To the Editor:
Florida is not immune to propaganda, it seems. And in the case of The Villages it resides on two extremes.
At one extreme are WVLG Radio and The Villages Daily Sun. I’ve heard the term “relentless positivity” applied to both of them and it does seem to be an appropriate label. I do enjoy listening to WVLG — great music brought to us by some great on-air personalities — but a steady diet of sunshine, brotherhood and and touting the GORGEOUS homes for sale does tend to get a little old. The Daily Sun does make an effort to print some actual news, but anything related to The Villages is going to have about the same flavor as what is delivered by WVLG. Sunshine, cute stories about this-or-that Villager, etc. “Where never is heard a discouraging word” (about The Villages, anyway) seems to describe the Daily Sun quite well.
On the other extreme resides Villages-News.com, and to a lesser negative extent, the discussions to be found on Talk of The Villages. Where WVLG and The Sun is nothing but positive, the stuff coming from Villages-News.com on the other hand is overwhelmingly negative. The one prints uplifting stories about golfers in America’s Friendliest Hometown, while the other provides us with a never-ending diet of drunks, people whizzing in the median and petty arguments more suited to adolescents than to (one assumes) mature adults. Talk Of The Villages is sort of Villages-News.com Lite: There are some discussions about service providers and other vanilla-type things, but there also plenty of curmudgeonly old codgers who seem bent on making everyone else taking part in those discussions as miserable as they are. One gets the distinct feeling that, if the Talk Of The Villages thought police weren’t so vigilant and unbending about just what gets talked about and how, the place would be indistinguishable from Villages-News in about a week.
There is always a difference between what we read and hear, and what we see. In this case, the difference is stark. Villagers are NOT overwhelmingly randy, crabby old drunks and rabble-rousers, nor are they overwhelmingly cute little old people who crochet, take walks in idyllic settings and discuss their grandchildren. The truth is somewhere in the middle.
Maybe if media serving The Villages were a bit more realistic, rather than simply catering to an extreme, we’d be seeing more of that middle. But that would take factual, objective reporting, something that seems in short supply these days.
Palmer Amaranth
Village Alhambra
