(The following is a short excerpt from an excellent report that just came my way.
Check it out at http://faculty.washington.edu/stygall/homelessmediacoveragegroup
Seeing the Homeless
by George Dillion, English Professor, University of Washington
If an individual or organization decides to portray homelessness as urban blight and contagion—as the dump come to your door—a common tactic is to shoot garbage-scapes with a few closer shots of excrement and syringes, possibly (if you’re lucky) with a sanitation worker in a haz-mat suit standing next to a pile. We have seen examples in previous pages. Sometimes the mayor’s office invites “friendly” news teams to help produce and disseminate City Hall’s view.
But that is the press and TV; surely the blogosphere is more independent of property owners, developers and City Hall? The triptych at the left appeared (in color) in the West Seattle Blog, a new media blog which sells ads and offers to speak for West Seattle. It was one of a series of spreads by Matt Durham on a homeless encampment at the end of Camp Long in West Seattle that was swept on May 1 of this year. Matt’s pictures and accompanying articles were very successful in setting loose hundreds of comments, most of them hateful, perhaps invited by the twist of the robin and its caption (“Robins and other wildlife sift along the garbage to gather food as winter breaks”). The result is that homeless becomes homelessness, the cause of all the garbage and ugliness, and both homeless and homelessness can be bulldozed like a patch of Himalayan blackberry, but more noxious.
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Filed under: Anti-poverty, Homelessness, Nickelsville, Seattle, activism, international, tent city
