media maven / By Marcy Burstiner

Sick Time

(Aug. 6, 2009)  There is one national story that will directly affect every resident of Humboldt County: passage of health care reform in Congress. If it passes it promises insurance for those who don’t have it and possibly hundreds of dollars in savings each month for those who do. Over the past two weeks, you could find in the Times-Standard stories on health care reform interspersed with these stories on the national page: new field training at West Point; the difficulty soda ash producers in Wyoming have against Chinese competition; the closing of a federal anthrax probe after eight years; the oldest synagogue in the United States opening a new visitor center in Rhode Island; and the Department of Energy denying a loan guarantee for an Ohio uranium plant.

To quote my groggy headed husband when he picked up the paper this morning and saw the article on West Point: “Who picks these stories?”

Meanwhile there is a tragic story closer to home that hasn’t gotten the coverage it deserves. That’s the fallout from the state budget, which if you break down the cuts, will also directly affect just about every resident of the county. Here’s how Thadeus Greenson began his story on the passage of the budget: “With a stroke of his pen Tuesday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made official what is perhaps the largest reduction in state services California has ever seen. ”

Largest ever. Doesn’t that scream huge coverage? I don’t know about you, but when I read later in the story that on top of the severe cuts we knew would come, Schwarzenegger erased another $80 million in child welfare, $61 million from Medi-Cal, $52 million from AIDS prevention and treatment, $50 million from Healthy Families, $27.8 million from the Williamson Act program and $6.2 million more from state parks, I gasped.

But after one follow-up story that concerned possible legal challenges to the budget cuts, Greenson was off to Reggae Rising, where he filed three stories. You might disagree, but I think that people who missed Reggae Rising don’t care enough to read about it after the fact, and those who went know as much about it as Greenson, or were too stoned to care.

What readers also don’t need is spotty and superficial coverage of an important issue. Don’t just tell us that Schwarzenegger erased $80 million in child welfare spending, tell us what that means. I had to Google child poverty to find out how many children it might affect: 2.1 million in California and 7,734 in this county. The story didn’t tell me how much had been cut before the veto. Nor did it put into perspective how low the pole is set to qualify for welfare aid: The federal government doesn’t consider you impoverished unless your family of four earns less than $18,500.

There are two ways journalists can effect change: Report and write something that gets many people to act or write something that gets one person to act who has inordinate influence, power or money. If you write a story about someone’s plight and in response either hundreds of people write their congressman or Bill Gates reads it and cuts a check, you effect real change.

You get people — either one or many — to care by zeroing in on the people affected, not the numbers. Eighty million means little when you can’t picture the people affected. One hungry child’s face is a different story.

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