An excerpt from Pierce's January 14 column:
How convenient.
“Homelessness — one of the media's favorite tools to portray the alleged downside of Ronald Reagan's '80s prosperity — was a more serious national problem during Bill Clinton's 1990s,” the Media Research Center's Elizabeth J. Swasey writes.
Patrick Markee of the Coalition for the Homeless admitted as much on [Wednesday] night's Hannity and Colmes on the Fox News Channel: “Definitely, we saw more homelessness in the 1990s than we did in the 1980s.
“But we saw far less homelessness on TV sets during the Clinton years. The MRC did the math: During the first Bush administration, morning and evening newscasts on ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN ran an average of 53 stories on homelessness annually, compared to less than 17 per year during the Clinton administration,” the writer said.
The soon-to-be No. 1 New York Times bestseller, Bernard Goldberg's Bias, devotes an entire chapter to the media's indulgence in advocacy journalism on this topic. In it, Goldberg cited a 1999 column by the Providence Journal's Philip Terzian, formerly of the Carter administration, that showed the New York Times ran 50 stories on homelessness in 1988, including five on page one, but in 1998 ran only 10 — not one on page one.
The expanding homeless population was out of sight during the Clinton years but just three short weeks after George W. Bush assumed office, ABC won the race to be the first network to rediscover the homeless: On Sunday, Feb. 11, 2001, World News Tonight Sunday anchor Carole Simpson intoned: “Homelessness, which is estimated to affect from 2 and a half to 3 and a half million people, is again on the rise.”
How convenient.
For a full transcript of the ABC story which ran just weeks after Bush was inaugurated, as well as to view it via RealPlayer, refer back to the February 12, 2001 CyberAlert.
Click here for Pierces's daily “Inside Politics” column.
(This update courtesy of the Media Research Center.)
