Jamie Dimon's Daughter Doubts Anyone Has Heard of Flint, Michigan
A headline on a recent PolicyMic story reads: "This is America's Most Apocalyptic, Violent City — And You've Probably Never Heard Of It." That city would be Flint, Michigan. The story's author: Jamie Dimon's daughter.
Now, we are not implying that children should suffer the sins of their fathers. The fact that Laura Dimon's father is the chairman of JPMorgan Chase and arguably bears significant responsibility for some of the biggest acts of malfeasance in Wall Street history does not disqualify Laura Dimon (Columbia Journalism School '13) from pursuing a career in journalism. It helps, in fact, since she has a cushion to fall back on when trying to cobble together a living in journalism. And the fact that Laura Dimon is working for PolicyMic rather than, you know, interning for Andrew Ross Sorkin implies a lesser amount of nepotism in her life than might be expected.
But it is reasonable to expect Laura Dimon to be aware of both her place in the world, and of the general state of the world at large. With that in mind, let's very briefly examine the problems with this story:
1. The headline "This is America's Most Apocalyptic, Violent City — And You've Probably Never Heard Of It" implies that you, the average reader, have probably never heard of Flint, Michigan, even though Flint, Michigan is, famously the birthplace of General Motors (a company for which Jamie Dimon's bank managed an IPO in 2010) and Michael Moore made that movie about it 25 years ago. We venture to guess that it might be more accurate to say that Laura Dimon had probably never heard of Flint, Michigan prior to the writing of this story.
2. Though the story primarily consists of ruin porn photos of Flint, Michigan, several of the photos in the story were not, in fact, photos of Flint, Michigan. One, for example, was a photo taken in Israel.
There's also the matter of this other Laura Dimon story, "The 6 Most Notorious Criminals Of 2013 Aren't Facing the Justice They Deserve," which—despite purporting to feature The 6 Most Notorious Criminals Of 2013—does not feature Jamie Dimon.
Media bias at work?