Robert L. Terrell

We should all be deeply concerned about the conspicuous avoidance practiced by mainstream organs of journalism regarding the rising number of homeless U.S. citizens.  The print and broadcast media devote, it seems, as little attention to the subject as they possibly can.

And the little reportage they provide does little to engender broad, public understanding of this massive social tragedy.

Conspicuous avoidance is due to several factors, one of the most important being the considerable ignorance possessed by typical mainstream journalists regarding the sectors of society inhabited by homeless people.   It is ignorance of which many journalists are proud.  Bourgeois, socially irresponsible pride, has proliferated in recent decades as an almost inevitable consequence of metropolitan, mainstream journalism becoming an integral component of the elite establishment. 

This has widespread negative consequences, at least for non-elite members of society, including the hundreds of thousands who are homeless.  The scale of the problem becomes immediately apparent when one considers the fact that the majority of the nation’s citizen’s are by no means elite.  

Because they follow the example of their metropolitan peers in matter of reportage in an almost rote manner, regional and local press organs are infected with shortcomings that are more or less the same as those of the metropolitan, elite media.   As a result, journalists who practice the craft outside elite sectors devote the bulk of their reportage to mainstream members of their communities, and matters pertinent to their perceived best interests. The corporate takeover of small, independently owned newspapers, regional chains, and broadcast stations across the nation during the past two decades has only made matters worse.

Thus, the day-to-day travails of homeless people, and the large cohort of poor, and near poor people at the bottom of the social order, are of secondary concern.   More often than not, their existence is only noted when they come into conflict with law enforcement officials, and agencies which provide them inadequate, sporadic assistance.   Few members of the mainstream media, or the hundreds of colleges and universities that train the journalists that work for them, are willing to publicly admit this.  But is it true nonetheless.

The systemic economic and political factors responsible for the growing number of homeless people receive particularly scant attention from mainstream journalists.  Moreover, much of the reportage devoted to this growing segment of our populace is hostile and dismissive.  One gets the impression that the nation’s mainstream journalists are uncomfortable with the subject of homelessness.   They are obviously more comfortable covering members of their own class, and this is particularly the case regarding those members who are wealthy, powerful and/or famous.

Homeless people are none of these things.  They are frequently penniless.  They don’t possess power. They do not engage in conspicuous consumption.  Nor are they considered to be “beautiful people.”  Instead, they tend to be dirty, unkempt, incoherent, and frequently incapable of engaging in dialogue of the sort common among elites.   

Maybe most important, homeless people constitute a dramatic repudiation of mainstream journalism’s mantra that ours is a healthy, balanced, fair and socially responsible society.  This is all the more reason why they should receive sustained, serious attention from mainstream journalists instead of the conspicuous avoidance commonly accorded them these days.