I hope all those who insist that this newspaper never misses an opportunity to portray certain people from certain areas of the county in a negative light noticed yesterday's front page.
It featured a major drug bust.
Not in Chester. Or Collingdale. Or Darby. Or Marcus Hook.
This one happened on the Main Line.
And it involved young people from some of the best schools in the region. The two ringleaders were graduates of the prestigious Haverford School, where they starred on the lacrosse team.
Some of their "employees," according to police, were pushing pot and other stuff in Radnor, Conestoga, Lower Merion and Harriton high schools.
They also had folks in local colleges, including Lafayette, Haverford and Gettysburg.
As we often do when we have an arrest that features a large group of people, we displayed their faces on our front page.
Usually this is met with complaints that we are picking on minorities and disadvantaged people.
Inevitably someone will call me and complain that we always portray minorities in this fashion, but when it involves a non-minority, it goes not get the same treatment.
They say we routinely try to 'hide' those stories inside the paper.
I offer yesterday's front page as Exhibit A in my argument against that accusation.
Funny, I didn't receive one call about it yesterday.
Comments
Rates of drug use are just about identical in Black and white communities - that should be reflected in policing and media coverage.