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Comment by yojo | Hacker News Reader

As a citizen of Portland, OR, I can verify that national news outlets heavily distort reality to draw eyeballs.

I’m not sure local news is a whole lot better, but at least you can count on readers to call bullshit.

Yep. I've been in PDX for 22 years. Back during the BLM protests, my FOX-loving family back east would call me and see if I was OK whenever FOX ran some bullshit story about the city burning.

Once you step outside Portland, it is terrifyingly red. Jefferson Secessionists are the scariest. I've been harassed in small towns outside PDX when I go camping and they see the PSU parking stickers on my car. Heck, I met a guy at a bar in Plush, Ore., who was telling me how he and his buddies made sure no black people ever set foot in his town. And this was in 2018.

Also, KATU news is owned by Sinclair Media. Even OregonLive is dubious. Willamette Week, The Mercury, and OPB are reasonable, IMHO.

Maybe the biggest BLM protest in the country rallied almost daily at the park in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. I'd take my kids to play there in the morning and you'd never know anything had happened the evening before.

Yep. My elderly parents have listened to Rush religiously for decades now. Fox news is on constantly.

They repeatedly contacted me in a panic wanting to arrange for a change of locks n my house, security cameras, etc. They honest to god thought BLM protestors were randomly invading homes in Portland because of these trash news outlets.

And then the bigger national media outlets do their "both sides means we pretend bullshit is worth taking seriously" nonsense and make the lunatic positions seem less fringe.

It's maddening that my own family is convinced they understand what is happening in front of my porch and downtown at protests I literally attended, better than I do. And it's all because of these news outlets selling a cravenly dishonest narrative that BLM protestors demanding police reform are actually some sort of race war against white people.

Leaving the extremely uhhh paisley/tie-died Oregon Country Fair and returning to WA on the backroads was wild. Stopped to get gas a says away and got out of the car wearing tie-dye, etc... Was immediately approached by two locals who got into the whole thing - hippies killing people, breaking into people's houses, raping and drugging kids. (This was before Trump, there was still the satanic baby abuse thing. Not that one, the one before!)

As a disguise because I live in rural WA which is Red and dangerous I had a complete set of typical "rigging/logging" clothes which I do wear working in the woods. I was talking to them, changing my clothes to logger jeans, ripped stained hickory shirt suspenders, the lot. They were very confused

If i was talking to a man at a petrol station and he took his trousers off, i would also be confused.

We can't pump our own gas in Oregon. Got to do something to pass the time. :)

The media misrepresentation is a two-way street. The area around my wife’s office in DC was boarded up and dead for a year because of the BLM protests. Didn’t see anything about that on CNN.

I'm tired of people saying Chicago is like John Wick and Mad Max had a violence baby.

Can't count how many times the people saying this live in rural areas that have, per capita, higher violent crime rates than Chicago.

The city has its problems, as all American cities do, but it is a wonderful place with amazing people and a ton to offer. Except for the winters. Those are awful.

A while back I had some of my relatives ask me if we were doing OK with all the rapes happening in California. I had no clue what the hell they were talking about.

This has happened to me numerous times based on prejudices people have about other countries or regions. But the funniest thing is that it even happens when you travel from one small town to the next small town, as has been parodied in comedies from The Simpsons to Corner Gas. I think it's a fairly basic fear to see places you don't visit often as threatening. For some reason it doesn't seem to be quelled by the easily verifiable fact that plenty of people live perfectly adequate lives in the other place.

"Oh, that? We just turn the radio up and it doesn't bother us."

I’ve visited Chicago a few times (not in winter, though), and I loved it. Maybe my favorite American big city. Great people, fascinating architecture, middle finger to TFG tower along the river. Also, I never got crimed.

Best summer city in the world, in my not so humble opinion on the matter.

Fall is pretty fun too.

Winter is a definite meh.

Unfortunately this didn't age well.

I sincerely hope you're not referring to the Highland Park active shooter.

First off, not Chicago. Highland Park is almost 20 miles outside of the city.

With a median household income of $100k and a violent crime rate 4x lower than the rest of Illinois and nationwide.

Your comment is unnecessary.

I'm not from Chicago, but all I ever hear about is the murder rate being higher than most countries. It's like that is the only thing people do in Chicago: go out and murder each other.

Because the US murder rate is so much higher than most countries. Chicago isn't in the top 10 for murders per capita in the US. It's not even top 20.

Chicago is #28.

https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/murder-map-deadliest-u-s-ci...

Granted it's way too high, but ask yourself why we don't take about Little Rock or Chattanooga or Richmond this way.

I'm asking myself, but I don't know why. Only have a theory Koch brothers something something fairness in reporting act something something...

I think it's going to be my life's work to get people to stop making these comparisons. The difference in the size of city limits makes them meaningless. Chicago is geographically huge and includes a large swath of suburbs. Other city limits are much smaller and include all of the bad areas without the suburbs to dilute the per capita numbers.

yeah the general impression of chicago must be so inaccurate after today

Once again, not relevant. Reposting:

First off, not Chicago. Highland Park is almost 20 miles outside of the city. With a median household income of $100k and a violent crime rate 4x lower than the rest of Illinois and nationwide. Your comment is unnecessary.

The only point to be made here is about the US having a unique problem with mass shooters. Which has nothing to do with Chicago's general crime rate.

I feel like People experience or learn about a place once and that paints their view of it for years to come.

Someone else in this thread mentioned the Simpsons and I can't help think about the episode where Homer was vehemently against going to New York, because he had been there in the 70s when it was at its worst.

The Chicago thing isn't from experience, it's from people who've never lived in Chicago repeating it over and over again.

The victims of violence in Chicago are not the white people citing it on TV.

The Chicago thing is because every summer the national media see fit to report on local crime news from Chicago every time they have an eyepopping number of homicides a week, which is most weeks. I've never lived in Chicago and I don't care about their crime, but the national media won't shut up about it.

There are parts of Chicago that are really nice, but also parts that are notably worse than the “bad” part of most cities. A lot of the area around UChicago itself was very sketchy compared to any other university area I’ve been to. This was about 5-10 years ago. Maybe it’s improved since although I’d be surprised. It’s not random happenstance that people who have never been are more likely to be afraid of Chicago than New York nowadays.

That was my impression. Beautiful city, shining buildings, and then you walk a few blocks too far in any direction and you're in a very rough, very rundown poor-seeming neighborhood. There was a very clear line demarcating the areas. As opposed to, say, New York, which is nice but a little grimy everywhere.

Or San Francisco, which is, you know.

Oakland, CA has more violent crime than Chicago - and never gets national news coverage. Why?

"Crime in Chicago" is a rightwing racist dog-whistle now, and so common that is a reliable standby they use now when wanting to fearmonger.

It was less than an hour after today's events when right-wing Twitter was saying "LOL, Chicago" when Highland Park is the polar opposite of the Chicago they love to blame.

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