HuffPo: Beer Sniffing Reporters Invade Pine Ridge

[OmahaBlueDog]

By Tim Giago

When Tim Williams of The New York Times called me prior to his sojourn to Pine Ridge he asked if we could meet. I assured that we could. He told me when he would be out here and gave me a phone number, but when I called it he never answered and so we never met. The first thing I cautioned him about in our initial phone conversation was not to make the beer selling stores in Whiteclay, Neb., the focus of his visit. Needless to say, that is exactly what he did.

Like Ms. Sawyer, he made his visit to Whiteclay the centerpiece of his story. When Ms. Sawyer asked the Pine Ridge police chief, Rich Greenwald, about crime on the reservation, he replied that 80 percent of the people his officers arrested for traffic violations or other crimes were alcohol related. How did Ms. Sawyer report this comment? She said that 80 percent of the people living on the Pine Ridge Reservation were alcoholics. Say what? Didn't she hear what he really said or was she seeking some sort of sensationalism at the expense of the Lakota people of Pine Ridge?

Newman built his column on the fact that "Nicholas Kristof painted a heartbreaking picture" of the Pine Ridge Reservation. Yes he did, but he made Pine Ridge and Whiteclay synonymous with alcoholism. One is a community whose sole existence is selling beer and cheap wine to the residents of Pine Ridge and the other is a community with active programs struggling financially to combat alcoholism, a community with an extension of Oglala Lakota College in each district, a Boys and Girls Club actively working against crime, alcoholism and the deprivations of poverty, and also a community with four high schools such as Little Wound, Crazy Horse, Pine Ridge High School, and Red Cloud High School, that are working long and hard to stop the very problems caused by alcohol and poverty that the savvy reporters from New York failed to seek out.

Tony Newman was right when he wrote that prohibition is not the answer to curing alcoholism because it was tried nationally and only led to the birth and growth of organized crime. It also did not stop alcohol consumers from drinking.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-giago/beer-sniffing-reporters-i_b_1513111.html