Interaction with the Media

Difficult Time for Homeless People

Yes, these have been some hard times for homeless people. The media wants to know why would anyone be outside in this horrible weather? Now, I am sure that the young woman and men who come to ask questions are fine upstanding citizens who care about the world, but they don't make them like they used to. Reporters of the past knew everything about everything. If they did not understand why homeless people slept outside, they became homeless for a period of time to find out. If they wanted to know about low income workers they went to work at a temporary labor company. If they needed to know about the health care crisis in America, they hung out on the front lines in the emergency room. There were no embedded journalists or journalists camped in the relatively calm green zone. Journalists were on the front lines. It seems that those days are gone, and so now the height of investigative journalism is watching perverts in the library.

Anyway, the pretty faces that grace our television every night don't really understand the people that they cover. This is fine if they were detached observers, but now they are wearing their ignorance proudly on camera. They wonder out loud about how crazy it is to reject shelter. They criticize the criminals even before conviction. The announcers specialize in empty banter between stories, but do not understand government, power, or how things work in this world. I am not sure that many of the journalists of today are prepared, but certainly television journalists are more prepared for the runway then the broadcasting of the news.

Brian