by Steve Reinbrecht
The Reading Eagle tried to look like a real newspaper Thursday and tell us about banks in Berks.
But the editors are so clueless they didn’t notice their numbers were off by 1,000.
They reported that the banks in Berks have $9.8 million in deposits. Perhaps because my background in philosophy and poetry leads me to question the world around me, that number struck me as a bit low. I checked their source, the FDIC, to find that it’s really $9.8 BILLION in deposits, a more comforting number.
Did an office full of journalists, entrusted to keep Berks residents informed about important news that affects our lives, catch this silly mistake as they were collecting and editing the information and proofreading their pages?
Nah. As usual, the main focus seems to be filling pages with words.
The Eagle wants to appear like a real newspaper and have business news, but it’s easy to see it doesn’t work too hard to get to the truth.
Probably because business is so behind the times here in Berks County, and the Latino population has been so neglected by established banks and businesses, that the Eagle’s advertisers don’t want to see the truth posted next to their ads.
Berks would better prosper if Latino entrepreneurs got easier credit, I bet.
In fact, the very edition of the Eagle's “Business Weekly” supports my idea.
In an interview with James Buerger, senior vice president and chief lending officer for Community First Fund, the Eagle asked “What is the greatest need in lending in the Reading area?”
“The Latino market is under-represented in the Reading market," he said. "We're [the fund is] involved in the Main Street program. It has a lot of potential and a long way to go. But it will help the core of Reading be revitalized, which will help revitalization spread out. As the core gets revitalized, then the next block will get revitalized and then the next block and so on. We're seeing this in Lancaster and elsewhere. … That's the whole concept: to start with the four or five blocks of Penn Street and work with the business community.”
But the Eagle rarely if ever has thoughtful stories about:
• Lending to Latinos
• The lack of progress with Reading’s Main Street program
• The city’s micro-loan or façade-improvement program
• Reading’s economic development efforts
• The city’s plan for downtown
If it’s all smoke and mirrors, the Eagle should report that.
Business people are generally good at detecting bullshit. But they have reasons they don’t want people knowing the truth, so they are really good at producing bullshit.
Check out some of this week's business content:
So which is it?
It’s the media’s important job to find the truth.
I often learn more news about Berks County from Google alerts and Facebook than I do from the Reading Eagle pseudo-newspaper.
Some recent examples:
Cultural sensitivity? Did you know that Ramadan has started? Other local newspapers realize the importance and help explain the holiday to non-Muslims, but not the Reading Eagle. Not that the Eagle is shy about religion – if it’s the Christian kind. Its Christmas coverage goes on ad nauseum for days, and it carries a daily Bible verse and weekly columns about local churches. But Ramadan? Meh.
Hundreds if not thousands of Muslims live in Berks, and many families worship at its two Islamic centers. If you haven’t noticed, Muslims have been in the news a lot lately, often the victims of misperception, prejudice and stigma. Often it’s the media that maintain the misperception, prejudice and stigma. Other local news organizations had stories last week.
The Reading mayoral election? Al Walentis, not the award-winning Reading Eagle, broke the news on his blog about retailer Al Boscov providing $70,000 to Reading Mayor Vaughn Spencer for his campaign:
“It shows that the Albert Boscov money spigot is at full guzzle feeding the mayor's campaign coffers. Naturally, some might question whether one individual should have such influence in a municipal election. What might Albert Boscov be hoping for in return?”
When the Eagle editors thought they had figured out how to spin the story without embarrassing Boscov, a major advertiser and de facto but untrained city planner, the result was pathetic.
Deportations? I didn’t see anything in the Eagle about a judge’s dramatic order June 19 to stop the deportation of a woman and her child from a Berks detention center. But other media have the fascinating story.
“A U.S. Court of Appeals judge has ordered U.S. officials to intercept a mother and her 12-year-old daughter on a plane Friday being deported to Guatemala and immediately return them to the United States.
“The 34-year-old mother, Ana, and her daughter were woken up at 3 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Friday and pulled from their rooms at a [Berks] Pennsylvania family detention center, where they had been living for over a year, said her attorney, Bridget Cambria. By 10 a.m., the two were placed on a plane flying to Panama City, where they would catch a second flight to Guatemala City.
“In a rare move that will likely draw more attention to the controversial practice of family detention, Chief Judge Theodore A. McKee of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ordered U.S. officials to stop Ana and her daughter when they arrive in Guatemala City and immediately return them to the United States."
The Reading Eagle’s journalism produced this headline about the center, which it had ignored for years: “Berks County Residential Center: 'family friendly' or 'bad'?”
Pedestrian killed? I first learned that a woman had been killed on Route 422 in Lower Heidelberg Township on Facebook. Other news media identify her and talk of a fight and bikers at a barbecue joint. The Eagle can’t get the story because its reporters no longer seem to develop sources. I can’t remember the coroner’s office not releasing basic info if the police won’t. The Eagle’s lack of credibility has injured it.
Same with a story about possibly contaminated water at a Berks bottling company. A warning from the state came out June 19; nothing in the Eagle as of Sunday night, June 21.
How about this: Police say 30-year-old former teacher Jonathan Ruppert of Hamburg sexually assaulted a 17-year-old student in a Lebanon High School classroom in April.
You can read about it everywhere but the Reading Eagle, because although it LOOKS like a newspaper, it really isn’t one.
One great thing about America is that we have the right to say “No!” when government agents want to, or are ordered to, search our houses and vehicles.
In 2014, Pennsylvania’s top judges decided that cops don’t need to convince a judge to sign a warrant to search your car.
But as far as I know they still need a warrant to get around the Fourth Amendment and search your house without your permission.
And because we rely on the news media to be the watchdog for our rights, reporters who write about police searching homes should always find out why the police were allowed to do the search.
On June 16, the Reading Eagle had a story about Spring Township police arresting two 20-something brothers after finding 2 pounds of marijuana, guns and $3,000 in their home.
“Detective Steve Brock said the search of the residence was conducted June 2 after investigators responded to complaints from residents about suspected illegal drug activity.”
We’re all glad these pot dealers were busted, because their guns were really dangerous. Though now their disappointed customers might have to turn to smoking bath salts or toxic synthetic "marijuana," or alcohol or other Establishment-approved anti-depressants.
But this is where the rubber hits the road with respect to the Big Question of government: How to balance the rights of the individual with the good of society?
This is the exact spot where I want my local media to shine their lights upon, for us all to see exactly how public-safety policy is working. No need to remind you that police behavior is generally under scrutiny lately.
The Eagle reporter should have reported:
• Did the suspects give permission to search?
• Did the police get a search warrant?
• If they did, who was the judge?
• What was the “probable cause,” the reasons why the police believe a crime was probably committed?
• Are reports by suspicious neighbors enough to get a search warrant? The story suggests it is.
In an e-mail, Detective Brock told me: “The incident was based off citizen complaints about drug activity at the residence. The search of the residence was consensual.”
I bet he would have explained it to the Eagle reporter.
Of course, most of us are very law-abiding and never have contraband. So what’s the big fuss? An editor, Dave Warner, once told me it’s the oozing stories – where something slowly, apparently innocently creeps into the world – that are more important than the breaking-news stories.
By publicizing the oozing signs of the erosion of human rights, better journalism could have benefited many societies in the world that are in trouble now. But of course the Establishment leaders always get control of the media and use them for their agendas, not to publish truth.
In the New World Order, when I am appointed editor of the Reading Eagle, I will insist that reporters always ask police chiefs the reasons their officers search pockets, homes and vehicles.
Once I went, as the managing editor of bctv.org, to the state police headquarters for a forum on trooper-journalist relations. I told the room full of troopers and mostly TV reporters that news releases about vehicle stops should always include the probable cause.
I was quickly surrounded by in-leaning troopers decrying my attack on their ability to do their job. Later, one trooper more gently told me that frankly, people are ignorant of their rights and will quickly consent to a search of their vehicle, and that police depend on this to save themselves a lot of trouble.
I don’t really think the police in Berks are doing anything wrong. They are doing their jobs.
But the Reading Eagle newspaper is not doing its job.
By Steve Reinbrecht
I'm sorry to ask you to imagine something horrible for a moment. Imagine that a 20-year-old Wyomissing High School graduate, a former field hockey player, was found dead at 8 a.m. in a West Reading alley after being shot about five hours earlier.
Do you think the Reading Eagle, Berks County's primary news-gathering institution, would cover the story? What page do you think the editors would run it on?
Do you remember the stories about Saxxon Lee Hopkins a year ago? The Exeter High School graduate, a football player, was found dead about 8 a.m. in a breezeway in Reading after he was shot about 3:30 on a Monday morning. Really.
What could be more horrible for a community to suffer than the murder of a 20-year-old man?
But a year later, the Reading Eagle has barely covered it. The story about Hopkins' death was published June 2, 2014, on Page B3. The next day, a story with little new ran on Page B2. On July 13, his name was listed in a Page B1 wrap-up of city homicides.
Since then, the Eagle newsroom has given no more attention to Saxxon Hopkins. Ignoring Hopkins’ death leaves the Reading Eagle open to charges of insensitivity at best and a “no human involved” mentality at worst.
In 2013, the Eagle proudly organized a Crime Summit, to which the ex-governor came. The event was so important and secret that reporters weren't allowed to know even who was in the closed meetings, much less cover the discussion.
But in Hopkins' case the award-winning pseudo-newspaper provides the most tepid, meager, formulaic coverage of -- a murder! -- the most horrible of crimes! -- the loss of a young man by violence! -- one of 11 homicides in Berks last year.
The problem of marginalizing the deaths of young men of color is not just Berks’, of course. But it is something that good journalism can address and help solve. The Eagle's current attitude mirrors the racism of America's bad old days.
“Homicide had ravaged the country’s black population for a century or more," writes Los Angeles Times reporter Jill Leovy in Ghettocide. [Her 2015 book about crime in Los Angeles is available at a Berks library near you.]
"But it [homicide of black people] was at best a curiosity to the mainstream. The raw agony it visited on thousands of ordinary people was mostly invisible. The consequences were only superficially discussed, the costs seldom tallied.
“Very few murders were covered in the media. Television stations covered more than the papers, but without any particularly particular consistency, and many, many deaths received no mention by any media outlet, especially if the victims were black. It rankled deeply. … ‘Nothing on the news!’ a mother cried, weeping, at the site of a journalist the day after her son was murdered. ‘Please write about it! Please!’ "
On July 15, 2009, Hopkins's mom ran a “Happy 16th Birthday” wish for him in the Eagle.
On July 15, 2014, his parents ran a “Happy 21st Birthday” wish for him in the newspaper, five weeks after he was killed.
Hopkins left behind his parents, a daughter, five brothers and four grandparents.
Friends left obituary messages, which I've edited lightly:
"I remember when Saxxon first came to Northeast Middle School; he was a cool friend to have. I remember the last time I saw him in ... summer school. Every time I look at my diploma it reminds me of Saxxon because me and him went through summer school together in order for us to graduate ... . Prayers to his family and friends."
"I knew this young man several years ago. ... Some people don't know the level of their potential. Hope that whoever is responsible is prosecuted to the fullest extent. Very sad to see something like this."
"Yes, I knew him and all the three families who are in mourning over this. My three grandchildren are cousins to Saxxon. My prayers and heartfelt thoughts and love are with everyone. Very very sad."
The Reading Eagle editors might say, "The police say they have nothing to report."
Would the public accept that response from the police in the death of my hypothetical Wyomissing woman? Isn't it the job of the newspaper to challenge the police on such a refusal to provide information about such an atrocity? I think it is, no matter the truth. And there are always other sources.
In any case, I truly have no doubt the Reading Police Department works hard on every serious crime. Reading Chief Bill Heim recently answered my inquiry saying, " This case is being investigated. There is no media update at this point." But I lack the juice of a reporter from the mighty Eagle.
The Reading Eagle published stories about people on Death Row for murder. It compares the numbers of homicides in Reading and Berks from year to year.
What is the attitude of the people in the newsroom who decide what to shine the light on? Is the attitude, just let the police do their jobs? We’re not going to look at crime very hard because advertisers don’t like that sort of content? That no humans are involved?
We know about Saxxon's death. Neighbors found his body in a breezeway in the 1100 block of Mulberry Street near Robeson Street. Hopkins was shot several times in the "upper torso." Residents had heard gunshots about 3:30 a.m. but did not see anything.
I want to know more about his life. I want what I think is a too-comfortable public to see something about the loss and grief such atrocities create. Berks needs better journalism.
