Spectrum

Often Appalachian natives decry the “drive by journalists” from big cities that come to small Appalachia towns just to capture pictures and depictions of poverty, unemployment, drug addiction and squalid and trashy living conditions. They come, stay for a day or two, take pictures of the most decrepit conditions and human devastation, conduct a few interviews and then leave painting the whole region with the same brush of destitution. The same criticisms have been levied by some against the recent book, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, written by J. D. Vance. Michael Clay Carey, a former journalist and current assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at Samford University in Birmingham Alabama, instead thinks that local news media in Appalachian towns often ignore poverty and local social ills to the detriment of their citizenry. They generally don’t report about poverty, economic or health issues, because they don’t want people to think that they are exploiting ste