Thanksgiving Suspends Chronicle’s Homeless-Bashing

by Randy Shaw, 2007-11-21

For 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.

It’s a two-decade old tradition: come Thanksgiving, the Chronicle starts trying to create reader sympathy for the Bay Area’s low-income residents. After spending the first eleven months of the year opposing laws to protect the poor, the Chronicle spends the last month seeking public donations to assist this vulnerable population.

This year the contrast should prove particularly striking. After using columnist Chuck Nevius to mount a vicious, homeless-bashing disinformation campaign disinformation campaign, now the Chronicle has to shift gears and try to get readers to feel sympathy for those less fortunate.

Since different writers with much different agendas write the Season of Sharing profiles, this is not as difficult as it sounds.

But whenever I read these often moving stories of low-income families living in overcrowded units, and of the struggles of low-wage workers, I cannot help but wonder why we only hear sympathetic accounts about these people between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The answer, of course, is that the Chronicle has opposed every tenant protection measure, and every local revenue-raising proposal, that could improve the lives of the Bay Area’s most vulnerable residents. So the last thing the paper wants to do is have year-round stories sympathetically portraying those who are victimized by the real estate and corporate interests whose advertising dollars fund the Chronicle.

The Chronicle apparently will never learn that every month should be a season of sharing, and that concern for even down and out Bay Area residents should not be only a one-month preoccupation.

Send feedback to rshaw@beyondchron.org