Letter To The Editor: How Geography Determines Stories

The trial and execution of Troy Davis captivated the attention of people all across the country, and has led to articles and editorials in national and local newspapers from coast to coast. Yet the local newspaper of Savannah, Georgia, the place in which Troy Davis’ alleged crime took place, has paid little to no attention to the recent developments of this story.  It is a newspaper’s responsibility to provide the public with important stories, whether or not a given story makes your city or state particularly proud.  Any editorial at all would be better than nothing, no matter what you have to say about the topic.  The important thing is that people are aware of what is going on in their country, and in this case their state.  

I attend a university in a small town in Massachusetts, and even here students and the community were putting together protests and recognizing Troy Davis.  If you search the recent archives of the Los Angeles Times, they have numerous articles analyzing this case.  A similar search of the Savannah Daily News database yields just two links: both of which redirect you to another news site.  This raises a question that goes far beyond the matter of Troy Davis and his execution.  Newspapers need to be discerning and be able to objectively inform the public to enable democracy, not to perpetuate the biases that different parts of the country may possess. 

I became interested in the Troy Davis case when I had to look for a story in my Newswriting class.  I quickly became aware of the attention that people were paying to the Georgia execution case in all different parts of the country.  I found an editorial in The Los Angeles Times about the execution, and was about to respond to it, when I realized I should look at a local newspaper from Georgia and see what their coverage on the case looked like.  

I knew their perspective on the situation may look a bit different than what I have seen in Northampton and Los Angeles, but I was so surprised and annoyed when I found basically no coverage of the story in the local newspaper of Savannah, Georgia. (Savannah is the city in which Davis’ alleged crime took place.) A search led me to only two links, both of which were just hyperlinks to other news sites.  A similar search in The Los Angeles Times provided 72 articles about the case.  I am aware that the LA Times is much bigger than The Savannah Daily News, but it is also on the other side of the country opposed to being in the very town in which the case was concerned.  

This ended up going beyond the Troy Davis case, becoming a discovery of how newspapers throughout the country do in fact have different biases, and this is reflected in the content of their stories.  We always talk about how newspapers must be objective and just present the news, but it is possible to write parts of the truth from various perspectives.  This is what I realized after comparing the two newspapers, and I am more skeptical than ever of the objectivity of the news.