OUR VIEW: Pack media attack us, again (vote in poll)

The latest pack-media hit on our city came Saturday, when the New York Times published an ominous propaganda photo at the top of the front page. It shows a dark orange-red street under a lone streetlight that was turned back on after a frightened mom complained.

The opening paragraphs of a story tell the horror a woman and her grown son after the city turned off a third of all streetlights to save electricity and $1.2 million a year — a move the Times would praise if done for the environment.

The Times said the woman’s tires were slashed and her car broken into after streetlights went off. Strange men showed up on her porch. She pawned a TV “to get a shotgun.”

The story links the robbing and shooting of Esteban Garcia to a darkened streetlight. Seven paragraphs in, the story happens to mention the inconvenient little fact that oh, by the way, Colorado Springs is safer than most cities.

We shouldn’t dwell on that, because Police Chief Richard W. Myers told the Times that perception of crime is more important than crime data. In other words, we don’t have numbers to bolster your case against the Springs but we’re happy to wax philosophic if it helps.

If perception rules, public safety employees may want to cooperate less with a herd of media lemmings hellbent on propagating fear about this city.

To make Colorado Springs sound even more ominous, the Times said “police are trying to free more officers by having residents report some crimes over the Internet.”

Scary. Except for the fact every major police department wants residents to report non-emergency crimes over the Internet. But in Colorado Springs, it illustrates the dark danger and despair of fiscal responsibility during recession. City spokeswoman Sue Skiffington-Blumberg told The Gazette that other cities throughout the country have taken identical cost-saving measures as those we’re known for.

“We are not alone, but we are the example. We have the world’s attention,” Skiffington-Blumberg said, explaining how media organizations keep borrowing the Springs story from one another to avoid original research.

As the city’s top public relations employee, she will not submit guest columns or letters to counter bad stories because she considers them accurate and helpful. She said the New York Times story wasn’t negative. She said the world’s media are merely telling stories based on what they’ve seen in The Gazette and the Denver Post.

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“These stories are told in the light of ‘how can this be happening in such a great place to live?’ These are hard times, yet Colorado Spring is surviving and surviving well,” Skiffington-Blumberg said.

But the stories don’t say that. They frighten tourists and prospective employers who probably decide to take their money elsewhere. City staff and politicians should get ahead of the story and manage the message, letting the world know that Colorado Springs remains among the safest large cities in the country — a place that learned to cut spending, reduce consumption and involve the public in fulfilling needs through voluntarism and philanthropy. At the very least they should demand op-ed space when we get slammed. Colorado Springs should be the example of how to survive hard times without getting buried in debt, not the world’s cautionary tale.

— Wayne Laugesen , editorial page editor, for the editorial board. Friend him on Facebook