Daily journalism is a grind. As the old newsroom in-joke went, It’s like making love to a nymphomaniac…although that probably doesn’t get uttered much these days among our media wokesters. There’s sure to be a lobbying non-profit for the sexually-insatiable out there somewhere.
Just to be fair, doing this stuff 24/7 is tough. But, still…
If you wanted to see the extremes in what passes for “reporting” on the top topic locally—all gathered under the anodyne tent of “homelessness”—we present two opposing views of what constitutes “journalism.”
Let’s start with a model of competent reporting, by the Tribune’s Joe Gallivan, under the headline…
STREET LIVES: The Angel of Rock Bottom
As we have noted before, Gallivan (by day a business reporter) has been doing an ongoing series covering the homeless scene at street level. His latest focuses on…
Jenn Coon may be the future face of Portland's homeless solution.
As a peer support specialist, the 5-foot, 53-year-old plunges into the mass of humanity surrounding Portland's best known food line five days a week.
In dispassionate, “I am a camera” style, Gallivan puts you in the scene, including a hairy series of encounters with mentally-deranged and potentially dangerous recipients of Coon’s largesse that could have been written by the late, great Richard Stark.*
Here’s a sample…
On another morning, a young guy with matted hair and filthy clothes was sprawled on the sidewalk, his head propped up, dozing. She reminded him to eat. A fidgety old man waved an electric guitar neck around. Another guy, looking very rock-and-roll, with multiple rings and a shirt open to his navel, but no pants, tried on a pair of suede boots Jenn had been saving for him. "Do you like them? He likes boots with a heel," she said, hoping he would like some flats, too. Someone else was pushed up to the lunch window in a wheelchair. The bandages on his feet were brown and red with blood and he seemed agitated. She talked to him but he refused all help, including medical.
Read Gallivan and you’ll see just how deep-rooted, intractable, and altogether complex “homelessness” is in reality.
And wouldn’t it be nice if we got that from Nicole Hayden, on the Oregonian’s homeless beat. Ms. Hayden occasionally seems to get out of the O’s newsroom—she once found a presentable homeless person and wrote her into the lede of what was a drudgery on the ineptitude of various city-county bureaucracies, which seems to be her true interest.
The star of that piece, a drifter named Jennifer Drain, got more ink when she was shot to death in Old Town. Which, to be utterly cynical, illustrates something about boo-hoo journalism that most newsies don’t want to think about.
Another encounter with a real homeless person prompted this from Ms. Hayden…
Lulu Thomson can’t easily explain the ways the world broke her heart. The memories are hard. Some days she can’t talk about the abusive relationships she fled but other times the stories tumble out of her.
The 22-year-old can easily recount, however, how the city of Portland’s anti-homeless practices have forced her to endure a constant battle to survive during six years on the streets.
Which prompts the question: is there anyone over at the O who actually “edits” this propaganda?
Ms. Hayden was back at the commanding heights of the homeless organs recently with this…
Multnomah County seeks more landlords to house homeless
…a story that didn’t answer the basic question: if they want “more landlords,” then how many do they have now? (Elsewhere, The Trib’s Jim Redden, probably sitting next to Hayden at the same press conference, managed to say)…
Kafoury and other officials at the press conference said they do not know how [many] landlords are currently participating in the program or how many more they expect to join, but the more the better.
Well, at least Hayden got “the more the better” into her copy.
Meanwhile, one of the O’s biggest sluggers, Shane Dixon Kavanaugh, dropped another quasi-homeless story into the stewpot of a close—and nasty—City Council race. It started out as yet another dreary inside-City Hall piece of bureaucratic fluff….
Portland’s burgeoning program to provide a non-police response to crisis calls on the streets would see a significant boost under Mayor Ted Wheeler’s proposed annual budget, his office told The Oregonian/Oregonlive on Wednesday.
(The URL, by the way, referred back to yet another Hayden story—this one about how a tenter had been helped by a Portland Street Response worker to move from a tent to an RV. Which, if you live close by an RV village, might not be the best news ‘o’ the day.)
It’s just a coincidence—really!—that the Street Response thingy is the brainchild (and source of patronage) for City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, who is fighting two well-financed (and seemingly sane) opponents in the upcoming primary.
As we said: just a coincidence!
In the last graf of the largely Hardesty-centric report, Kavanaugh referred to an impeccable source—a PSU report by its Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative—which was much ballyhooed when it reported that nine…count ‘em, nine… homeless people got permanent housing thanks to Hardesty’s team, without mentioning any credible estimate of how many lost souls live on our sidewalks and—this may surprise Mayor Whatshisname—are returning to our freeways.
Oddly, if you bother reading the original report, PSU didn’t do any follow-up to determine whether or not the lucky nine stayed in that housing, one of the biggest problems in working with the homeless sub-culture, as PSU should know.
PSU also reported (but the city’s media did not) that the Hardesty teams handed out tents…which is a funny way to address the homeless problem.
But Kavanaugh is Mr. Positivity when it comes to Commish Hardesty’s brainchild…
On average, unhoused community members served by Portland Street Response rated their satisfaction level with the program as a 4.6 on a 5-point scale.
Kavanaugh doesn’t bother sourcing that tidbit, but the Street Roots Ambassador Program—hardly a neutral observer—surveyed just 314 street people, which begs the question: how representative of the homeless sub-culture were those polled, considering that many are severely mentally-ill and loaded with various mind-altering drugs.
But here’s a stat buried in the PSU report that might interest a skeptical reporter…
33 of 314 unhoused community members (10.5%) reported specific interactions with Portland Street Response, ranging from meeting them during outreach activities to receiving services from them.
Does this seem like an all-out success story to you? Particularly when (accepting Street Root’s numbers at face value—a heavy lift), the city managed to spend…well, how much this cost doesn’t make it into Kavanaugh’s story. (Although he shared with us taxpayers that the expanded Team will chew through $8.5-million a year, if City Council approves it.)
We’ve talked before about Homelessness Inc. and the progressive machine’s uncanny ability to monetize the city’s social collapse. Consider this example umpteen.
And isn’t Jo Ann Hardesty something else?
Meanwhile, over at Willamette Week, the freebie weekly’s go-to investigative attack dog, Nigel Jaquiss, offered more proof that his old, Pultizer Prize-winning mojo is running on empty.
The headline gets ourvote for the “Don’t Bother Reading the Story” award:
Metro Recognized Voters Weren’t Seeing Benefits From Housing and Homeless Measures, but Its Solution Hit a Brick Wall
As Nigel hit-pieces go, this one was, well…kinda sad. You expect a full-scale mugging but get only a slip "‘n’ fall….
Metro had a problem.
The regional government convinced voters to put up $653 million for a housing bond in 2018 and $2.5 billion to reduce homelessness in 2020. But by early last May, agency officials realized the public wasn’t seeing results.
So they went looking for a salesman.
By golly, they found one, paying $150,000 to an outfit that seems to have been set up to grab the quick cash. Whereupon Jaquiss plants the harpoon…
Metro, which handles land use and transportation planning, among other functions, has a big communications office: 32 employees and a budget of $4.75 million. That might seem like enough resources to craft a message on how taxpayer money was making a difference.
It’s a scandal! Sorta.
If you can manage to read to the end of the story (where, as you keen-eyed Dissenters know, you should always begin), the high dudgeon becomes a mouse-squeak…
…on March 28, People for Portland filed a ballot measure seeking to dictate how revenue from the homeless services measure would be spent in future.
That move forced Metro to immediately shut down Winning Mark’s work, Christensen says, because Siegel’s communications could now be seen as a violation of laws that prohibit public agencies from engaging in political campaigns. The plan was ready and a few ads had already run.
And here’s the kicker. Nigel didn’t answer the obvious question…did the PR firm get to keep the $150-Gs?
As we’ve said: doesn’t anyone around here know how to edit?
*Non de plume of Donald Westlake, who wrote the “Parker” series of crime procedurals, which are among the best fiction of its type (or any other, for that matter).
Another fabulous and funny editorial. Thank you. I'm sharing this on social media!