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Media Crit: Houston Press Coverage of the Relocation of the Homeless from Main and Pierce
by Nick Cooper
Friday, Apr. 01, 2005 at 1:05 AM
nickcooper--at--indymedia.org
The Houston Press has provided needed coverage of the relocation, but their coverage has lacked in some ways. Margaret Downing's article missed some key points, and Richard Connelly's article made a large factual error.
Margaret Downing's article,"Life on the Sunny Side" acknowledges some of the essential aspects of the problems with the City's 30 day program:
1) It is important and essential to address this move as a relocation of a community, and Downing has done this. Those involved with organizing the move have been calling it something much more friendly, stressing the consensual nature.
2) At least some of the 172 homeless moved out from Main and Pierce have been put in very lousy places which are far away from town where food is much more available.
3) Despite the fact that allocating money to the Coalition for the Homeless to offer homeless some choices is far better than just kicking them out in the rain, the motives of the City in this seem less than altruistic.
But she failed to bring up several others:
1) This 30 day program has a larger context. It is considered a test-run or a pilot for a ten year program.
2) The plan of temporarily moving the homeless out of an area to buy enough time to close it off to homeless people staying there in the future has happened in Houston before, at Root Square Park. The Press covered the story of those folks two years ago, before they were relocated.
3) Downing was not very thorough about talking to agencies involved with the project or homeless at a variety of accommodations.
Downing's quoting Anthony Love from the Coalition for the Homeless that "groups who had been feeding the homeless under the bridge decided not to follow them to the hotels" and then following it with an Food Not Bombs quote "It didn't seem feasible to carry this ten or more miles out to the motels in South Houston, Pasadena and Channelview" implies that FNB was one of the groups Love had expected to help with the feeding, which isn't necessarily so. In a follow up with Indymedia, Mr. Love indicated that he was referring to churches, not FNB.
Richard Connelly's article, "Making News," gave important coverage to the scandalous issue of the Ch. 13 Cameraman who called in a charge against a homeless man urinating just so he could shoot the arrest. Read the Indymedia coverage here. Connelly's major mistake was in these words:
Activists decided to do something about it, so they contacted media outlets around town and told them to come to a spot under the highway the morning of February 2, where they would stand in solidarity with their less affluent brethren as they all faced down the Man.
Except the Man didn't cooperate. Or even show up. About two dozen activists, along with a handful of media reps, stood around watching some homeless people sleep.
If Connelly had simply run this story by any of the people who were actually there, including the Houston Press reporter, he would have found out that the cops showed up and gave interviews (which are available here).
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