Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson has taken a disapproving look at Portland before, and the Rose City was seen in a less-than-flattering light again on the Thursday edition of “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” As part of a series called “Homeless in America,” one of the show’s producers traveled to cities on the West Coast, including San Francisco and Seattle to, as the show’s website puts it, investigate “the nation’s homeless crisis and the decay of American cities.”
In the episode that aired Thursday, Portland and Eugene were the featured cities. Carlson introduced the segment first by saying that some homeless people in the Bay Area, in California, were living on “makeshift boats.” The host then turned to Oregon, with a segment that began in Portland.
The first Portland stop, as viewers heard, was intended to be breakfast at “an upscale bakery near the city’s fashionable Pearl District.” But when the film crew arrived, they found what is said to be a homeless man rifling through a trash can, and a dirty syringe in a parking lot.
Homelessness in Portland, we’re told, looked a lot like what “Tucker Carlson Tonight” had found in other cities -- “lots of tents, lots of drugs.”
“The city’s permissive culture, its temperate climate and generous social services attract vagrants and addicts from around the country,” we hear. Next is an interview with a woman who says she’s from Montana, but came to the West Coast to get treatment for her leukemia, and moved to Portland after police in Washington State towed her motor home.
Images of tents, trash and encampments in Portland are shown, and we’re told that “virtually every open space in the city seems packed with people living outside and using drugs.”
The segment then travels to Eugene, a “college town, with the politics to match.” An effort by the St. Vincent de Paul charitable organization is highlighted as providing a “simple and cheap” option, with a group of tents which offer beds to homeless people. The shelter also offers addiction treatment services, according to the segment.
Like his fellow conservative commentator hosts, such as Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, Carlson’s show airs in primetime on the Fox News Channel. Carlson is known to routinely criticize Democrats, along with other news outlets, notably CNN, for having a liberal bias. He has been the subject of controversy himself, as in December 2018, when Carlson’s comments regarding immigrants prompted several advertisers to withdraw their commercials from his show.
The subject of homelessness on the West Coast has also been in the TV spotlight following the March airing of “Seattle Is Dying,” on Seattle’s KOMO-TV. The documentary, reported by Eric Johnson (a onetime journalist at Portland’s KGW-TV), discussed the frustration felt by citizens and businesses in the city, and said that homelessness is less about a lack of affordable housing than it is about addiction and mental illness.
-- Kristi Turnquist
kturnquist@oregonian.com 503-221-8227 @Kristiturnquist
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