Robert L. Terrell

The San Francisco Chronicle has been featuring lurid tales recently about the city’s escalating crisis with homelessness. And unfortunately, most of the reportage is embarrassingly bad. The biased and distorted nature of the newspaper’s coverage of homelessness results from several factors, not the least of them being its semi-colonial relationship with the city. I might elaborate on the point by pointing out that the Chronicle still functions like a traditional big city, metropolitan daily. In the U.S. context, this means that the paper is primarily oriented toward seeing the city and its best interests from an upper class, white perspective.

This is true despite the fact that the majority of San Francisco’s residents are people of color, a significant percentage of whom are lower middle class or poor. Thus, there is a mismatch between the city’s predominant population and the isolated, elite few catered to by the Chronicle’s editors and reporters. The skewed nature of the newspaper’s dated, and significantly biased, reportage is most clearly apparent in the sections which feature “the beautiful people:” attending symphonies, operas, museums, galleries, exclusive fundraisers and gala parties in multimillion dollar, hilltop mansions. The people featured in the photographs that grace these sections of the newspaper are invariably white, and most often wealthy. One who reads the Chronicle on a daily bias might easily get the impression that the vast majority of San Franciscans are wealthy whites who reside in hilltop or seaside mansions.

There is little in the paper’s normal reportage that helps readers understand why homelessness is virtually inevitable in a city where average dwellings commonly cost more than $700,000 dollars, and the minimum wage is far less than $20 per hour. Moreover, the Chronicle’s uncritical, fawning reportage regarding the affairs of the rich and famous is replicated on a daily basis in every section of the paper. This was the case throughout the dot com boom, which the paper’s cheer leader type coverage got wrong from beginning to end. Thus, it comes as no surprise to those who read the paper every day that it consistently fumbles in its confused effort to report on homelessness, which is arguably the most complicated social problem facing the city.

In any event, the Chronicle’s wrong headed, attack-the-victims reportage of homelessness is being practiced most auspiciously these days by C.W. Nevius, a former sports writer, who was until recently relegated to an obscure suburban beat far removed from the inner city where the homeless crisis is most intense. After his departure from the Chronicle’s sports beat several years ago, Nevius typically wrote about soccer moms and related fluff. Every indication at the time was that he was simply going through the motions, doing just enough to remain respectable until he could retire and drift off into unremarked anonymity.

But approximately five months ago, Nevius began writing a series of hit pieces on inner city homeless people. The stories coincided with the final push of Gavin Newsom’s re-election campaign, and they gave a positive push to the Mayor’s effort to keep his job. The articles also provided cover for the San Franciscans who apparently hate homeless people, and want them disappeared by whatever means necessary. Their vitriolic hostility has been featured for months on the Chronicle’s editorial page, and the level of hatred they exude is so heartless and intentionally cruel that it is hard to read them without cringing.

Nonetheless, clueless Nevius, feeling inspired and vindicated by such support, has upped his output of anti-homeless rants, which are intended, it seems, to demonize one of the city’s most vulnerable groups. His graceless, sordid performance is indicative of the extent to which The San Francisco Chronicle is out of synch with the city’s non-elite, colored majority. It is also indicative of some of the most important reasons why the newspaper is losing millions or dollars per month. I suspect everyone concerned, including the homeless people currently being demonized by the San Francisco Chronicle via the cultural and caste-based assault being waged by C.W. Nevius, will be better off when the carpet baggers in charge of the paper go belly up, and subsequently slink out of town to suburbs and gated ghettos better suited to their particular brand of biased, sucking up and kicking down journalism.