Eastern Kentuckians mixed on '20/20' report

APPALACHIA'S STORY A HARD ONE TO TELL

By Mary Meehan and Rich Copley - mmeehan1@herald-leader.com

When Eastern Kentuckians watched Diane Sawyer's 20/20 report about children and poverty in Appalachia on Friday, many felt as if they had seen the show before.

For some, legions of whom shared their ire on online discussion boards and by word of mouth, it was because the 20/20 special report seemed to touch on the worst stereotypes of mountain people as missing teeth, being mired in hopeless poverty and strung out on drugs.

For others, there was a sense of déjà vu because the ABC News program put a national spotlight on the harsh existence that festers when rampant drug addiction escalates the already substantial struggle of the poorest of the poor.

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Appalachia will get another national TV close-up in April, when PBS stations air Appalachia, a four-part documentary produced by Oregon Public Television.
"We wanted to tell the story of Appalachia that hasn't been told," said Jamie Ross, producer of the four-part series, which begins locally at 10 p.m. April 9 on Kentucky Educational Television.
Ross said the PBS series will be an environmental history of Appalachia, starting in the prehistoric era and taking the viewer through to modern Appalachia. It will also get into economic issues. "Poverty has a lot to do with how we treat the land and resources," Ross said.
Working on the series, Ross said, "Appalachian people tend to be very hospitable. We were always welcomed and enjoyed our time there.
"I think that's why they get resentful. They open themselves up to you, and then they don't like the picture they see."
RICH COPLEY

"It's hard not to look at that program and think about 50 years of reporting on Appalachia," said Art Menius, director of Appalshop, an arts and education center in Whitesburg that has produced more than 100 films about Appalachia. "The stories that get all of the attention are the ones that the producers think have the greatest reach in terms of pulling heartstrings, and it misses a whole lot of what's going on."

Hazard Mayor Bill Gorman was more blunt in his assessment of the report, titled A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains, in which he briefly appeared.

"The same load of crap they've been doing for 40 years," he said.

A steady succession of unflattering pop culture and news portrayals of mountain people have made Eastern Kentuckians sensitive to the way they are portrayed. But with Kentucky native Sawyer, born in Glasgow and raised in Louisville, anchoring the report, viewers said they were hoping for a more sympathetic portrayal.

"I was hoping for a fair and complex look at Appalachia," said author Silas House, who lives in Lily. "She did a beautiful job introducing it, stating she was a Kentuckian and that Americans had these stereotypes and she hoped they would dismiss those stereotypes and look at the complexity of the issues."

But House said he thought the program failed ultimately because of some of its content and that "it was trying to do too much."

Plenty of people saw Children of the Mountains. It was the top-rated prime-time program Friday, attracting 10.9 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research. It was the biggest 20/20 audience since 2004.

The Herald-Leader contacted ABC News for comment, but Sawyer and the report's producers were not available.

Sawyer told The Associated Press before the report aired that she and her crew drove more than 14,000 miles in two years to make the documentary, which focused on the stories of Central Appalachian children struggling with poverty and other issues. "Very few people make their way up into the hills and the hollows and the shadows to look at these lives," Sawyer told the AP. "It's not easy to get there."

A difficult story to tell

It's also hard to tell the story of a life, much less a complicated life, in the space of a television show, said Jim Matney, a coach at Johnson Central High School in Paintsville, where Shawn Grim, one of the young people featured in the program, was a football standout.

Grim, of Flat Gap, was portrayed as a hard-working boy from a tough background trying to do better. As shown on 20/20, he ultimately got a scholarship to Pikeville College, but dropped out after eight weeks.

"I think that ABC didn't mean to offend anyone," Matney said. "They had a very difficult job of telling this story of a young man who worked hard to break free of a very bad and dysfunctional situation."

Matney is concerned, he said, that the show made it appear that Grim did not have the support of the community. Many people tried to help the young man, he said. Many doors were open but Grim, for a variety of reasons, wasn't always able to walk through them. Although he was shown living in his truck, Grim had families willing to take him in, said Matney, who has received hundreds of offers of help for Grim since the program aired.

But, he said, the report accurately represented the ravages of the toxic mix of poverty and drug addiction. "I think it is even worse than what was portrayed," he said. "We are fighting for our lives."