The homelessness problem in Oregon and other West Coast cities has again received some unflattering attention on national TV, once more on the Fox News Channel.

In what has become a familiar topic on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the Monday episode featured the host and guests lambasting California, along with Oregon and Washington, for, as Carlson put it, policies that haven’t made things better, but made the problem “worse, consistently, steadily.”

This isn’t the first time the Fox News show has turned its attention to what it calls “the nation’s homeless crisis and the decay of American cities.”

Just last month, for example, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” ran a week’s worth of segments in its “Homeless in America” series.

In addition to Seattle, San Francisco and other West Coast areas, Portland was described as a city where the visiting film crew encountered what they said was a homeless man rifling through a trash can, a syringe in a parking lot, and, as Carlson said, “lots of tents,” and “lots of drugs.”

On Monday, the Fox News Channel host began his show with a monologue about California. Oregon’s neighbor to the south has gone, as Carlson said, from being “the state that made the American dream a reality,” to “a symbol of everything that’s going wrong with this country.”

Carlson’s list of the images associated with California? “Needles and feces in the street, a dying middle class, the country’s highest poverty rate, policies that prioritize illegal aliens over ailing American citizens.”

After denouncing California, the state’s policies and its governor, Gavin Newsom, Carlson then turned to West Coast cities in general, and how they’re failing, in his view, in efforts to address homelessness.

“As we told you in this program last month,” Carlson said, “the three West Coast states of California, Oregon and Washington have more than 100,000 homeless living on the streets on any given night.”

As images of homeless camps, trash, and people sleeping on sidewalks flashed onscreen, Carlson continued, saying that city officials “have blamed low wages, a lack of affordable housing, other factors,” and have “thrown tens of millions of taxpayer dollars at the problem.”

Carlson then introduced a guest who, as the host said, believes that “local governments are ignoring the most obvious driver of homelessness on the West Coast and the rest of the country, and that’s the opioid epidemic.”

Carlson’s guest, Christopher Rufo, a Seattle-based journalist, documentary filmmaker and onetime Seattle City Council candidate (he dropped out, citing threats made against his family), said, “I think that we have an addiction crisis that’s being disguised as a housing crisis.”

Like his fellow primetime Fox News hosts, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, Carlson is a commentator with a conservative point of view. He has criticized other news sources, notably CNN, for having what he considers to be a liberal bias.

Carlson’s guest on Monday’s show, Rufo, has appeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” before, and has been an opinionated presence in Seattle. In a May interview with Seattle’s KUOW public radio, for example, Rufo also talked about homelessness, in an interview bearing the headline, “’Homelessness is now a billion-dollar industry,’ says this Seattle conservative.”

In his appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Monday, Rufo cited statistics that he said support the view that heroin and fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, are coming “directly from Mexican drug cartels” and being shipped through “USPS and commercial mail directly from fentanyl manufacturers in China.”

Carlson asked Rufo why city officials are “resolutely ignoring” what Rufo described as cities like Seattle and Portland sending “truckloads” of cash to Mexican drug cartels, and fentanyl manufacturers in China.

“I think the kind of ideological factions,” as Rufo characterized them, that are in “the dominant position in California, Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington,” don’t “want to say there’s an addiction crisis, because it conflicts with their social justice ideology that the homeless are kind of virtuous victims of an oppressive society. They also want to avoid what they call stigmatizing addiction, so rather than confront the problem with clear eyes, and really digging into it, they’ve chosen to ignore it.”

The segment ended with Carlson making another editorializing statement in response to Rufo’s view of city officials in Oregon, Washington and California.

“They’re liars,” Carlson said, “and ideologues.”

Carlson’s conservative perspective has appealed to loyal Fox News Channel viewers, though others have been critical of his approach.

Media Matters for America, for example, the liberal research organization that tracks and critiques conservative media, recently posted an article that says, “Fox News has recently increased coverage of the problem of homelessness in America’s cities, using the issue as an excuse to chastise Democratic politicians and criticize proposals aimed at helping undocumented immigrants.”

In the June 4 post, Courtney Hagle writes that the Fox News Channel has “painted a grim picture of American cities as ‘almost Third World in their decay,’ facing ‘a complete breakdown of the basic needs of civilization,’ and filled with ‘drugged-out zombies chasing barefooted babies.’ Fox has largely focused on the issue in cities on the West Coast -- mostly focusing on cities in liberal California, with a few segments on Denver; Seattle; and Portland and Eugene, OR. Every city Fox highlighted has at least one thing in common: Democratic leaders. And the problem Fox identified in each city is more or less the same -- the Democratic leaders and their ‘rich friends’ prefer to push ‘social justice initiatives,’ ‘socialist solutions,’ and ‘liberal compassion’ instead of properly addressing mental illness or engaging in punitive crackdowns on homelessness (Fox’s preference).”

Hagle’s piece also says, “Despite the attention Fox has been paying to the issue, the network has been silent about the Trump administration’s lack of serious interest in tackling America’s homelessness crisis.”

The article lists several recent segments about homelessness featured on such Fox News shows as “Hannity,” “The Five,” “Fox & Friends,” “The Ingraham Angle,” and several examples from “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” which, Hagle writes, provide examples of how “Fox plans to make this topic a part of its strategy ahead of 2020 by using the real and serious problem of homelessness to demonize Democrats and fearmonger about socialism.”

-- Kristi Turnquist

kturnquist@oregonian.com 503-221-8227 @Kristiturnquist

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