The New Yorker magazine’s latest issue features a nearly 10,000 word article on the rise in homelessness in New York City — but the piece doesn’t mention the name “Barack Obama” a single time.
According to the article, the number of homeless in New York City has exploded in recent years.
“For baseball games, Yankee Stadium seats 50,287. If all the homeless people who now live in New York City used the stadium for a gathering, several thousand of them would have to stand,” the article opens.
“More people in the city lack homes than at any time since . . . It’s hard to say exactly. The Coalition for the Homeless, a leading advocate for homeless people in the city and the state, says that these numbers have not been seen in New York since the Great Depression. The Bloomberg administration replies that bringing the Depression into it is wildly unfair, because those times were much worse, and, besides, for complicated reasons, you’re comparing apples and oranges. …In any case, it’s inescapably true that there are far more homeless people in the city today than there have been since ‘modern homelessness’ (as experts refer to it) began, back in the nineteen-seventies.”
Yet nowhere in the mammoth piece is President Obama’s economic record over the last five years even considered as a possible factor. The terms “Barack Obama” or “President Obama” don’t appear at all, though the term “Obama phones” comes up once:
“Nearby, a young man named Angel was helping a woman from Access Wireless hand out cell phones that were paid for by Medicaid,” the article reads. “He called them ‘Obama phones,’ because they were free.”
By contrast, a far more mild homelessness problem under President Ronald Reagan was universally deplored by the establishment media. As recently as September of this year, homelessness was cited by Salon as the centerpiece of the 40th president’s toxic legacy.
In his book “Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News,” former CBS reporter Bernie Goldberg used the media’s reporting on homelessness as an example of its bias against conservatives.
“To a lot of journalists in the press and TV, the villain was — who else? — Ronald Reagan, who in their view was the embodiment of the greedy 1980s. … As a matter of routine, they made it look as if the Reagan administration practically invented homelessness,” Goldberg wrote, arguing that stories on homelessness virtually ceased to be featured once President Clinton was inaugurated.