More than 1,200 shares later, Northern New Yorkers are clearly paying attention. The question is why so much of the local mainstream media apparently isn’t.
Print, camera, microphone, take your pick. Kingston is practically in our backyard. We can literally look across the river at Canada, and a convicted murderer serving a life sentence walked away from Collins Bay Institution on September 24 and has now been missing for five days.
So here is the obvious Northern New York question: has anyone determined whether he could have crossed the St. Lawrence River and entered the United States?
That is not hysteria. That is basic geography and basic journalism.
Yet some of the local radio news personalities and other traditional media outlets apparently think an arbitrary international line running down the St. Lawrence River is reason enough to stop paying attention. Give somebody a printing press, microphone or news camera and somehow we still end up hearing plenty of absolute bullshit while a potentially important public-safety story sits right across the river.
The Watertown Post put this story on Facebook last week with a link to our website. It has now generated more than 1,200 shares. Think about that. More than 1,200 people thought this story was important enough to pass along to somebody else. That is an extraordinary response for a Northern New York news story, and it tells us something very clearly: Northern New Yorkers want answers.
Meanwhile, much of the local media seems oblivious.
If Canadian authorities have not located this guy after five days, asking whether he might have crossed into the United States is simply the next logical question. Maybe he is still somewhere in Canada. Maybe he crossed the river. Maybe authorities already have information that rules that out. Great. Then tell the public.
These are the questions news organizations in a border community should be asking before something happens, not afterward when everybody suddenly races to a microphone and announces they have “breaking news.”
Go to Canada and turn on the news sometime. They talk about the United States constantly because what happens across the border matters to them. Apparently some Northern New York media organizations haven’t figured out that geography works both ways.
And here’s another little irony: Canadians cannot even access Watertown Post news links on Facebook because of Canada’s restrictions on news content, while other kinds of local content remain readily available. Yet our readers on the American side are sharing this story by the thousands.
That tells us where the interest is.
Fortunately, the Watertown Post still has its finger in the air, paying attention to what is happening around us instead of pretending the St. Lawrence River is the edge of the known universe.
American patriots deserve to know what is happening right across the river.
It isn’t another planet.
It’s right there.
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