Reporting the Maine news, the stories that make the front page.

The ones that could have, should have been parked a few pages inside. Online or print, take your pick. The degree of negative, crime reported news when you live in the 4th lowest state for wrong doings can be shocking. And a brand new reader that picks up some newsprint can conclude that Maine is like most other places. It is not.

Maybe the front loading of sad face news happens because it is a big deal for something bad to happen. Not common place. Possible it is watching too many cop shows, poor reality television fare. Or if there was an uphappy editor who liked causing depression, lack of hope was in charge of the latest edition print run.

Fueling the fire of negativity. Pouring on the AV gas.

We’re not talking happy news should always be front and center to just make you and me feel warm and fuzzy all over. Not wearing permanently a-fixed rosy colored glasses round the clock. No one’s head buried in the sand. It’s the tone of the reporting, sometimes the agenda behind it that needs adjustment. It’s the degree of pile on the worst you can find on the front page that is disturbing.

There is plenty of good news unfolding, being done no matter where you live on the planet. But the steady diet of gloom and doom can cause despair. Tend to make one cynical, to begin to look for the worse, not the best. Or to shut down the fire in your belly for where you live now in Maine. To wet blanket the blaze of passion that drives, motivates. Makes life worthwhile and for all of us to do our part for the greater good. When our feet hit the floor each morning. Reach for a fresh coffee. The local Maine news.

True Mainers are resilient, resolute, determined to survive and rise above economic, weather, life situations that swirl and whirl around all of us.

It makes us dig in, causes an attitude to make what we are lucky to have be more than enough to do the job. To rise to the occasion and be grateful, feel truly blessed. And challenges all of us to be highly creative, resourceful. Not to wallow, whine, moan and groan. Roll over and play dead.

Ever picked up and scanned a printed Maine media publication. After after the front page up and down, side to side, to peek at what follows it? To feel a wonderment of why did they take that position? Why the placement, front loading of every bad thing the editor could find on top? And how come so many areas that could contributed to the collection of column inches did not make it in black, white, color? To stay dark, mum’s the word.

I worked as a broadcast journalist many moons ago at a Bangor outlet and thought of the diet I was creating for the other end of the media stream signal.

To try to give them a balanced array of Maine news with easy on the opinion, forget the fiction or the need to entertain. No candy coating it. But no spoon feeding or shock and awe terrify for a default mode reached for either.

Just try to make the national news happenings apply to the local Maine market. Or point out how different rural Maine is to the urban areas where eight out of ten people have to live. Like it or not. With additional information gathered and reported on with a home grown approach to “that’s the way it is” each Maine broadcast day. But underneath it all a sense of pride shines through. For being lucky to live in Maine, to make sure to remind all of us why we live here and how vastly different it is in Vacationland. To root for the home team and know the differences of being here, compared with the urban landscape of moving and shaking.

It is a time of unrest, unhappiness and pressure building in the country like a pressure cooker.

Lots of folks living outside are not happy and want to get to Maine, the way life should be. Hear it daily in my Maine real estate job. With the gauge pinning, bending in two in the frustrating critical red zone. In the time of increasing pressure from outside news sources to assume the crime of the city exists to the same degree in rural Maine, everywhere.

It is short sighted, limited to report only what squawks on the police scanner channel in our few Maine cities. Amplifying it to add color, and the sharp edged approach in Law and Order reruns. (Jimmy, cue the “Dum Dum” signature sound from the show) Or piling on so much negative news that it makes one wonder is there anything positive happening in the Pine Tree State? Yes, yes there is. Rise up Maine post bloggers. Maybe it is another reason newspapers are getting thinner and thinner. Supporting crippling, nasty editorial sections with hard earned Maine advertising dollars part of the problem.

I’m Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers, ME Broker
207.532.6573
info@mooersrealty.com