ABC’s 1990 Cautionary Tale About the Collapsing Detroit

Part 1

Part 2

These are fascinating. Only 24 years out and you can see a marked difference in the way ABC handles a story about race.

ABC actually does a fairly decent job at trying to be balanced, and actually airs bits of an interview with Coleman Young that do not paint him in a great light. Why does Young come off badly? Because they actually air his remarks, not at all concerned with preserving a specific narrative and burying most of what he says.

The producers are no doubt left, but they are 1990 left, which is shockingly closer to the center compared to today’s mainstreamed lunatic fringe.

Even the requisite parts where they show white people in the suburbs playing golf while the inner city burns, they don’t seem to be coming down too strongly on whitey, even showing a segment where the remaining whites in the city congregate with the middle-class blacks at various social events. They even point to black flight, where middle to upper-middle class blacks hung on as long as they could, but violence, drugs, arson and crooked black politicians forced them out, the same way whites were forced out. The left would never air that today.

One section, where they try and bait a white guy as he rails about the “coloreds,” doesn’t quite get the 2014 treatment. Today, ABC would simply have the voice-over of the guy as they showed blacks hanging from trees. But in1990, his opinion is presented and there isn’t a hammer on the head for the viewer, just in case you don’t know the “proper” way to react.

There is no way on earth any of the leftworks would run this today. It has too much truth in it and it doesn’t have any representation from professors of black studies or critical race theory. It doesn’t have fast-talking race hustlers who speak in poly-syllabic words with little to no contextual meaning, followed by, “you know what I’m sayin’?”

They have one black spokesperson that summed up Detroit’s problem this way; blacks finally have the political power, but whites have the money. The money is leaving because the political power is hostile to the whites. Again, this would never air today. The guy would be dismissed as a Tom.

The program is also devoid of the white progressive pontificating about how the cause of Detroit’s demise is “white privilege,” “greedy capitalists,” “systemic institutional racism,” or “the Tea party.”

In other words, the program is not loaded down with lies. It looks a lot more like what Fox would air than MSNBC. What does that tell you about the evolution of leftist “journalism?”

ht/ Rob E.