'Dateline' show draws positive, negative attention

Outside offers to help area food pantries have seen a sharp uptick since NBC broadcast a “Dateline” feature Sunday evening that shed a spotlight on growing poverty and hunger in southeast Ohio.

In spite of this, however, the gripping images and interviews, most of them from rural Athens County, did not convince everyone of the severity of the problem.

As of last night, more than 600 comments could be found on the related webcast of the “Dateline NBC” hour-long program Sunday evening. Many of them expressed skepticism and ridicule about the program’s poor subjects, though others expressed dismay that things could be so bad in southeast Ohio, and wondered how they could help.

During this inaugural program in Dateline’s “America Now: Friends & Neighbors” series, veteran NBC reporter Ann Curry and her production team focused on several poor families, as well as Lisa Roberts and the Friends and Neighbors Community Choice Food Center that she runs in Lottridge, a small village southeast of Athens. The program showed an alarming increase in the number of area residents resorting to food pantries.

Roberts got a lot of the screen time in the program, which followed her management of the food center over a several-month period.

Online posts from users such as “ratsplat” seemed to echo the complaints of many viewers of the hour-long documentary. Many criticized some of the featured poor for being overweight, wearing jewelry, having babies out of wedlock and doing things such as smoking cigarettes and drinking soda pop.

“…The story was trying to convince us that these people are suffering, but we see smoking cigs, fake nails, gold chains, irresponsible teens living off the system by using their children as food stamps, dirty children (how hard is it to wipe a face clean), kids playing with pistols, etc,” “ratsplat” wrote.

But Roberts said earlier this week that she doesn’t have time to listen to the critics, because she has mouths to feed.

“You can’t let it sink into your heart or it will pull you down. I try to focus on how just as many people come to me and make positive comments,” she said.

Roberts said that when it comes to poverty, many who are not poor tend to think of how they would handle the situation, because it is easier to scrutinize a person than sympathize with what he or she is going through.

“There was something that said that (one of the interviewed) had a gold necklace on; it’s a family heirloom. It’s all he had left; he’s lost all of his items,” she explained. “It’s true that he’s gone hungry for a lot of times, but he’s kept that necklace.”

After watching news coverage like this, some people tend to focus on the negative, Roberts said.

“What surprises me is that people choose to focus on whatever negative they can find. That surprises me,” she said. “Of everything that was shown to them? Of all the things that I said, and all the things that was said to them? Is that all they’re going to take away from it is somebody has a necklace, somebody is smoking a cigarette, and somebody has their fingernails painted? Shame on them; they’re focusing on the wrong thing.”

ONE OF THE LOCAL people whose appearance on the program triggered some online attacks was Crystal McCoy of The Plains, unmarried mother of children aged 1, 3 and 4.

McCoy – who called being part of the “Dateline” show “a great experience” – came in for some specific, nasty online comments, which she said made her angry to read.

“Some of them were nice, but the ones that were mean, it kind of pissed me off quite a bit,” she said Monday. “I even wrote back to some of them.”

As a 22-year-old unmarried woman who dropped out of high school after getting pregnant her junior year, McCoy may have seemed an easy target.

“Because I’m a single mother, with three babies, I guess people didn’t like that very much,” she speculated. “And I think what I said about (birth control) upset some people, because I said, ‘Accidents happen.’ And they do. That obviously didn’t go over so well.”

McCoy noted, however, that her current situation in life isn’t all of her own making. She said her family was the victim of a house fire, which left her in the hospital for a couple of months. Now, having run through her 36 months of cash assistance welfare benefits, she receives food stamps and medical coverage for her children, but has zero income.

“I hate to say it, but I bum off my dad and my grandma,” she said. “But if I don’t pay my $300 electric bill by the end of this month, my power gets shut off.” Asked her plans for the future, she said, “Right now I’m just going to go day by day, I guess.”

THE GOOD NEWS about the show, according to Roberts of the Food Pantry, is that supportive cards and calls have been arriving from citizens across the nation. Many of the people want to help. Also, she said, the featured families have been offered both jobs and places to live since the show’s airing.

In addition, things may be looking up on national level for those who stand in food lines at Friends and Neighbors. During the episode, Roberts collects paper plates from food center patrons with handwritten pleas for help. After she had collected hundreds of them, she sent them to the White House.

Recently, she said she received notification that the plates had arrived at Barack Obama’s presidential mailroom.

“I know that he’s (Obama’s) really busy and that he doesn’t have to call me,” she said. “I just sincerely hope that he will look at those plates and read them. Every one of those plates is a person.”

The Southeastern Ohio Regional Food Center, the food bank the serves Friends and Neighbors and 149 other pantries and soup kitchens in 10 counties, has also seen an increase in interested donors since the “Dateline” program ran, confirmed director Dick Stevens.

“We’ve been getting a variety of calls and e-mails since they saw the feature,” he said. “Yes, we anticipate that kind of response from people who really care about the needs of people. Seems like that’s something that’s always been the case of people seeing a need and trying to respond to it in any way they can.

Jack Frech, director of Athens County Job and Family Services, said what he hopes viewers of the program take away is an understanding of how government safety nets, such as the food-stamp program, are not always enough.

Frech said that it’s a “huge tragedy” that some people who have worked all of their lives have wound up standing in food lines in this area. He also said that he hopes those posting negative responses to the broadcast online consider a few factors before passing judgment.

“A lot of these folks absolutely make terrible decisions,” he said. “Nobody should smoke cigarettes; they aren’t healthy for anybody. And all of those things are choices and may very well be bad choices at the time. But the question is, just because you make bad choices does that mean your children have to go hungry?”