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Littlejohn Leaves Las Vegas:
The Reporting on Las Vegas Course
By Marni Wahler
Glittering, smoke-filled casinos spilling out along the pavement, women clad in sequins and feathers, busloads of senior citizens clutching styrofoam cups of quarters, polyester-clad dreamers with a cocktail in one hand and a pinkie ring on the other, and endless yards of red carpeting that beckon visitors to a world that never sleeps. This is how most of us envision Las Vegas-the strip. But Professor David Littlejohn and fifteen journalism students wanted to get beyond this periscope view of the city and set out last fall to find the real Las Vegas.
Littlejohn had envisioned a course that would enable students to report outside the Bay Area, as had other classes that traveled to Cuba and Mexico. "I very much wanted to do something like that in my domain, which is essentially California and the western United States, but focus on the cultural, rather than the political, fields," said Littlejohn. "There was only one obvious possibility, one city that we can easily get to and that provided hundreds of possible stories that haven't been told before."
Their journey led them to outposts often overlooked by the media and inhabited by suicidal teenagers, the homeless, Latino laborers, marginalized blacks, frenzied policemen, and senior citizens. A year of reporting and three trips to the Nevada desert introduced them firsthand to the social problems plaguing the fastest growing city in the West. Their essays now serve as chapters in a book that Littlejohn is editing for possible publication.
Las Vegas proved to be a very depressing city, said Littlejohn, largely because of its number one industry. "The gambling mentality totally infuses the city from every respect, down to how teenagers behave," said Littlejohn.
"Marie Sanchez's chapter on the teenagers is the most depressing one of all. She talked with hundreds of them, and they're all on a suicidal course," he said. "[W]e all went down and found this kind of story in our different ways, no matter what we were writing about."
Michael Stroh, who reported on gambling addiction, found that Las Vegas' urban problems are not unique, except in their origins. Few U.S. cities can link so many problems to the gambling industry.
But, said Stroh, "that's what the city is known for. Of course, we've been lucky enough to look behind the mirage. But most people, that's all they know. That's how the media portrays Las Vegas, and there's been nothing else to tell them different."
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