Media Framing and the Criminalization of Homelessness

Truong, Shirley V.; Bullock, Heather E.

doi:10.1037/e521512014-180

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…We juxtapose the media’s sympathy and positivity toward evacuees not only with the negative attitudes and stigmatization of people experiencing houselessness reported in previous research (Mueller, 2009; Pruitt et al, 2020; Truong, 2012), but also with the media’s silence about the experiences of previously unhoused people during the wildfires. Media reports during the 2020 wildfire season did not report on the ways people already living unsheltered experienced loss of attachment to place (if not physical structures) and also endured the smoke and dangerous air pollution that engulfed the region during this period.…”

Section: Findings and Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 87%

“…To produce this essay, we followed Pascale's methodology of exploring media accounts and other relevant scholarship on media portrayals of houselessness (Pascale, 2005). Subsequent scholarship also documents how media coverage of houselessness focuses on its negative impacts on housed portions of society (Mandeno, 2015;Pascale, 2005;Pruitt et al, 2020;Schneider et al, 2011;Sheese, 2017;Truong, 2012;Werman, 2019;Zufferey, 2014); or associates houselessness with crime and disorder, mental illness, filth, substance abuse, theft, violence, threats to safety, and smelliness (Mueller, 2009;Pruitt et al, 2020;Schneider et al, 2011;Toft, 2014;Werman, 2019). Like Pascale's essay, these studies rarely include or examine media coverage of people rendered houseless because of a natural disaster.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Natural / Disaster: Differential Media Portrayals of Wildfire Displacement and Homelessness in Portland, Oregon

Cowal

Leickly

Ajibade

et al. 2022

Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies

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The devastating 2020 wildfires in Oregon provide an opportunity to revisit the “discursive creation of homelessness” first identified by Céline Pascale in this journal in 2005. Drawing on physical observation of the unfolding event and discursive analysis of media reporting (print, radio, and television), we find radically different media coverage of people unhoused by wildfires and those previously unhoused but also affected by the fires. Journalistic uses of nomenclature and reported speech, portrayals of agency, and exclusion of marginalized voices provide current examples of the stratification of deservedness. The wildfires, deemed a natural disaster but simultaneously an “unnatural” cause of houselessness, reinforced the differential material treatment of “evacuees” as a special category deserving of aid and support in contrast to people living unhoused before the wildfires. Yet this reasoning ignores the temporal dimensions of displacement and lack of housing, which independent of their causes produce compounding and tangible socio-economic and physical effects on those affected. We argue that as climate change-related disasters such as wildfires displace more people in Oregon and across the United States, the origins of houselessness will be less meaningful while societal response and compassion will matter more.

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Section: Findings and Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 87%