Seven Years Later, Eric Johnson Still Standing by 'Seattle is Dying': "They Tried to Ruin Me for It"
It's been seven years since KOMO News anchor Eric Johnson dropped "Seattle is Dying" on the city, and he's still processing what came next. In a sit-down with The John Curley Show on KIRO Newsradio, Johnson reflected on the firestorm that followed his explosive documentary about Seattle's drug crisis, and he's not mincing words about the backlash. "They tried to ruin me for it," he said bluntly.
What Johnson Expected vs. What Actually Happened
Here's the thing: Johnson thought the documentary would unite people. "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.
Instead of the rational debate he expected, "Seattle is Dying" exploded. "Blew up like an atom bomb. I mean, it was crazy," Johnson told Curley. And the response from Seattle's power players was swift and fierce. "They lined up against me," he said. "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."
The Real Seattle Stepped Up
But here's where Johnson's story takes a turn. While the institutions came down hard, everyday Seattle had his back. "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 stands by the core message of his documentary: the crisis he covered was fundamentally about drugs, not primarily housing. And he believes if city leadership had focused on helping people struggling with addiction instead of protecting their image, Seattle could have saved far more people over the past seven years. "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. 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."
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This article was created with AI assistance and reviewed by Seattle On Tap editorial staff. Always verify information with official team sources.