K ILL LIST
Breathless election night coverage before the polls close CNN, on Election Day 2020, seemed intent on blowing out viewers’ synapses no matter how few votes had been counted. Wolf Blitzer and John King colored in states on their “magic wall” and threw out “Key Race Alerts” (sponsored by Calm, a sleep and meditation app). Into the early morning, the outcome remained unknown, yet the intensity stayed high.
CJR
the city saw record-breaking home prices, displacement, and street homelessness. Yet Murray called Amazon’s hiring frenzy “a great problem to have.” By the summer of 2018, journalists in Seattle were connecting the dots and had decided to cooperate on an official “day of homelessness.” Four outlets—Crosscut/KCTS 9, a nonprofit digital newsroom and public TV station; KUOW public radio; Seattlepi.com; and the Seattle Times—shared data and coordinated #SeaHomeless reporting; the Seattle Times subsequently created a Project Homeless team. “The idea was, ‘We need to elevate this issue—we’re going to do this to bring it to politicians’ attention,’ ” David Kroman, a reporter at Crosscut, told me. “Real Change had been doing it this whole time, so it felt like the larger media landscape was catching up to them.” Ashley Archibald was the primary reporter for Real Change at the time. She broke several important stories, including one on a streetoutreach group that cut ties with Seattle police because of how officers carried out sweeps and pushed people into emergency shelters. She also wrote about how Amazon and other businesses were likely to use loopholes to circumvent a proposed progressive tax. “Any scoops I got were almost certainly due to the fact that Real Change is very close to the ground,” Archibald said. But the implications of this proximity were understood differently throughout the office. As “the homelessness problem” became increasingly equated with sweeps, young employees clashed with Harris, who turns sixty-one at the end of September and viewed sweeps as a compromise in the trade-off for shelter. “The way I put this is, I’m not for people’s right to live in squalor,” he told me. His colleagues were vocal in their disagreement; Real Change published op-eds by local activists opposing street evictions without exception. “There were serious tensions between the old-guard homeless-advocacy community that was about expanding services and finding a middle path, and the harder socialist left that was represented by people like Kshama Sawant,” he said. According to Harris, the debate over the Compassion Seattle amendment has been the latest proof of a polarized community. Business groups and social services agencies behind the proposal argued that it would bake a minimum level of homelessness funding into the city budget and create two thousand emergency housing units. Their opponents, rallied in large part by Real Change’s advocacy department, called the amendment an unfunded mandate to encourage sweeps and prioritize shelter beds over permanent, affordable housing. “I am absolutely in agreement with Real Change that we are opposing Compassion Seattle,” Sawant told me. “It is not compassionate at all.” (She made the same point in an op-ed in The Stranger, noting that the amendment was funded by real estate money.) Harris, a supporter of Compassion Seattle, found himself awkwardly in league with Tim Burgess, a former city council member who, in heavily left Seattle, counts as a conservative. Back in 2010, Harris and Real Change went to war with Burgess over an ordinance that was widely perceived as criminalizing panhandling—and won a mayoral veto. (Real Change was “almost always pretty harsh on me, both the editorial and the news side,” Burgess said. Nevertheless, he added, “I read it, and people in my office read it, because it offered
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