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  • 2019-06-24 (xsd:date)
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  • No, Seattle Doesn't Refuse to Hose Poop from Sidewalks Because It's 'Racially Insensitive' (en)
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  • In July 2017, the Seattle Times reported that two judges in King County (Washington) Superior Court had expressed concerns to county officials about the preponderance of crime around the courthouse located at Third Avenue and James Street in Seattle: Although the Times article emphasized the need for reducing crime (and the fear of crime) around the courthouse as the primary problem, of which cleaning up human waste was just one element, many right-leaning websites focused on the sanitation aspect — and one county councilmember's comments in particular. In the middle of the story, the Times quoted Councilmember Larry Gossett as saying that he didn’t like the idea of power-washing the sidewalks because it brought back images of the use of hoses against civil-rights activists. That single line was plucked from its context and used as fodder for articles bearing headlines such as Seattle Councilman: Cleaning Poop Off Sidewalks Is Racist (The Daily Caller) and Seattle Councilman Criticizes Plan to Hose Excrement Off Sidewalks Because It's Racially Insensitive (The Blaze). And Turning Point USA reduced the whole issue to a single meme asserting that the city of Seattle leaves poop on their sidewalks because hosing it off is 'racially insensitive': Of course, none of those right-leaning sources made clear that Gossett didn't actually use either the term racist or racially insensitive, nor did any of them report — as more moderate news outlets did — the full context of Gossett's remarks, which was that he felt merely cleaning up waste would essentially be treating a symptom rather than addressing the larger underlying problem. Tacoma radio station KNKX, for example, observed that: Likewise, the Seattle Times also included that missing context: The Turning Point USA meme was particularly factually egregious in that it fostered the mistaken impression that the issue of sidewalk-cleaning applied to the entirety of Seattle, when in fact the discussion was about the area around a single courthouse. And the meme also wrongly asserted that Seattle leaves poop on its sidewalks, even though contemporaneous reporting made it clear that wasn't true, with the Seattle Times noting that the county’s administrative officer, Caroline Whalen, and the facilities manager assured committee members that a stepped-up schedule of power washing and garbage cleanup [around the courthouse] would begin immediately. The coup de grâce was that the photograph used to illustrate The Blaze's article and Turning Point USA's meme did not picture a scene in Seattle, or Washington state, or anywhere else in the U.S., but rather ... Moscow: (en)
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