Corporate Media Propaganda on Homelessness
The most powerful people in our society are engaged in a constant propaganda war to distract people from very simple, very basic solutions to problems.
From Alec Karakatsanis:
One of the most dishonest and alarming trends in copaganda is the disgusting intermingling and conflation of homelessness and violent crime. The people executing this propaganda campaign are responsible for an enormous amount of preventable suffering and death.
Connecting homelessness with "mental illness" is similarly dishonest and harmful. The vast bulk of homelessness, including the record 1.2 million homeless children, is an issue of inequality, profit, economics, and corrupt real estate/land use policy.
There should be no conversation about homelessness that does not discuss the root economic causes. And yet, an entire genre of corporate news articles exists to obscure what everyone knows are the actual problems and solutions, which are not "vexing" at all.
The most powerful people in our society are engaged in a constant propaganda war to distract people from very simple, very basic solutions to problems. In most cases, those problems stem from inequality, profit, corruption, and incompetent leadership.
One core conceit of this reporting is officials have tried EVERYTHING and this intractable problem just WON'T GO AWAY. Tricking well-meaning people into thinking that vile, ineffective policies are being constantly tried by caring leaders is key to cycle of profit and inaction.
In my Copaganda book (out in April, all royalties donated to grassroots charity that organizes unhoused people) I discuss this more. But here's an essay that gets at why NYT benefits from talking about homelessness without focusing on material conditions:
As a side note, this NYT article is a subtle but effective propaganda weapon against the extremely popular left-wing candidate in the Mayor's race, Zohran Mamdani. His focus on housing, inequality, childcare, groceries, etc. is enormously popular. So, what does NYT do?
The NYT pretends to print a list of the other candidates who want to "address homelessness" but leaves out the candidate with the platform most threatening to the city's economic elite! It's as if he and his platform don't exist.
Every word, sentence, and article that misleads people about this causes profound harm because homelessness is preventable and causes illness, suffering, harms to childhood development, and tens of thousands of premature deaths. It matters that people know the real causes.
As I explain in the article, it also pushes people toward "solutions" to homelessness and mental illness like more cops and cages, which only exacerbates things across the board in terms of safety, security, and flourishing of the most vulnerable people, and everyone else.