Every Journalist (and Human) Should Be Angry about What Happened to Sonia Gonzalez
Have you ever seen a politician, normally so removed from the day-to-day business of his or her jurisdiction, take the time to really make an impact? In the midst of a busy schedule and endless demands, these politicians will use the authority granted their position to help an ordinary citizen overcome adversity. Now imagine if that person was Mayor Bill de Blasio, progressive star and mayor of arguably the most powerful city on the planet. What an effect he could have, right?
If you aren’t from New York City, or haven’t otherwise heard about it, that’s exactly what the mayor of our city did on Wednesday. His hand forced by journalists, de Blasio was finally held accountable for the city’s worsening homelessness problem, his lack of dedication to affordable housing, and his slavish acceptance that the police should stand in for tangible social services. He looked at the face of a homeless woman on the front page of the New York Post, a bleak metaphor for how our crumbling social safety net has been replaced with increased criminalization, and he did what anyone who truly wants to build a more equitable world would do: he sent the cops to throw all of her stuff away.
Tuesday morning, the intrepid “investigators” of the New York Post used their front page to spotlight a serious issue in the city: a record-level homelessness problem that is getting even worse thanks to evaporating affordable housing, lack of oversight, and a fundraising organization for De Blasio that appears to be bankrolled almost exclusively by developers. However, if you’re familiar with The Post, you can probably guess that their interests weren’t so magnanimous.
They did nothing less than publicly torment Ms. Sonia Gonzalez and her collection of carts. Her crime was poverty. Her crime was being “unpleasant” for people to look at. Her crime was being unable to find housing in a city that is literally selling off public land to powerful developers.
I might be new to the journalism field, but it seems to me journalists often have a few goals. We want to improve the reader’s quality of life or level of knowledge with important information. We want to tell stories that aren’t normally told. Maybe we want to empower communities to build their own media and their own solutions. But the holy grail seems to be this: in some way, we are able to hold the powerful accountable and make them answer for their actions. If we are really lucky, an influential policy or viewpoint might even change because of a story we told when others weren’t able to.
The Post story disgusts and scares me so much because they did the opposite. They used their readership and platform to leverage the city’s power structures — the mayor, the police, other media — to take from someone who was already, in their eyes, powerless. They did not ask her story first. They didn’t offer her a safe place to live or mental health support. They smacked a woman’s face onto their greasy tabloid pages and waited for the hate-clicks to roll in. The powerful could laugh at her or even physically destroy all of her belongings, depending on their occupation.
The Daily Mail, itself an often schadenfreude-filled tabloid, went to speak with Ms. Gonzalez. She told them the carts keep her safe on the streets. She told them she had two four-year-old sons once, but they died in a car accident.
I regularly volunteer at the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen, the largest kitchen in New York City. Everyday, they serve around 800–1200 meals to people for whom it might be their only meal. When new volunteers come in and we get to chatting: one thing comes up over and over again: “So many of the people here don’t look like they need this place.” That statement speaks to the stereotypes around poverty, but I don’t begrudge anyone who has that realization. It is an important one that many people would be better off having.
It also speaks to the stories and, for every meal served, for every smile and every frown we get there, I assure you there is a story to be told. People who used to have fancy careers are sidetracked by cruel fate and, with no safety net beneath them, are now suddenly a “lazy freeloader”. These are stories of people being kicked out by their families like so many LGBTQ youth. These are stories of drug and alcohol problems left untreated because if death happens it happens.
I could easily sit here and enumerate the dozens of times the Post has basked in the glee they seem to find by mocking the homeless, but it speaks to a deeper and more troubling idea that has spread rapidly throughout big cities: that the homeless are committing a crime by being homeless. London has set up spikes. Denver put a ban on “urban camping”, a pleasant enough term that seems to indicate a hip expedition for those with no roof over their heads. L.A. police started seizing small homes charitably built for the homeless. Homeless men were killed by police in New Mexico and Miami for having objects that for them are tools of survival. To the police, they were armed.
The Post achieved its journalistic holy grail by forcing the mayor to do something, but they fulfilled the mission of journalism in the most perverse way imaginable. They admonished us to be careful what we wish for, or we might just get it. While outlets that challenge police violence or demand decent lives for refugees are denounced as “having an agenda”, the staus quo of demeaning and exploiting the poor is just another splotch of ink off the printing press. Mayor de Blasio said he had Ms. Gonzalez’s property removed because it “just wasn’t fair”. His definition of fair is built on the interests of the powerful. If a fair system or, yes, fair reporting led to this, then it is simply an honor to be biased.
