How indistinguishable is the center-left from the right wing when it comes to homelessness discourse?
In the past year, we’ve seen an enormous amount of media attention on the misnamed Los Angeles “homelessness crisis.” More often than not, liberal and center-left media coverage of homelessness, housing, and policing sounds indistinguishable from the blatantly poor-hating propaganda of the right wing.
Over the summer, Fox News ramped up coverage of homelessness in California cities. This directly led to Trump’s very vocal attacks on California, painting its cities as warzones and prompting an LA visit by Trump in September. This trip was followed a call from liberal Eric Garcetti to collaborate with his openly fascist administration. Eric Garcetti and Donald Trump, after all, are “true partners” when it comes to the Olympics and other endeavors. Just as Trump and Garcetti’s rhetoric is often indistinguishable, so is the media’s coverage that does both of their bidding. And now, it appears we’re about to see what the result of this aisle-crossing courtship will bear out. It’s absolutely going to be a problem.
This persistent rhetorical collaboration between the center and right reinforces the economic partnership which created the forces driving these intentional systems of inequity. And this discourse is moderated and largely manufactured by local news media. It helps keep the politics of austerity and the politics of cruelty alive and thriving in LA, where three unhoused people die a day and at least 100,000 people experience homelessness in a given calendar year.
Can you tell whether Patrick Soon-Shiong’s LA Times or Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News published these clips from the past several months while this debate — framed by a compliant, consolidated press corps — has raged?