This kind of dovetails nicely with Armondo's frontpager on racism.
I don't know Noel Weyrich. Maybe that's because I don't bother to read Philadelphia Magazine, which is apparently desperate enough for sales these days to reach out to the stormfront.org readership. Give me the alternative stylings of PW any day of the week. Apparently, though, Mr./Ms. Weyrich thinks s/he knows who I am - or at least what I'm about.
In the upcoming issue of Philadelpia Magazine, Weyrich takes apart the corporate media coverage of Latoyia Figueroa's case, and my involvement in moving it into the mainstream. Basically, l'argument des Weyrich is that I and other Philly-based bloggers used race baiting to make CNN, MS-GOP, and Fox take notice of Latoyia being missing. S/he further posits that none of it made any difference anyway.
(jump on down for more...)
I'm not quite sure where to start, and even less sure that I should start. But let's try this. Weyrich seems to think that Philly (and national) bloggers were "having fun" horsewhipping the corporate media with this story. In particular, s/he seems to think I was basking in the glow of corporate media adulation. Let's get one thing straight (and a lot of frustrated journos can back me up on this one): Once the story was out there, no person was more reluctant to go before the camera or microphones than me. I can count on one hand the media interviews that I actually did - and always in the context of keeping Latoyia's name active.
On countless occasions, I was asked about the racial issues involved in the coverage. On equally countless occasions, I said that no one could ignore the race / lifestyle / socioeconomic aspects of the story - they were out there then; they are still out there, as New Orleans is my witness.
Weyrich must live in some alternate bourgeois universe (which, perhaps, is Philadelphia Magazine's geographic target) to not see the issues.
In Weyrich's world, I'm guessing that every fetus matters - as long as it is white, doesn't have a predisposition to perpetuating welfare fraud, or isn't addicted to crack. This story was never about Latoyia by herself. It would have never been a story if the narrative was Latoyia missing by herself. It was a time-bound story about a missing pregnant woman, no more, no less. It was about one of those value voter issues - not the woman herself, not her ethnic heritage, not an indictment of her lifestyle, but about the baby that was growing in her womb.
No one but Latoyia's family seemed to care. After 8 days of her being missing, and virtually no media notice (while Natalee Holloway was 24X7 on cable news, apparently with some "lifestyle issues" of her own), I got pissed and blogged about it. So fucking sue me, already. Where were you, Noel?
Let's forget for a moment that the Philadelphia Magazine characterization of Figueroa's lifestyle is so far off the mark from the woman I grew to know, that Weyrich does no more than expose his/her own racial bias and whitebread view of the world. Was Weyrich at Latoyia's viewing and funeral at St. Peter's? I know it's a bit of a rough neighborhood, Noel, but I was there among the crowd to quietly pay my respects at the closed casket viewing, because I was so deeply affected.
To cast me as a blogger gadfly wallowing in the misery of another human being is to seriously demean me, and insult the efforts of everyone else who was committed to resolving Latoyia's case.
Weyrich concludes that "the cable news types know Dick Brain is clueless, but they can't count on anyone else knowing it". After reading Weyrich's article, it's quite apparent that there's at least one clueless person getting paid a lot of money to write race tinged drivel, without bothering to have the journalistic integrity or common decency toward the Figueroa family to actually research how the story developed.
At the end of the day, the media heat mattered. Everyone involved admits as much. Stephen Poaches never foresaw a minority woman from West Philly mattering to the police or the media. He was wrong. He got stupid. He got scared. He got caught. And if not for the attention that Latoyia's case received, she and her unborn baby would still be decompsing in an overgrown Chester, Pa. vacant lot.
I'm proud to have been a small part of a much larger effort to resolve Latoyia's case. I challenge Weyrich to stand face to face with Latoyia's dad or Coucilman Juan Ramos, as I did, and explain some of the assertations and implications in the article regarding Latoyia.
And the next time Noel Weyrich is looking to play "new media" against "old media", perhaps s/he should take a peek at Dahr Jamail's latest. I think Dahr's story rates a whole lot more ink than a mean spirited attempt at taking down a Philly blogger. "Hotel journalism", indeed.
(By the way, Weyrich, that's "Mr. Head" to you. How the hell did you get "dick brain" out of "Richard Cranium", anyway? Next time, I recommend consulting a PDR when attempting to identify body parts.)
/rant