The essence of propaganda,” says French sociologist Jacques Ellul, “is indignation.”
I was reminded of this by KOMO’s recent hit piece on homelessness, provocatively titled “Seattle Is Dying.”
Narrated in an ominous voiceover that is now familiar from a generation of political attack ads, the one-hour special from Anchor Eric Johnson tells us Seattle is “a beautiful jewel that has been violated.” We hear that homeless people “pollute our parks and neighborhoods,” and that “rot and filth” is “being allowed to fester” in Seattle’s “post-apocalyptic landscape.”
“We’ve turned over our city to those who would steal from us and addict our children.”
And our feelings around that, says KOMO, are unambivalent.
We are “furious about the way we are living.”
There is a “seething, simmering anger that is now boiling over into outrage.”
Ari Hoffman, the City Council candidate who recently took to the Facebook pages of Safe Seattle with grisly made up stories of a beheaded body found in an encampment, agrees. He’s “beyond furious.”
All of this anger and disgust is liberally sprinkled with objectifying shots of people having mental breakdowns in the street.
I think of this style of “reporting” as misery porn.
“How did compassion,” the narrator intones, “get twisted into this sickening reality?”
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We spend a billion dollars a year on homelessness, KOMO says, using a statistic from the Puget Sound Business Journal that encompasses direct and indirect spending on homelessness for the entire Puget Sound. “And the more money we throw at the problem, the worse it gets.”
There is no objectivity here. KOMO is owned by notoriously conservative Sinclair Broadcasting. Dan Rather, one of the deans of television reporting, is on record calling Sinclair’s practices “an assault on our democracy.”
Two instances of alt-right-style thuggery — the orchestrated mob scene at a Ballard community meeting last year and construction workers disrupting a Kshama Sawant head tax rally at Amazon — are glorified as righteous popular anger.
Political revolution, KOMO insinuates, is in the air, and the “idiots” on the City Council are responsible for Seattle’s collapse.
There is no mention of the homeless “state of emergency” that, three years ago, concentrated the power to act in the hands of the mayor.
It is not a homeless crisis, we are told. It is a “drug crisis.” Former City Attorney candidate Scott Lindsay’s “System Failure” report is twisted to conflate homelessness, criminality, and drug addiction into a seamless whole.
“I don’t know one person who’s gotten treatment and gotten off the street,” says KOMO reporter and Executive Producer Matt Markovich.
Johnson interviews the most unsympathetic homeless person in Seattle, a daily meth user who’s racked up 34 criminal cases, including assault and attempted rape, in just four years.
“The system has exalted me,” he says. “I’m having a blast. It’s just so much fun!”
Yeah. Being a homeless drug addict is a real joyride.
From here, the special pivots to solutions, and the answer, says an anonymously quoted cop, is simple. “Lock them up. People come here because it’s called Freattle.”
This narrative is not backed up by facts. In fact, the data says the opposite. A 2018 survey asked 900 homeless people in King County: “Where were you living at the time you most recently became homeless?”
Eighty-three percent of respondents said they became homeless in King County. Only 3 percent said they came here seeking services.
The problem of homelessness, KOMO says, is not complicated. It’s not upstream. The problem, obviously, is homeless people. And the solution “can be boiled down to two simple words. Enforcement and intervention.”
Screw all those troubling reality-based studies that say incarceration for poverty crimes mostly worsens outcomes, or that forced treatment usually fails.
As the special ends, the camera pans over Washington State’s closed federal prison on McNeil Island. “Maybe that billion dollars we spent last year could be spent on a tough, compassionate concept that actually works. That saves lives.”
The depth of KOMO’s compassion is revealed by what they withhold. The prison on McNeil Island is currently home to 240 sex offenders deemed too dangerous to release to the community.
Exile homeless people to there. What could go wrong?
That information isn’t missing because KOMO didn’t know. Less than two years ago, Markovich himself reported that story.
Tim Harris is the Founding Director Real Change and has been active as a poor people’s organizer for more than two decades. Prior to moving to Seattle in 1994, Harris founded street newspaper Spare Change in Boston while working as Executive Director of Boston Jobs with Peace.
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