A fair shake from the provincial and national news media when it comes to covering news from Prince George - the city, not the baby prince - would sure be nice.
It's not their job to extol Prince George's numerous virtues, nor is it their role to convince others Prince George is a great place to live and work, but it is their responsibility to report fairly and accurately while not perpetuating inaccurate stereotypes.
Unfortunately, our news colleagues in Toronto and Vancouver weren't up to the challenge when describing Prince George the city to their readers this week.
The Citizen has an informal story-sharing arrangement with the Vancouver Sun and The Province. We're happy to provide them stories and photos of important breaking stories from Prince George and, in exchange, they are more than willing to share their work that has interest to Prince George readers.
Part of that arrangement, however, is that they are free to edit the stories we send them. Vice versa, we have the same privilege.
Sadly, editors at the Sun took Citizen reporter Charelle Evelyn's story Wednesday featuring local reaction to the news that the new royal baby will be known as Prince George and did some funky editing to it and then put the following headline on it: 'Musty, lifeless' Prince George celebrates royal baby. Underneath was a secondary headline that read: B.C. city loves the name, Abbotsford-Mission MLA Simon Gibson not so much.
Gibson was featured at the end of Evelyn's story in The Citizen on Thursday. The former Abbotsford city councillor wrote a letter to Prince George city council last year, urging the city to change its name to something else, because its current name is "musty, old-fashioned and lifeless" and people in his neck of the woods keep confusing it with Prince Rupert.
The Sun, however, moved Gibson to the top of the story, which didn't make sense because Gibson declined to comment on what he now thought of the name Prince George when contacted by Evelyn on Wednesday.
As of Thursday afternoon, the story was the second most-read story on the Sun's website. While Evelyn's story now reads as a jab to MLA Gibson, the headline cheerfully confirms the belief Gibson and most people in the Lower Mainland have that the province beyond Hope is nothing but wilderness and inhabited by desperate rednecks scratching out a living in the resource sector.
With the exception of Gord Hoekstra, a former Citizen reporter who now works at the Sun, it's a safe bet that if the members of the Sun newsroom was presented with a blank map of B.C. and were asked to point where Prince George is on it, the majority of their fingers would land somewhere between Fort St. John and Fort Nelson.
The view of Prince George from Toronto is just as bad.
The Globe and Mail's story on Prince George the city and Prince George the baby was accompanied by a photo of a Canfor pulp mill and the online reader comments asked why Will and Kate would take their child to such a wretched place. Over at the National Post, a picture of a huge stack of timber accompanied their story, with an explanation that Prince George is "a logging community about a 9-hour north of Vancouver."
For fun, The Citizen should include a sentence on all Toronto stories we run that reads "Toronto, known as Hogtown for its pork-processing facilities and its red-faced belligerent mayor, is about a five-hour drive southwest of Ottawa" and then include a mugshot of the huffing-and-puffing Mayor Rob Ford.
Hey, it's factually correct.
But we have never let the scorn and ignorance of the big-city slickers hold us back before, nor should we start. What Prince George is really about is the cradle currently sitting in the foyer at City Hall. Residents are being asked to fill it with extra toys that will then be distributed through local charities to needy families.
Let's fill that cradle 20 times over and prove once more, at least to ourselves, that Prince George the city is as deserving of fairness and respect as His Royal Highness.
