Know of What You Type

Joining the National Symphony Orchestra this week is one of my favorite soloists, Baltimore-born violinist Hilary Hahn...

Um, well, no, actually she wasn’t. Never mind that being bred, born or raised in Baltimore is no more contextually relevant to a D.C. media outlet than being bred, born or raised in Seattle or Timbuktu, what is it about about Baltimore that causes Washingtonians to turn off their internal fact-checkers? Why is it that they are lazier about Baltimorean facts than they are either with their own market or markets with which they don’t presume to have an association?

Trust me, I’m no classical music expert. I’ve never heard of Hilary Hahn. But I do know how to read the first words in a biographical sketch. So when I looked up her bio, all of her bios, in fact, in every available online media source, from her personal web page to wikipedia, I was actually a little surprised to see that they all started with these words: “Hilary Hahn (born November 27, 1979 in Lexington, Virginia) is an American violinist,” or some other introductory equivalent. She didn’t move to Baltimore until she was three years old. Three years is a long time. Three years is probably longer than the time the average DCist contributor has spent in Washington D.C.

I have no doubt that if Charles Downey had been writing about someone from Washington, he would have double checked before saying he or she was Washington born. If such-and-such was from Pittsburgh, and for some reason Charles Downey felt the need to mention that, I’m sure he would have double checked as well. But, for whatever reason, when the word ‘Baltimore’ pops into the head of a Washingtonian, something clicks in their brains that tells them they already know everything, and that fact checking is unnecessary.

And to be fair, it isn’t just DCist. Even the Washington Post fucks up all the facts when writing an article that has something/anything to do with Baltimore, and the Washington Post is probably the newspaper in this world that is least likely to bugger up facts, in their own market and the national and international markets as well. It’s as though they have two separate fact checking departments, local and not-local. When an article about Baltimore is being written, nobody can decide which department is responsible and nobody ends up checking that facts. Of course, I’m sure that isn’t the cause, and it’s just a simple matter of people thinking they know what they are talking about when they in fact don’t know shit.

Not knowing shit is not the end of the world. I personally don’t know shit about a great many things in this world; but not knowing shit and thinking you know everything is a pretty revolting and obnoxious character trait, which probably is what makes is it so distinctly Washingtonian... at least in relation to its neighbor to the north. So Washington, do yourselves a favor, when you write about us just check your facts. Pretend we’re Portland. Trust me, you know as much about Portland as you know about us.