Since the release of Eric Johnson's documentary Seattle Is Dying, which depicts an epidemic of street homelessness, addiction, crime, and disorder, city elites have launched a coordinated information campaign targeted at voters frustrated with the city's response to homelessness.
The key messages of the campaign include a number of misleading claims, including: "Seattle is making progress to end homelessness," "1 in 4 people experiencing homelessness in our community struggle with drug or alcohol abuse," and " we are not spending enough to address homelessness.
" All three contentions fail to meet basic scrutiny: street homelessness has increased 131 percent over the past five years; King County's lawsuit against Purdue Pharma admits that "The majority of the homeless population is addicted to or uses opioids"; and 62 percent of Seattle voters agree to the statement "We are not spending enough" only when it is directly prefaced in the polling questionnaire by the phrase "Other cities of the same size are spending 2 to 3 times the amount that Seattle is and are seeing significant reductions in homelessness"-itself an unsubstantiated claim.
"New poll shows the majority in Seattle say we have a moral obligation to help homeless people, and we need to spend more," declared Seattle Times data journalist Gene Balk.
Catherine Hinrichsen, director of Seattle University's Project on Family Homelessness, published "6 reasons why KOMO's take on homelessness is the wrong one" in the local magazine Crosscut, arguing that the documentary "Conflates homelessness with drug use, mental illness, and crime." And Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan told reporters that "We have made a lot of progress" and dismissed the documentary as "An opinion piece." Her office pushed the #SeattleForAll messaging on government social media channels.
In its own widely circulated story on the polling data, the Seattle Times does disclose that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Campion Advocacy Fund, and the Raikes Foundation support their homelessness coverage-but not that Pyramid commissioned the polling and coordinated the campaign with the city and the mayor's office.
In the most recent polling, 68 percent of Seattle voters say that they don't trust the mayor and city council to solve the homelessness crisis-yet the foundations, the communications firms, and the mayor's office keep lashing out at dissenters.
https://www.city-journal.org/seattleforall-campaign
The key messages of the campaign include a number of misleading claims, including: "Seattle is making progress to end homelessness," "1 in 4 people experiencing homelessness in our community struggle with drug or alcohol abuse," and " we are not spending enough to address homelessness.
" All three contentions fail to meet basic scrutiny: street homelessness has increased 131 percent over the past five years; King County's lawsuit against Purdue Pharma admits that "The majority of the homeless population is addicted to or uses opioids"; and 62 percent of Seattle voters agree to the statement "We are not spending enough" only when it is directly prefaced in the polling questionnaire by the phrase "Other cities of the same size are spending 2 to 3 times the amount that Seattle is and are seeing significant reductions in homelessness"-itself an unsubstantiated claim.
"New poll shows the majority in Seattle say we have a moral obligation to help homeless people, and we need to spend more," declared Seattle Times data journalist Gene Balk.
Catherine Hinrichsen, director of Seattle University's Project on Family Homelessness, published "6 reasons why KOMO's take on homelessness is the wrong one" in the local magazine Crosscut, arguing that the documentary "Conflates homelessness with drug use, mental illness, and crime." And Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan told reporters that "We have made a lot of progress" and dismissed the documentary as "An opinion piece." Her office pushed the #SeattleForAll messaging on government social media channels.
In its own widely circulated story on the polling data, the Seattle Times does disclose that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Campion Advocacy Fund, and the Raikes Foundation support their homelessness coverage-but not that Pyramid commissioned the polling and coordinated the campaign with the city and the mayor's office.
In the most recent polling, 68 percent of Seattle voters say that they don't trust the mayor and city council to solve the homelessness crisis-yet the foundations, the communications firms, and the mayor's office keep lashing out at dissenters.
https://www.city-journal.org/seattleforall-campaign
No comments:
Post a Comment