Thanksgiving Suspends Chronicle’s Homeless-BashingRandy Shawbyline‚ Nov. 21‚ 2007For many, Thanksgiving marks the start of the Christmas shopping season. At the San Francisco Chronicle, turkey day means that the paper ceases drumming up public hostility toward homeless persons and starts reporting on the poor with dignity as part of its Season of Sharing Program. The pattern is repeated each year. From January through Thanksgiving, the Chronicle largely ignores single moms trying to keep their family housed, seniors facing speculator evictions from their longtime homes, or the struggles of African-American families to remain living in the Bay Area. But from Thanksgiving to Christmas, the Chronicle’s script changes. The Bay Area’s low-income and vulnerable residents are suddenly described in sympathetic terms, and their current plight is framed as a function of an unfair system, rather than of individual failure. |