Channel 5’s news is so mind-numbingly bleed-and-lead awful and its anchors Mike Synder and Jane McGarry such prototypes of the bloated yet freakishly bland face of fascist communication (I mean, look at them sometime) that it almost seems pointless to criticize it. Still…last night on the 10 p.m. newscast, once the barrage of daily violence was over, reporter Grant Stinchfield found the most fear-mongering thing to come up with that day was a piece painting the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library as little more than a “daycare” for the homeless.
Complete with eerie music and vamped-up still frames of people so poor they dare hang out in a place of learning for a few hours each day were suggestions that while Stinchfield did a piece two years ago (wow!) on homeless at the library, the wretched fools are still there, napping at the desks and using the restrooms. Big supportive evidence was the testimony of a coed (cute, of course) who said that sometimes when she is studying, homeless people will sit nearby and look at her. She said something about them not being quite right in the mind. Nary a word in all this about the library’s numerous ongoing projects or new branch libraries. Nary any awareness that, to date, being poor or homeless per se is not a crime. Tonight, an investigation of greedy diners at soup kitchens.
