Hardluck Journalism

Will Truman 13 Comments

Sheila Tone, my coblogger on Hit Coffee and a former journalist whose present legal career presently has her doing a lot of work with the disadvantaged, wrote a post on the Rolling Stone article that’s been getting a lot of attention:

This article isn’t really about homelessness or the middle-class downturn. It’s about welfare. Its message is that we need more welfare, fast, and it needs to be made easier to get. Liberals on the Internet are aflutter over this piece, because it passionately validates the premises that people on welfare are JUST LIKE YOU and are there, as the four homeless sources here are presented, through absolutely no fault of their own hardworking, responsible selves. This is advocacy journalism, not objective journalism. That’s OK if readers actually know the rules.

But I suspect readers don’t really know how that works. I also suspect most don’t understand that with stories like this — where the sources are homeless, on welfare, or otherwise down and out, and they’re talking about what led them to their situation — reporters usually take what they say on good faith. I suspect that most readers assume that if, for instance, a homeless woman says she used to be a successful nursery owner in Moab, Utah, with revenues of $300,000 a year, that the reporter somehow made sure this was true before putting it in a magazine. How about if a guy who won’t give us his name says he was a soldier? How about if a homeless couple claims they always worked and made $60,000 a year before the recession hit? All on faith. There’s no way to verify that stuff, not under the conditions most reporters work. And even if it’s true, that doesn’t tell you they’re not leaving out some major, unflattering piece of the puzzle — their substance abuse problems, their criminal backgrounds, a thousand other possible common flaws that don’t mean we can’t feel sorry for them, but would be relevant to an informed opinion.

Furthermore, the average reader may not know that giving a sympathetic hard-luck story publicity — especially national publicity — often leads to an outpouring of generosity. Thus, a motive to shade the truth. There is also the fact that in general, more people lie than you might think. This is especially true of people claiming to have suffered circumstances that elicit automatic, unquestioning sympathy from others — homelessness, sexual victimization, domestic violence. And yet writers, in my experience, are less likely to scrutinize people who make such claims. This is sometimes due to blinding sympathy, and sometimes due to a well-grounded fear of being attacked as heartless by the true believers. (”How would YEEEEW like to be … [raped, homeless, a sweet mild-mannered girl beaten by her dirtbag boyfriend]?”)

In the comments, she links to this Antiplanner post, also on the Rolling Stone article, with this provocative closing line:

While the story Rolling Stone tells of homeless people is heartrending, it is not a story of America’s declining middle class oppressed by the 1 percent. It is a story of working-class people oppressed by the middle class.

Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

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13 Comments

  1. Thete is a tendency to moralize about the kinds of stories the intelligent and talented Ms. Tone describes. They are a way of gaining control: “That would never happen to me because I would make a better moral choice…”

    Knowing this does not excuse either a) the universal vulnerability to overwhelming events, nor b) the effects of one’s own poor choices. If one falls into poverty as a result of a bad decision (say, dodging a creditor or dropping out of high school pr a felony conviction precluding most jobs) that is tragic. If one is crushed by the external world (home and life savings destroyed in natural disaster) that is pathetic. Overcoming such circumstances can be seen as heroic.

    The gray area for me is substance addiction. It usually starts voluntarily and with a degree of pleasure. But it takes over and enhances parts of one’s behavior that otherwise would be socialized into control. Is it the substance or the man who beats up his girlfriend? The true answer, unfortunately for the advocacy journalists Ms. Tone writes about, is ambiguous. Ambiguity makes for poor advocacy.

  2. I think middle class people will rarely become homeless at least in part because they usually have enough social contacts to help them out in a dire emergency. So most people from middle class backgrounds have not only made significant bad luck and mistakes but also alienated anyone who would bail them out. There are exceptions like gay teens whose families don’t want anything to do with.
    This phenomenon also demonstrates one reason why people from poor backgrounds tend to stay poor. Most people make mistakes but it’s easier for people from better backgrounds to recover from those mistakes. I think it’s important for people not to be too judgmental about the fact that people are partially responsible for the situation they’re in because of the fact that most people make mistakes.

    On another note I found the Randal O’Toole piece terrible as I do with most of his work in spite of my libertarian leanings.

    • I think middle class people will rarely become homeless at least in part because they usually have enough social contacts to help them out in a dire emergency. So most people from middle class backgrounds have not only made significant bad luck and mistakes but also alienated anyone who would bail them out.

      I’m skeptical of this explanation, largely because I can’t think of anything I’ve done, or anything I can recall anyone I know having done, that would have prevented a poor person from escaping poverty. Maybe one person. But middle-class people do not regularly drop out of high school or have children before graduating from high school, for example. Some do, but it’s nowhere near as common as it is among the lower classes.

      What are some examples of things that most middle-class people do that would result in a lifetime of poverty under different circumstances?

      • A drug addiction will do it. They run out of friends pretty quickly.

      • Getting in trouble with the law is a good example. Drugs, also. More likely to do well even if you don’t go to college. You’re right that people from more well-to-do backgrounds are typically less likely to do things to get themselves into jams in the first place. In part because their social networks resist it, of course.

        • Drugs are an equal opportunity destroyer. Terminal velocity implies the rich might have a longer time-of-flight to the bottom, but it’s not that much longer. A few seconds maybe. There’s no parachute. Either you get into a bed in rehab or you don’t, it’s just that simple, and the recidivism rate is equally dispassionate whether you’re doing detox in Betty Ford or trembling and shaking and vomiting in County Jail.

          I sure wish these folks who glibly natter on about Legalization got to meet a few addicts. Sooner or later, they’re all out there turning tricks, getting busted. Rich or poor, the same fate awaits them.

          • It’s certainly better to throw them in PMITA prison straight up.

          • Surely that depends on the drugs, the degree of use and dealings with the law, which in turn can be shaped by social circumstances.

            The guy who smoked weed once a week for two years at college was never caught and then ‘grew out of it’ can be a successful businessman or politician. The guy who smoked week once a week for two years while unemployed and got arrested with his stash just after he decided to quit – not so much.

            Also I think you’re misreading the legalisation argument if you think the core of it is ‘yay drugs’. The argument is that the harm that would be done by people being able to get dangerous substances without fear of the law is less than the harm that is currently done by the war on drugs. Not nonexistent, not not worth fighting in other ways, just less.

        • Right. But “middle-class culture is superior to lower-class culture” is a very different claim from “middle-class people do all the same stupid things that lower-class people do, at the same rate, but they always get away with it.”

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