Another “this would have been a thread of tweets and briefly was until I realized all the cutting and pasting I’d have to do”.
People should lay off Plohetski for his in the minute conflation of houses with homes during the Cedar Park fire’s initial stages last night; but don’t forget later on that every local journalist does the same thing even when NOT under this time pressure to get information out; they have a huge mental blind spot about this stuff as an industry. Only suburban homeowners are real to them.
Compare how much airtime and the depth of coverage they give transit versus cars (hours on issues with toll tag payments, two minutes repeating Capital Metro PR on the billions of dollars rail plan); or renter issues to homeowner issues, despite the fact that the median Austin resident now rents! It’s an obvious blind spot, despite the fact that at least some of those same journalists actually rent apartments!
Hell the typical thing they put on the air that they think is essential local journalism is “this new strip mall opened up forty miles from downtown” and/or “look at all the traffic here forty miles from downtown”.
(Even KXAN, which should be better about this given their central location, gives this 40% of Austin about 90% of their brainpower; the others are even worse).
Local journalists don’t think apartments count as homes
