FINDINGS

After reviewing the articles acquired, coding them to the standards set previously, evidence appears to suggest a present underlying narrative aimed at associating negative connotations with the homeless underclass in America.

Of the fifty articles on homelessness reviewed, 14 (28%) mention a crime, 14 (28%) mention drugs, and between those equivalent figures, 6 (12%) mention both crime and drugs. While these statistics may seem low, it is prevalent enough for these negative connotations to form a possible hegemonic narrative. For example, a Daily Mail article in the dataset presents subtitles to one of their articles with highlights amounting to: “A homeless man tried to abduct a little girl walking with her grandmother in the Bronx by wrapping her in a comforter and snatching her from the sidewalk”, “A 16-year-old girl was strangled from behind by a homeless woman while eating sushi in Queens on October 4”, and “A cancer nurse called Maria Ambrocio was killed when a homeless man slammed her headfirst into the pavement while fleeing a robbery in Times Square on October 8” (Stieglitz & Gordon). This presentation of these individual incidents of conveniently unnamed homeless people committing brutal acts in innocuous everyday places exaggerates a systemic problem regarding mental health, homelessness, crime prevention, and rehabilitation into an epidemic of individual instances of homeless people randomly deciding to inflict violence on those around them. Read enough of these isolated incidents, and one’s brain starts to correlate them, an insidious tactic used by outlets who do not regard the much more statistically likely tragic deaths and needless brutality afflicted on the homeless by others with the same regard.

A majority of 35 (70%) articles did not feature interviews or perspectives of homeless (of which comprised 18%) or previously homeless individuals (of which comprised 12%). Concerning the latter figure, a two-thirds majority were social mobility success stories, reinforcing the American Dream. For instance, the CNN article, “How this homeless artist became a viral internet sensation” (Clark, Wilborn & Dalon), describes the individual success story of one Richard Hutchins, said homeless artist who reached stability after he climbed the rungs of the American socioeconomic ladder. ‘Surely, he got there with his own hard work alone,’ one may surmise, ‘pulling himself out of the gutter by his very own bootstraps, as foretold by the American Dream!’ However, as one analyzes the article, that notion quickly dissipates. “Hutchins had been living on Skid Row for six years when, this past Easter Sunday, he encountered Charlie "Rocket" Jabaley, rapper 2Chainz's former manager, at a grocery store in Los Angeles. Since then, Jabaley and his company, the Dream Machine, have helped transform Hutchins' life.” This, as easy to reproduce as conveniently meeting a millionaire’s former manager is for those who do not have stability, truly shows the depth of the American Dream. If only the U.S. Government would arrange a social welfare program where every homeless person in America could meet 2Chainz’s former manager, in a Shark Week-esque farce where whether they die of frostbite on the streets is decided by the vibes they give off to Monsieur Rocket, arbiter of homelessness. This is why the tactic is so insidious. It frames the incredible luck Richard Hutchins had to make a societal connection of that proportion as something others can replicate, which is like telling people to gamble their savings account on the lottery because a friend of yours won the Powerball.

17 (34%) do not encourage aid to the homeless, while 9 (18%) actively malign homelessness or homeless aid to a point of discouraging aid. While this is a minority, it is concerning that this figure is even in the double digits. What does it mean to discourage aid? For starters, the obvious instance of discouraging aid is painting the homeless class in a negative light, or individual homeless people, which usually coincides with individual crime articles as well. Another more subtle way of discouraging aid to the homeless is to highlight cases where those who give aid to the homeless do not have the best intentions. Hypothetically, if one were to read a headline such as “NYC cuts ties with one of the biggest homeless shelters in the city after it was revealed CEO collected more than $1 MILLION a year in salary and steered millions of dollars in business to other companies he controlled” as taken from the Daily Mail, one might subconsciously associate homeless aid with fraud, therefore discouraging aid to the homeless.

17 (34%) don’t even mention the broader problem of the homelessness crisis, with only 16 (48.48%) of those that do directly calling the problem a crisis. Why is mentioning the broader problem important? It’s a matter of subconscious emotional indication. There is a tactic used primarily in news articles of individual philanthropic acts to combat systemic woes, where the focus is shifted away from the systemic issue and towards the individual interaction. For example, when ABCNews publishes a feel-good article about a kind midwestern exchange of boots between a homeless person and a housed couple, such as “The Story of Why a Stranger Traded Shoes With a Homeless Woman”, one may get lost in Kelly McGuire’s saccharine account of her exchange with the homeless woman, with quotes such as "She, who had nothing, offered me these boots. HER boots. I wore them all the way home. Her name was Amy and I just cannot stop thinking about her." (ABCNews), that one may forget that there is absolutely nothing heartwarming about the fact that there are unsheltered homeless people facing winter conditions that could kill them if they don’t all coincidentally have the same experience as Amy did. There is no mention in the article about the other, not-so-fortunate homeless people, nor is there a mention of the fact that if Amy did not have this lucky encounter, there would be a chance that she would freeze to death, unsheltered. By focusing on this Facebook user’s single encounter and not broadening the scope for a single paragraph, ABCNews allows readers to gloss over the harsh reality of homelessness.

Given the ten outlets, some outlets showed significant trends in their portrayal of the American homeless. Regarding negative portrayal, I graphed out three variables: Frequency of crime mentions, frequency of drugs mentions, and rate of aid encouragement. Daily Mail mentioned crime in four of five articles (Figure 4), and actively negatively portrayed aid in all five (Figure 2). Daily Mail went out of their way to highlight the reasons we should potentially fear the homeless, with tabloid-like editorialized headlines such as “Terrifying footage shows homeless man try to abduct three-year-old girl in the Bronx: NYC is hit by homeless crime wave as vagrant population DOUBLES in a decade to 50,000” (Stieglitz & Gordon). FOX mentioned crime in three, drugs in two (Figure 3), and had a rate of aid encouragement of negative 3 within the five articles. Washington Post mentioned drugs in four, and crime in two. Lastly, and least, is NYT, which mentioned drugs in three, and had a rate of aid encouragement clocking in at negative one.

On the side of positive portrayal trends, ABCNews positively portrayed aid in all five articles, and never mentioned drugs nor crime. However, though this was not calculated and does not take away from the metric, they never mentioned the broader problem of homelessness. CNN, right behind them, did almost the same on the metrics, except for a single substance mention. Huffington Post did not mention crime or drugs in any of the five articles, but only encouraged aid at a +1 rate, as shown in figure 2.

Overall, this data shows a present media stigma against the homeless. Even though the statistics may come out to show approximately a half (44%) of the articles mentioning crime (eight articles), drugs (eight articles), or both (six articles), the methods used to obtain these articles weren’t random. They were designed to play off the search engine optimization algorithm that the largest search engine worldwide makes use of, meaning that a quarter of the most prominent articles in the most prominent American news sites attach negative stigma to homeless people. This can account for a warping in American views on class structure. Even when those who were homeless are positively portrayed, their climb from the depths of poverty is used to reinforce the concept of the American Dream, warping the rate at which Americans perceive social mobility to occur.

CONCLUSION

Originally, the goal of this analysis was to discover if the concept of the American Dream being possibly hegemonically enforced is one of the reasons that the average American’s perspective on social class has been proven to be warped. Reviewing past data from other researchers, I formed the hypothesis going into my findings that there is a possibility of the American Dream being culturally reinforced, which could be a cause of the warped viewpoints. Thus, the only logical step was to then peruse media narratives on those who’s very existence challenges the American Dream: the American homeless. Looking through the data, and finding evidence of negative connotations attached to homeless people in nearly half of the articles I obtained off an algorithm specifically designed to feed billions content each and every day, it is safe to say: yes, the American Dream is likely hegemonically reinforced, and it is most likely one of the factors behind the overestimations of class mobility in America, and this reinforcement negatively affects those who are a threat to the narrative.