Joe Austin Taking The Train

Many books, magazines, newspapers and so on influence the way people think and alter reality in either a negative or a positive way. The New York Times is one of the many newspapers that make people think in a different way than what reality really is or make things seem like something that it really isn’t. In Taking the Train by Joe Austin, the New York Times helped to produce the framing story of “the war on graffiti”. They did this by publishing stories about graffiti and writers that were not what it seemed to be and using these stories to make New Yorkers think that graffiti was the cause of many of the city’s problems. The New York Times published articles blaming writers and graffiti for the subway “crisis” and making out the writers

However, according to Joe Austin in Taking the Train, they are making this accusation in a city where unemployment for youths between the ages of 16 and 19 was very high, about 33 buildings were burning a day in the Bronx, poverty levels were high, dropout rates for colored youths was over 75 percent and many other problems was going on in the city. So, how could the appearance and young vandals doing graffiti be the primary cause of the city’s sadness? According to Joe Austin, on page 44 of Taking the Train “the Times encouraged its readers to ignore the more glaring (and more frightening) causes of the structural and political fault lines in the city’s social order.” This shows that the Times didn’t focus on the bigger issues in the city that were really the cause of the city’s sadness and hopelessness, rather they focused on the young vandals and graffiti. This caused many New Yorkers to also focus on the same thing and not the bigger issues that were causing the city’s