Media Bias

Today I'm not going to rant about any coach operators, management, boards..no today's rant is against the local media and the way they portray not only Max but public transportation in the Portland-Vancouver metro area in general.

Anyone who has been a regular reader of The Columbian newspaper in Vancouver over the years is well aware that they've been very anti C-Tran for many many years.

If you listen to the local tv stations you'd think people were being robbed, murdered, raped, etc. on Max every single day of the week. Unfortunately far too many otherwise intelligent people now have a perception that Max is the "crime train" and that public transportation in general is full of miscreants.

I'm not saying that buses and trains don't have their share of the less than desirable members of society BUT it's no worse than your average suburban shopping mall parking lot, local New Season's Market parking lot, etc. I come from a family of cops so from an early age I was taught to see things happening that an awful lot of people don't realize is happening in front of them. If you go to the Fisher's Landing Fred Meyer and sit in your car long enough and watch what's going on, I can just about guarantee that there will be a drug deal of some sort occurring right in front of you.

What we have with the local news media is a situation where if for example a stabbing or domestic dispute happen within a mile of a Max station, somehow the news story comes out that the stabbing happened near Max. I've seen stories where you've had some sort of shooting or stabbing that had ZERO connection to Max, yet for the stand-up report that aired on the local news, the reporter stood in a location that the Max platform was clearly in the background.

A couple of weeks or so ago some transients at an hour when Max doesn't run got into some sort of fight along some of the paths/trails out towards Gateway and I-205. One of them stabbed another one. So how did the story appear on the news? "A stabbing at Gateway Transit Center".

You had some sort of fight out in Hazel Dell in the Vancouver area a month or so ago and there was a stabbing. For some reason this got connected to a C-Tran bus stop along Highway 99 (this was on Channel 2, they chose to show a C-Tran bus stop) or 134th Street Transit Center (the other tv stations in town linked it to 134th Street). There was ZERO evidence that any of the men involved in the stabbing had ever been on a C-Tran bus let alone at 134th Street Transit Center. C-Tran looked into the incident and the transient camp where these guys had been staying was several blocks from 134th Street Transit Center!

One of the most well-known Max violence incidents was the older man who got beaten with a baseball bat in Gresham a few years back. First of all, I'm not justifying the actions of the poo bag who beat him-I hope the guy who did it rots in hell-BUT how many people who have heard the story realize it happened after 11:00PM? I gotta be honest, my neighborhood is very safe other than kids doing the occasional tp'ing of some trees BUT I wouldn't want to walk around or feel safe necessarily walking around my own neighborhood that time of night! The isolated yet hightly publicized incidents of crime that actually are related to Tri-Met or C-Tran, if you read or listen to the ENTIRE story and not just heard what you want to hear, you would realize that the OVERWHELMING majority of these incidents have occurred late at night or early in the morning(like 2am early).

One reason why crime on a bus or Max gets so much attention is that it is in fact RARE. People for example getting stabbed or beaten at local establishments happen many times a day, every single day of the week. It's so commonplace, it's not considered newsworthy unless of course you get multiple casualties of some sort or they can connect it to gangs.

Buses and trains run on busy roads, highways that have many different types of businesses that attract many different types of people. If 2 guys get into a fight in a bar along a busy road, it stands to reason there might be a bus route that runs passed the bar. The news media needs to take this into account and stop making it look and/or sound like these crimes have anything to do with a bus or train. News media-let's take some responsibility here!