A few hours after The New York Times was delivered Tuesday morning, Clark County Family Court Judge Gerald Hardcastle fielded calls for interviews from the Dr. Phil show and other media outlets. His personal story—as the father of a drug-troubled teenage daughter—had been featured in a Times series on Las Vegas.
He declined to appear on the pop psychologist's show. But he told the Weekly that he was hoping the Times article would be more about his commitment to his daughter, that it would serve to inspire others in a similar situation to be devoted to their children. Or that it would inspire some improvement in social services for children in Las Vegas. "It seems like I'm just complaining," he said.
In the article, Times writer Charles LeDuff notes that Hardcastle blames himself for his daughter's problems, "(B)ut he also blames the corrupting influence of Las Vegas, a city grown beyond belief and control."
Hardcastle is paraphrased as saying he came here with a dream 30 years ago and now "his dream is dead. 'I wouldn't come here again,' he said. 'I won't retire here. There's a lack of social control. The kids don't have dreams. I ask them, What do you want to be? They tell me nothing.'"
When asked whether he saw Hardcastle's troubled-teen situation as exclusive to Las Vegas in any way, LeDuff told the Weekly, "No. It's an American problem."
Why, then, was the judge's story cast in a series slugged "American Dreamers, The Lure of Las Vegas" as indicative of cultural woes specific to Vegas?
"I can't speak for my editors," said LeDuff.
Countless times the national media has sent their reporters to Vegas and published clichés about the underbelly of neon and dreams deferred, about matching suburbs and alienated souls. And there is probably a bit of truth in clichés. But shouldn't we expect something a little more thorough from the The New York Times? So what if they got the weapons of mass destruction thing wrong, the Jayson Blair thing, the Wen Ho Lee thing, etc. ... this is important. It's about Vegas. Sadly, The Times series, which started May 30 and continues through June 3, paints a woeful—and woefully predictable—image of Vegas.
With headlines such as "Seekers, Drawn to Las Vegas, Find a Broken Promised Land" (May 30), "Adolescents in Adult City: Often From Elsewhere, and Often Going Nowhere" (June 1), The Times has, in the first half of a six-part series, hit most of the down notes and offered little in the way of a fresh examination. The lead piece starts out at a Budget Suites and foreshadows the next few articles' dreams-deferred theme: "... (N)early 55,000 people gave up on their dream of living in Southern Nevada last year and moved elsewhere."
Through a broad use of allusion and cliché —here's how LeDuff describes the gated communities in Vegas: "The walls keep strangers out, but they were also built to keep children in, shielded from the neon hypnotism of the Strip"—The Times has gone the way of many a national media outlet: a simplistic downward glance at a city that has thus far evaded attempts to thoroughly characterize it.
Response to The Times series was as quick on the NYTimes.com on-line forum:
•Las Vegas cliché. This story is so skewed and blinkered it is ridiculous. It is one story to tell, perhaps. But it's an old one, and what is really going on in this city is much more complex. If the writer had driven even two miles east of that Budget Suites, this complexity would have become apparent.
•The article is **all wrong** There certainly are some people in Las Vegas like those described in the article, as there are in any big city. Losers, down on their lucks, greedy, ne'er-do-wells. On the whole, however, people in Las Vegas work very hard, are skilled, are friendly, are successful.
• I certainly have negative feelings towards the city about many things, but at the same time, I feel that this series is completely imbalanced.
• Blaming any of that on Las Vegas is ridiculous. The blame rests solely on that poor child's dysfunctional parents.
For his part in the series, Hardcastle said, "I was hoping there could be some kind of a lesson. It's about being committed to your children. I was hoping people could read it and say, 'If he could go through it [trouble raising a teenager] and survive it, then maybe I can, too. That's the story I wanted. The article seemed to be a shred of truth that is taken quite a ways down the road. It didn't come out that way quite clearly. But there's nothing that's an absolute distortion, though. Charlie told me 'You're not going to like what I write.' And I respect Charlie. And he's a Pulitzer Prize winner.
"They [The Times] had a little agenda, sure they did … I'm not concerned with The New York Times' agenda, The New York Times is down on Las Vegas," Hardcastle said. "The great thing about Las Vegas is the reality that this town pulls together …
"It's not really about blaming our city. I think it's probably difficult to raise kids in Los Angeles; I think it's probably difficult to raise kids in New York. But I think Las Vegas is capable of doing better. People say it's true everywhere, but my feeling is we're on the top of all the 'bad' lists … What we're going to have to do is support a lot of services (such as) mental health programs. We're going to have to try harder."
A lot of that kind of conversation about the future didn't make it into the story, Hardcastle said. "Another thing I talked about with Charlie that didn't come across is that there is a problem with the national media—not the newspapers, (teenagers) don't read newspapers—but records, music, movies, radio—how they portray things. Let's just say it's not Mozart. It's how they reflect who girls and women are. On TV, I'm hard-pressed to find a show that my mother would've let me watch growing up. It's so pervasive."
It is. And Vegas does have problems. And Hardcastle's tale is a compelling story that speaks to many more universal truths.
But it's not a Vegas story, per se.