I wasn’t just parachuting in for a couple of days and then leaving. And because I had grown up nearby, my roots in the area ran deep. I’d been a reporter for and the top editor of the local newspaper, the Buffalo News. I knew firsthand about the shuttered steel mills of my home town, the small city of Lackawanna. I knew that 2 in 5 children in the city of Buffalo live in poverty. And I knew that while the cities of western New York — Buffalo and Niagara Falls — had voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, the outskirts are as red as an old-school Starbucks holiday cup. Like many counties nationwide, Niagara County had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 but had flipped to Trump in 2016. (While the cities have a substantial minority population, the suburbs and rural areas are predominantly white.)
[Why I started saying ‘reality-based press’ in 2017, instead of ‘mainstream media’]
Just as Hastings suggested, I would go to diners, flea markets and pizza joints. I’d pull up a bar stool at the irresistibly named Paulette’s Blue Collar Inn. I would shop at Dick’s Sporting Goods, with its large gun department. I’d go to Mass at Most Precious Blood Church. And I would listen.
