“Our lives are not simply black and white”

If people read nothing but bad news about their town, that’s what they’ll come to expect. How to change that?

Espanola, New Mexico, lies smack in a high-desert valley that curls into taupe foothills that, in turn, fold into the Jemez and Sangre de Cristo mountains. The Rio Grande and Rio Chama rivers merge here, and for a time, the Chili Line railroad bustled along the Rio Grande, hauling freight between Santa Fe and Colorado. That shut down in 1941, leaving behind a small city that today feels…left behind.

It is a place over-packed with history and intersecting cultures. The region was settled by Tewa people in the 13th century, by Spaniards beginning in 1598, by Anglos after New Mexico’s annexation by the U.S. in 1848, and by Latino migrants over the last two decades. The city’s official website says that the cultures “exist harmoniously with each other.”

This seems optimistic. But let’s say, Espanola has a complex energy. It also has problems. It is a poor community in a poor state: Median household income is about three-quarters that of New Mexico’s, and 28% of children live under the poverty line. The city’s crime rate is nearly four times the U.S. average, and for years it has suffered one of the highest rates of drug overdose deaths in the nation.

All this is real, and Espanola’s newspaper, the Rio Grande Sun, reports it religiously. To read the Sun each week is to tour the city’s underside up close and in some glory — the drugs, the crime, the poverty, and the failure of government and other actors over decades to fix the those problems. “Son Gets Rude Awakening, Tasered by Mother,” I read the other week in the Sun’s police blotter. “Woman Allegedly Steals Car, Stabs Friend in Ribcage.”

There are people in Espanola who are tired of this. It was a constant refrain in the two focus groups we assembled there, the first in a string of similar conversations with citizens in smaller communities in New Mexico, Colorado, and Montana — part of a project, supported by the LOR Foundation, to explore rural news ecosystems in the Mountain West. We were trying to understand people’s relationship to the news: What issues are important to them, and how do those priorities match up against their perceptions of actual coverage?

Here’s what we heard in Espanola: Yes, there are problems. But there also are good things happening: People helping others, innovating, coming up with responses that work. And we don’t read about that in the Sun.

“We don’t get to hear voices that are important,” said one focus group participant. (We agreed not to make public that person’s name, or those of others.) “The important voices of the people in the valley, which would be wonderful because there are so many assets here. We don’t hear that. We hear about the drug abuse. We hear about the robberies. We hear about the crack stunts that have heads rolling down the street.”

Another said: “This newspaper just contributes to the ongoing destructiveness of people. It doesn’t represent my family, my culture, my heritage, my children.”

This does not come as a surprise to Bob Trapp, the Sun’s second-generation owner and editor. “What did they say about me?” he asked us the afternoon following our first focus group, half grinning, already knowing the answer. Trapp takes enormous pride in his paper’s independence and, I’d guess, in his antagonistic relationship with what he sees as vested interests. More than once, stones have come through the windows of the Sun’s squat building off Espanola’s main drag — and to Trapp, each one is a welcome sign that he’s doing something right (although last year’s fire, the work of a suspected arsonist, he could have done without).

And here’s the thing: Most journalists would say that the Rio Grande Sun is a good small newspaper. Arguably, very good. Trapp and his young reporters dig and tear into stories. They file Freedom of Information Act requests. They press for transparency and accountability in local government. Each week, they produce a grabby read. In 2015, the National Newspaper Association awarded the Trapp family its Tom and Pat Gish Award for “courage, tenacity and integrity in rural journalism.”

Not least, folks here buy it religiously. Show up in Espanola on a Wednesday afternoon, as we did, and you’ll see everyone from high school kids to the elderly at intersections next to waist-high stacks of newspapers, dashing car to car, hawking copies of that week’s issue for 50 cents apiece. It is a sort of coming together for an otherwise fragmented community, civic obligation meets charity meets open-air party.

So, what’s the disconnect here? Why does good journalism make so many people uncomfortable? In part, of course, because it should: That’s what good journalism does. My experience is that most people feel ambivalence about this watchdog function: They want independent, critical reporting — but not so much when it’s about them or their communities. And that tension isn’t, per se, unhealthy.

But it’s also true that relentlessly negative news coverage can leave out a big part of the story. What’s good in a community, what’s working, is as true and as important as what fails. And coverage that focuses on extremes risks missing what’s in the middle. As one focus group participant told us: “Most of our lives are not simply black and white, good or bad.”

More important, I think, news coverage can have a critical role in shaping the thinking and the conversations that determine a community’s self-image, what it believes about itself and its future. This was a telling strand in our conversations. A representative exchange went like this:

“[The Sun] creates what I call internalized oppression among families, about who we are. [The negative news stories] tell us, this is who we are. It’s very powerful and very destructive.”

“It really manifests itself in our younger generation that can’t even identify with their community because of that negative connotation. And you hear the news, creating just a consistent mockery of somewhere I think is the most righteous place to live in the whole country. And yet, you’re having a student who can’t even identify with that and, you know, rather than being proud and boastful about where he comes from, you have to kind of shrug your shoulders a little bit, and sink a little bit down.”

“Yeah, and that’s the way we identify with it. And it’s really a disservice to every family that has to kind of live through that. Because it builds on all of these other negative facets of who we are as a community.”

For the record, the Sun actually does print some good news — and Trapp says he’d like to print more. But what people in Espanola seem to embrace are the headlines that shout out violence, poverty, and corruption. And that external news narrative shapes, for better and worse, the community’s internal narrative. If people read nothing but bad news about their town, that’s what they’ll come to expect of themselves and others: Espanola is a bad and broken place. It always will be. Why even hope for something better?

I’ve talked about this phenomenon with Nick Tilsen. Tilsen is founder and executive director of the Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation, which serves the Oglala Lakota people on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in western South Dakota. Like Espanola, Pine Ridge has problems: endemic poverty, alcoholism and drug abuse, suicides.

Tilsen has become accustomed to well-meaning journalists from national news organizations dropping into Pine Ridge to document the misery. The New York Times. National Geographic. NBC and ABC.

Their reports are predictably dire. And predictably, word quickly gets around. “The number one communications on the Rez are text messaging and Facebook,” Tilsen says. “So once stories like that start getting shared, almost everyone sees them. When there’s a story about Pine Ridge, there’s a feeling of anxiety: I wonder if this is going to be a truthful story, or not? So many times I’ve seen videos and stories where you feel just deeply uncomfortable watching, or don’t know what to feel.

“There are some Lakota who say, people on the outside, their opinions don’t matter. But I wonder what the effect is, when we open the newspaper or we Google Pine Ridge, and the only stories you see are negative ones. When you see article after article about the poverty and negativity of this place, when you’re constantly told that they don’t have opportunity, that doesn’t empower.”

Tilsen says he wonders about what could happen if the news were different. “I think about the impact of the opposite, a constant stream of stories from this community, of things that are happening, that are working, on the community psyche here. What a story of hope, that people are rallying to solve the problems at a time when we’re burying a relative every week!”

As Mallary Jean Tenore of Images and Voices of Hope observes, psychology research has shown that “people in positive emotional states are more creative, more pro-social, and more resourceful. The same research also suggests that resilience can be learned and that it has a ripple effect.”

How might that play out in these small towns? Espanola was our most wrenching conversation among the focus groups — but it wasn’t unique. In nearly every community we visited, people complained about what they saw as one-sided news coverage that seemed to suck the hope and agency out of people, continually reinforcing a negative shared narrative of what might be.

What if journalism could shift the course of that narrative? What if we could, as Jack Knight, the co-founder of Knight-Ridder Newspapers, once said, “bestir the people into an awareness of their own condition, provide inspiration for their thoughts and rouse them to pursue their true interests”?

Wouldn’t news organizations and the communities they serve both be the better for that?