‘I didn’t realize forces would line up to push me down’: ‘Seattle is Dying’ journalist reflects 7 years later

It’s been seven years since KOMO News anchor Eric Johnson released his explosive documentary “Seattle is Dying.”

Johnson told “The John Curley Show” on KIRO Newsradio the response to the special highlighting Seattle’s drug problem wasn’t what he expected.

“I thought when I presented this to the right and the left, to everybody, when I laid this out there, logically, that the world would say, ‘Oh, we get it now. Now we know how to attack this. Wow. Thank you. Here we go.’ I didn’t really realize that the forces would line up to push me down, to shut me up, to quell whatever this thing is that I had opened up,” he said.

Johnson was worried people would watch the special and say, “Duh, we already knew that.” But what happened was completely different.

“‘Seattle is Dying,’ blew up like an atom bomb. I mean, it was crazy,” he said.

And instead of taking a new approach to the homeless crisis, Seattle entities were furious with the documentary.

“They lined up against me,” Johnson said. “I mean, it was an outrage. The nonprofits were outraged. Seattle University came out with a big statement decrying how unfair I had been. KUOW and The Seattle Times all sort of coalesced into this movement to discredit, to suppress, to defeat, somehow, this idea that I had laid out there. And for a while, it was rough.”

Community shifts narrative surrounding ‘Seattle is Dying’

However, Johnson discovered the rush of anger was only from a select few, while the heart of Seattle turned the narrative.

“The shop owners, the business owners, the citizens, the hard-working people of Seattle, all took control of that narrative, and they turned it back, which I’ll be forever grateful for,” he said.

Johnson believes if city leaders had focused on helping people struggling with addiction instead of focusing on their image, a lot of people could have been saved.

“Think about the young people who became addicted in the first couple of years of their addiction, the last seven years. How many of them could we have reversed the course on? I think it would be a large number,” he said. “I think there are a number of people who could have been saved, and we’ll never know because they weren’t and aren’t being saved.”

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

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