On October 12, Fox News Digital published Republican governor candidate Steve Hilton’s October 9 walk through Skid Row, the day after agents arrested 23 people charged with drug trafficking there. Its headline calls the neighborhood a “hellscape”. Read the headline as a sentence and count its actors: “unlikely critics” who “blast”, “Dems” who are blasted, a “GOP hopeful” who “tours”. The people who live on Skid Row never act. They arrive as a place, “homeless hellscape”, the hard word for a neighborhood where the county counted 4,400 homeless people in 2022, 2,695 without shelter. Four days earlier, NBC Los Angeles wrote of dealers “‘preying’ on homeless people”. Same street, same week: there they were the harmed. Here they are the proof. Lower down, the page says what its headline leaves out. The “unlikely critics” first appear in the 19th paragraph: Venus, a volunteer, then Adrian, who lives there and credits the Skid Row Care Campus. The story says Mayor Karen Bass helped announce the arrests, and prints no reply from Becerra or Bass. Prosecutors say most of the 20 homes searched were outside Skid Row, and the complaint alleges the dealers’ tents were not lived in; one defendant, it says, drove to his in a Bentley or a Mercedes. The tell is the people a story is about appearing only as its scenery, never as the subject of a verb. The headline rides the habit by which one worst block stands in for the whole record: the bad outweighs the good. Fox’s own video headline a day earlier said it plainly: “Steve Hilton tours LA’s Skid Row, criticizes California’s handling of homelessness”. Published 22 days before the vote, the longer line hands the scene to a candidate the story calls “a former Fox News host”, and the disgust to his opponent’s party.
