Abstract
The homeless population of San Francisco attracts a significant amount of media attention from both local media, but especially from national media outlets. In comparison with other west coast cities such as Seattle and San Diego, San Francisco does not have much larger homeless population. The effects of receiving more media attention are hard to quantify, but is there a noted difference in how San Francisco is covered from these other cities? This study seeks to answer if San Francisco is truly the standard bearer for homelessness and how its media coverage is different than that of Seattle and San Diego. In order to answer that question, this study used a content analysis method and took articles from the three largest daily newspapers: The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, looking for common underlying themes within the articles. Then all articles concerning the three cities and homelessness and collated. Using media framing techniques suggested by the media framing literature, I then broke down the different types of coverage received by all three cities. The results showed San Francisco did receive more media coverage then Seattle and San Diego, but that extra received coverage was more elaborate and covered San Francisco in more detail and used a greater variety of frames, while Seattle and San Diego’s homeless population usually needed to be about criminal activity to reach any of three selected newspapers.