Thanksgiving Suspends Chronicle’s Homeless-Bashing

From January through Thanksgiving, the Chronicle largely ignores single moms trying to keep their family housed, seniors facing speculator evictions from their longtime homes, or the struggles of African-American families to remain living in the Bay Area. But from Thanksgiving to Christmas, the Chronicle’s script changes. The Bay Area’s low-income and vulnerable residents are suddenly described in sympathetic terms, and their current plight is framed as a function of an unfair system, rather than of individual failure.

It’s a two-decade old tradition: come Thanksgiving, the Chronicle starts trying to create reader sympathy for the Bay Area’s low-income residents. After spending the first eleven months of the year opposing laws to protect the poor, the Chronicle spends the last month seeking public donations to assist this vulnerable population.

This year the contrast should prove particularly striking. After using columnist Chuck Nevius to mount a vicious, homeless-bashing disinformation campaign disinformation campaign, now the Chronicle has to shift gears and try to get readers to feel sympathy for those less fortunate.

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