The American Journalist Erwin Knoll once said "Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge." That quote is one of the things that's been in my head as I've thought about the places I have lived and worked recently.
In my time in Ministry, I've twice had a Journalist reach out to me regarding something for their Newspaper. If you find yourself in this situation - or think you might - the Methodist Church has a Media Office that has someone on call for advice if you need it. And these days, you never know when you might find yourself in the eye of the storm, in ways that admittedly I have avoided, but others I've known haven't: for example, I recall one Presbyteral Synod where someone retiring mentioned how their local Doctor for a while was a certain Harold Shipman - when his crimes were revealed, the local Methodist Church found itself opening their doors to the community that had been completely blindsided and suddenly found itself in the spotlight.
My own involvement with such things has been more slight. The second time was arguably the slightest of all - the local paper in Whitchurch asked about some vandalism at the church due to a photo on Facebook. The "vandalism" consisted of some Bedding Plants having been dug up and some soil scattered - a few minutes with a broom was all the cleanup needed, and there was speculation that it was crows searching for worms! Nevertheless this made a paragraph, with the local photographer despatched to see if it was worth a picture. Much as I was a regular reader and purchaser of that paper, I did sometimes think that they'd turn up to the opening of an envelope...
I suspect that the breach of the Llangollen Canal back in December has kept them going ever since. It was odd to find that a place less than half a mile from where you lived was suddenly making international news; we'd walked along that stretch so many times in our eight years in Whitchurch. The advent of phones and drones meant that the whole thing was documented (and continues to be) in some detail - even now some of the updates about it appear in my News Feed. What was a bit of a five day wonder for the world though continues to be a problem - what about the boaters who almost ended up at the bottom of the breach, their homes sliding away before their eyes? What about those trapped on the Whitchurch side of the breach? How is the Cafe at Grindley Brook doing given how much of its passing trade can no longer pass? Behind the headlines, there are people.
And in some ways that makes me think of the first time I was contacted by a journalist. That was a particularly grim and notorious time in Manchester; in August 2012, a feud between figures in the local underworld saw someone already suspected of killing one man's son using a grenade and gun to kill the father. He then went on the run. It was close enough to one of my churches that one member had to get in and out of her home by going through the police cordon. A month later, he would achieve even more notoriety by killing WPCs Fiona Bone and Nicola Hughes. In the days that followed the grenade killing though, a journalist contacted me on what I still think of as a fishing expedition: did I have anything to say? Although I got the impression that she too found this a little distasteful, it was fairly obvious that the newspaper was hoping I could back up what is often the line taken: to sensationalise and scare. If you believed some of the reporting, there were Police on every corner, while gang members skulked in the back alleys with grenades at the ready, and every resident locked their doors and peeked out from behind the curtains in case they were next.
All of this was of course far from the truth. If you weren't tied to the gangs - like the vast majority - you weren't a target; you'd have had to have had incredibly bad luck to be caught in the crossfire. My line about the area being full of ordinary people wanting to go about their everyday lives did get included in one report, but it wasn't what they wanted.
Having lived in Croxteth at the time of another notorious murder - this time an innocent boy, Rhys Jones, who tragically was in the wrong place at the wrong time as two local gangs indulged in a long-running turf war - I had seen this sort of reporting before. I remember being contacted by a friend, assuring us of their prayers; I recall reading a "colour piece" about the locked doors and police patrols, while outside I could hear a group of teens walking along chatting and talking, and no sign of any police at all - ironically, given those eventually charged lived closer to where I was than to where the killing took place. Again - behind the headlines, there are people. Demonising an area can become a self-fulfilling prophecy; it can become something of a dumping ground, a place where it's harder to get a decent job because of your address, a place where certain assumptions will be made about you. Did we have problems while we lived there? A couple of incidents, yes - the shed got broken into, and there was an attempt to steal petrol out of my car. But we got on well enough with our neighbours, and most of the people there were, like most, just trying to get on with their lives as best they could.
As a Methodist, I look back to John Wesley, and his "Four Alls":
All need to be saved
All may be saved
All may know that they are saved
All may be saved to the uttermost
When we see people as other, when we treat them as sidekicks to the news, when we treat the places they live as if they are No Go Zones, when we see their stories as commodities to be bought and sold, we risk forgetting that "they", just like "us", are included in those "Alls". Wesley railed against those that sought to value themselves more highly than others; railed against the reserving of the best Pews for those that could pay the highest fees. If we diminish others because of where they live, if we don't see the humanity we share rather than the man-made divisions we are so often presented with in our news, wouldn't he be railing against us as well?
Which made me think of a song by The Young'Uns, inspired by the time when the TV Show Benefits Street came to film in Stockton - and found not everyone was happy at how it made the area look. Some places are better to live in than others - I've lived in places bad and good on that front - but if places are given up on, abandoned, and the people still there are told they are worthless, why should we be surprised if they then take no pride in them? How about we try a different, more positive way?
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