February 10, 2005
Where are the Examiners?
The Washington City Paper's Department of Media column was interested to find out where the new Washington Examiner delivered. So they called 274 advisory neighborhood commissioners (receiving responses from 119) and scouted around town a bit. What did they find?
According to the survey, majority-black neighborhoods are lucky to get even spotty service. The paper's red plastic missives tend to land in exclusively white neighborhoods, with a some exceptions here and there. (Cleveland Park, for instance, doesn't seem to be included.) The survey results overlap closely with U.S. Department of the Census data on race in D.C. ...Poll respondents and fieldwork revealed a scarcity of plastic sleeves in well-to-do black areas. For instance, Crestwood, a community just east of Rock Creek Park, is 62 percent black, and 45 percent of its households bring in more than $100,000, according to the 2000 census. Yet midmorning searches of the neighborhood on two consecutive days failed to produce a single copy of the Examiner ...
The graphic to the left contains shrunken versions of their maps of U.S. Census data on where whites live and where they found Examiners delivered. Read the full column in their archive, or see their graphics in full size here. Meanwhile, why.i.hate.dc puts the W.Times and the Express head-to-head.
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All the bru ha ha seems to be over the map on the right, but isn't the map on the left far more alarming/disturbing?
Ug. Reason number 1000 I left.
Yeah, DC is kind of segregated. And that data is from Census 2000--I had to wonder, when I saw it, what the map would look like today.
Forget the census data...people live where they do and all the talk in the world isn't likely to change it anytime soon. The fact that this obviously right wing new newspaper is so blantantly hell bent on excluded minority readers is an outrage. Any major corporation that advertises with them should be the focus of a boycott. Question is, how does one organize something like that?
From the few people I've spoken with since reading the City Paper yesterday, the Examiner's delivery scheme in the suburbs is no different that it is in DC. If you live in Rockville or Burke you get it, and if you live in College Park or Suitland you can forget about seeing it on your driveway.
Hard to trust all the facts in the story when there are multiple Examiner boxes in Cleveland Park--at the Metro, in front of the Uptown.