MediaWatch: February 1996
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: February 1996
- A Social Problem Blamed on Reaganomics Fades Away in Clinton-Era Media Coverage
- NewsBites: Tricky Dick's Tax Break
- CBS Reporter Bernard Goldberg Charges Colleague
- Networks Scared of Flat Tax
- Global Warming Shtick Returns The Heat Is Off
- Transportation's Travel Bill
- Knowledgeable Limbaugh Dittoheads
- Janet Cooke Award: The Evangelical Right Wing That Wasn't
A Social Problem Blamed on Reaganomics Fades Away in Clinton-Era Media Coverage
The Incredible Shrinking Homeless
The poor may have always been with us, but the network news has often presented homelessness as a problem created by the Reagan adminstration.
"In the 1980s, the Reagan years, the amount of government money spent to build low-income housing was cut drastically. Then the homeless began to appear on streets and in doorsteps and housing became a visible human problem," proclaimed then-NBC anchor Garrick Utley on November 3, 1990. ABC's John Martin told the same tale in reporting a 1989 homelessness march: "They staged the biggest rally on behalf of the homeless since the Reagan revolution forced severe cutbacks in government housing programs."
It mattered little that budget experts John Cogan and Timothy Muris noted in The American Enterprise in 1990 that "while budget authority for subsidized housing programs declined 77 percent (from 1981-89), the number of subsidized units and the number of families living in those units increased by one-third." Reporter Harold Dow recycled the same old media spin on the March 26, 1991 CBS Evening News: "In New York there are an estimated 70,000 homeless people, three million across America. A problem that got a lot worse during the boom times of the 1980s."
So now that Bill Clinton has been in office for three years, has the ever-growing problem of homelessness continued to burden the White House? Or did the problem recede from the media's agenda? MediaWatch analysts used the MRC Media Tracking System to count the number of network evening news segments on homelessness in America on the four evening newscasts (ABC's World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, and CNN's Prime News or World News). Analysts found the problem faded from the list of priorities. In the Bush years (1989-1992), the number of homeless stories per year averaged 52.5, but in the first three years of the Clinton administration, the average dropped to 25.3 stories a year.
During the Bush administration, the story count grew from 44 in 1989 to a peak of 71 in 1990, followed by 54 stories in 1991 and 43 in 1992. By contrast, stories on America's homeless dipped slightly to 35 stories in 1993, and 32 in 1994. In 1995, the number fell dramatically to just nine. When the count is broken down by network, CNN had the widest gap in reporting during the Bush years and Clinton years (90-30), closely followed by ABC (45-16), CBS (41-15), and NBC (36-15).
But the numbers alone do not tell the whole story. The decline in homeless coverage coincided with the lessening of unsupported statistics about the size of the homeless population. CNN anchor Lou Waters announced on August 8, 1989: "A new research report is warning that homelessness in this country could easily double or triple if there is a mild recession...there now are up to 40 million Americans living on the knife edge of homelessness, just one paycheck, one domestic argument from the streets."
The willingness to wildly extrapolate the number of America's homeless began to change slightly in 1991, when the Census Bureau's partial count of the homeless in shelters and on the street reported an estimate of 220,000 homeless Americans. All four networks reported on the Census count the night it occurred (March 20, 1990). But when the Census Bureau released its official report announcing a count of 220,000 on April 12, 1991, only CNN reported it. ABC referred to the estimate on May 9, but only to note that congressional sources claimed the estimate was "meaningless."
While the stories in the Bush era regularly blamed Republican administrations, not one of the 75 homeless stories in the last three years has placed any blame on the Clinton administration. On January 21, 1993, ABC featured a report on the gaudiness of the Clinton inauguration, which reporter Judy Muller concluded: "The Republicans were criticized for their show of wealth in the face of need. The Democrats seemed to have avoided such criticism. Perhaps because President Clinton has promised to help those less fortunate. For now, not many people seem to begrudge Bill Clinton his night on the town, considering the sobering realities he faces the morning after."
Indeed, in a March 12, 1995 NBC story, reporter Giselle Fernandez warned of the consequences if congressional Republicans succeeded in trimming spending on homeless aid programs in a small $17 billion rescission bill: "Across the nation there are an estimated 20,000 homeless families. And social workers worry the crisis will only worsen if the new Congress keeps its promise and makes deep cuts in bedrock social programs and especially in public housing." Fernandez did not explain why the networks did not blame this problem on the Clinton administration: they announced plans to spend a whopping $2.1 billion in fiscal 1995 on homeless aid, more than three times the $550 million spent in the last year of the Bush administration. To NBC, reducing this dramatic increase was a "deep cut."
The only story that MediaWatch analysts found on ABC in 1995 was an anchor brief by Catherine Crier: "A new report today from the advocacy group Children's Defense Fund finds life for millions of American children still filled with poverty and violence. In its new yearbook, the group cites Census Bureau figures showing nearly 16 million children living in poverty last year, the highest level since 1964, and among the homeless, one in four is a child." In other words, the liberal group that used to be chaired by Hillary Clinton has noted that child poverty by one measure is the worst in thirty years, but ABC never wondered whether the Clinton administration could be at fault.
The network trend of slowly dropping the story of homelessness, and quickly transforming the issue from an indicator of Republican economic failure to a nonpartisan social problem, suggests that politics more than journalism is at play. Homelessness served as a negative campaign tool against the Republican intention to curb the unending growth of federal spending on social programs.
