I watched an interesting show Friday night. Louisville's own Diane Sawyer hosted a documentary titled "Children Of The Mountain." She visited different families down in the Appalachia Mountain area of Kentucky. The main theme of the show was to show America how they live down in the coal mining part of the state. Most of the people she talked with lived in poverty, and talked about being addicted to prescription narcotics - one teenage boy even lived in his small truck in an attempt to get away from the drug abuse in his home. And in case you're wondering, most of the people they showed on the documentary had multiple teeth missing.
I'm familiar with that part of the state - I know that people in that area do in deed live in poverty and don't take care of their teeth, and I know that drug use is rampant, but one thing about the TV show really upset me and got me all riled up. When the people Diane Sawyer was interviewing would talk, they showed subtitles at the bottom of the TV screen, as if they were speaking in a foreign language none of the American TV viewers could understand.
I'm the first to admit that I do have an accent, as did the people Diane Sawyer interviewed, but the TV viewers hardly needed subtitles in order to figure out what they were saying. Sure, they talked with a twang, but ABC made it appear like they were speaking in Swahili. I ranted and raved about this all day long, and one co-worker said that when she was dealing with people from Boston in a previous job, she could barely understand them. Having worked in customer service for twelve long years, I've encountered some people in New England and in New York City that had stronger accents then the people on the documentary. And it's a safe bet that if Diane Sawyer had been in Boston, Mass doing a similar documentary about Bostonians, you know damed good and well ABC wouldn't have had subtitles for them.
At least Diane Sawyer didn't call the Appalachian Mountain people hillbillies, even though they do in deed come from the hills.
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I used to have a BIL that I could never understand. He was from Southern, MD, lol. I used to ask him to repeat himself and then would be too embarrassed to admit I still did not understand him, lol.
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