overdosed mortality rates above 16 in 2014 have several characteristics in common, including poverty, disability, unemployment rates that exceed New England averages, and above average declines in manufacturing and manual labor occupations since 1970.”
It comes back to regional inequality. When the drug companies were pushing painkillers that they knew were more addictive than they let on, those painkillers were especially prevalent in places with a high proportion of people with genuine problems with pain from years of hard manual labor.
As for the younger people who fall prey, it’s not hard to see why you would be more susceptible growing up in a place where life seems to lack much purpose, where you’re less likely to have an intact family and community, where you are eager for escape.
I realize this has been pretty bleak, but I am going to end on a happier note.
Earlier this year, I reported a story about Jared Kushner’s family company taking extreme advantage of the tenants at the many apartment complexes it owns in the declining inner ring suburbs of Baltimore.
The rentals are in lousy shape. The tenants, both white and black, are constantly getting hit with questionable late fees and court fees and taken to court for back rent and broken leases even when they’re in the right.
This was a story that should not have taken as long as it did to be uncovered. After all, these apartment complexes are just 40 miles from Washington, D.C. But those 40 miles may as well be 40,000 given how many other big disturbing things in Baltimore go uncovered by the national media.
It was also a story that demonstrated how large the gaps have gotten. Nearly all the people living in these complexes were unaware that their landlord was one of the most powerful people in the country, a man living in a $15,000-per-month house in Washington with his wife, the president’s daughter, and sitting in the office closest to the Oval Office.
The story helped you understand the politics of our moment. I met many people in these complexes who are as disconnected from the media and civic life as Tracie was out in Dayton. Some told me they would still support Trump even after hearing who their landlord was. Many more told me they hadn’t voted at all because they never do.
The story grabbed me in part because it revealed my own ignorance. I had lived in Baltimore for nine years, but I was only dimly aware that these sorts of complexes even existed. Going into them and seeing what life was like at these margins revealed a whole new universe to me.
One tenant the story focused on was a woman named Kamiia Warren. She is a single mom who works as a home health aide and moved her three kids out of one of the complexes back in 2010. Because the older woman next door started acting aggressively, Kamiia got written permission to move out ahead of her lease.
But three years later, after the Kushners bought the complex, she started getting court summons saying she owed more than $3,000 in back rent for having left the lease early. She couldn’t track down a written permission at first. A judge slapped her with a judgment of nearly $5,000 with all of the late fees and court fees piled on. Her wages and bank account were garnished.
Her bank account was swept clean. Even after she finally found the form, she couldn’t get the remaining $4,600 judgment lifted. It sat on her record for years, hurting her credit rating and making it hard for her to take out the loan that she needs to start a small assisted-living center of her own – her life’s dream.
Well, after the article appeared, lawyers at a big firm in Baltimore offered to take on her case pro bono. I heard recently that they had managed to get the lien lifted just like that. They just called up and said, “This ridiculous lien you have got, can we do something about that?”All it took was a lawyer. They got rid of it.
Just last week, two other local law firms brought a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the other tenants at the complexes.
But, that’s not all. I have received many inquiries from people who wanted to help Kamiia. She was initially reluctant but finally told me she would accept these offers to help start her assisted-living center. The checks have come from all over. They are not coming from New York, or D.C., or San Francisco. They are coming from Bellingham, Wash., and Chickaloon, Alaska, and Wichita Falls, Texas. One check from Hailey, Idaho, was from a group of people who pooled their contributions.
With the checks, most people sent handwritten cards. I am going to read from just one of the cards, which came from Mount Joy, a smalltown in Lancaster County, Pa. – conservative territory.
“Thank you for agreeing to deliver the enclosed check. I am astounded Ms. Warren wants to use the money for helping others when it would probably be helpful for her and her children. She really must be quite a remarkable young woman. Please let her know that I don’t really care what she does with the money. It’s hers. I just want her to know how touching I found her story. And that there really are people who have a heart. And big corporations don’t always have to rule the world.”
It turns out that some people do care about the left-behind places. We just have to go there first.