Here's a particularly striking example. Check out the off-topic photo and caption. An article about the City Council's budget deliberations manages to sneak in a TOTALLY UNRELATED dig against "unsavory characters" downtown. The Sentinel now is so trigger-happy to talk trash about the street people downtown that it's working it into articles about completely different topics. Classic work, Robot Monkeys!
My favorite comment on the article from the (usually dismal) Forum is this one from "Jack":
What is the problem with this picture? I see 2 other police just standing there doing nothing. This is whats happened to our work force. It takes 3 men to do a 1 man job . and this is happening with all the people who work for the city and county. We better wake up because the other 2 officers are getting paid with benefits to do NOTHING.
Little wonder the city's broke. The great thing (if you're a police chief) about underfunding everything but the police department (who just hired 8 more officers in the midst of a budget crisis that's resulted in reduced funding to everything but the police) is that it inevitable leads to the sort of social deterioration (violent crime, rioting) that provokes the upper middle class moral panic which provides ideological cover for continued over-funding of the SCPD and militarization of the city government. From the point of view of a cop who's concerned about job security, crime waves are good politics. Paradoxically, frightening crime is politically valuable for the police - it's a self-reinforcing funding mechanism. The police's stated mission of eliminating crime would put them on the all on unemployment dole if they ever actually succeeded in achieving that goal.
Welcome to Santa Cruz. It's fun to be a vampire.
Hi Colin, Sounds as a research project! UC schools MA/MS programs in Communication tend to be quantitative/statistics heavy. UCSD has a cool program emphasizing culture/change. Ever thought of returning to school?
ReplyDeleteYeah, school's on the radar, and it would be nice to get class credit for what I was already planning on writing for my blog anyway. I just got done with the "recover from tragedy" phase of my life which affords me some "ok just have fun now" time before I have to get serious about hitting the books. I'm definitely going to visit my buddy in Guatemala before I do school - or find some way to study abroad. There's a lot to be considered. These days I'm primarily concerned with starting an Arts and Entertainment company. That's stage one. Once the sound-and-pictures business turns a profit, then we go for real estate. It's a multistage operation, you see. Going to to school will compliment all this, no doubt.
ReplyDeleteI'm targeting the Sentinel because it's destructive and irresponsible for a town's only daily newspaper to function essentially a propaganda organ of the old guard political machine and the business owners. It's contributing to a pressure-cooker atmosphere of mutual distrust and class animosity. They run fear-mongering smear articles and I've had it with their crap. This town is ripe for a redesign, that's a long-term of the goals of this blog. Being from Seattle and having not grown up in Santa Cruz I have the clarity of an outsider's perspective on how the town is run. It's hard to perceive the whole machine when you're one of the cogs. That's a metaphor.