San Francisco has a significant picture drawback
Read a few national and even international headlines and you can see it: San Francisco has an image problem.
It’s not just conservative media that’s beating the city. The New York Times, the Economist, and even UK-based publications like the Independent and Sunday Times have recently published reports on the state of San Francisco, ranging from its highly visible housing problems to its shoplifting problems.
“Why the City of San Francisco Is So Dysfunctional,” reads a headline in The Economist. “Crime is generally legal in San Francisco,” reads another Daily Mail headline. The New York Times, meanwhile, just ran an article stating that “the mundane crime of shoplifting in San Francisco has spiraled out of control, forcing some chain stores to close.” (SFGATE has published a more detailed examination of this claim.)
Ian Davis, professor of media studies at UC Berkeley, told SFGATE: “Yes, San Francisco’s progressive image in American thought makes it a prime target for criticism from conservatives. It often functions as a symbol of liberal or democratic politics.”
Indeed, a cursory search of last week’s Fox News headlines reveals an apparent trend in coverage. “San Francisco families ‘feel unsafe’ and hire private security amid crime wave,” read a headline published last week. On the same day, the media site published an article that read, “San Francisco prosecutors exit progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin’s office and join recall efforts.”
Davis quoted a 2019 Fox News story about the homeless crisis, which he believes he directly named: “In the summer of 2019, Fox News embarked on an ambitious project to chronicle the toll progressive politics is taking on the homeless crisis in four years had cities on the west coast: Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Portland, Ore. ‘ says a note at the beginning of the story.
“All fair points about the failure of housing policy aside, the Fox article presents the issue as a failure of the ‘Democrats’ and progressive ideology that SF symbolizes in the American imagination,” he said.
“In stories like this, the city is used as a symbol of progressive policy failure,” he continued. “The city is a character in a narrative that confirms the correctness of conservative politics. Selected quotes also allow the reader to see the problem of the homeless through the eyes of those who are harassed and made uncomfortable by the ‘scary’ people on the street.”
The problem of biased media is a historical problem. Davis said that “up until the 1980s, Americans lived in a low-choice media environment,” which “had the benefit of getting Americans on the same page about the big issues we faced as a nation.”
“Scholars and journalists could make out something of a unified mainstream public debate,” he explained.
But in the current high-choice media environment, a paradox has emerged.
“The variety of perspectives available should be more democratic and empowering, but paradoxically, the high-choice media environment allowed us to isolate ourselves from opposing views and information,” Davis said.
Twentieth-century journalists viewed news as “a sort of schoolhouse that offers information to encourage educated voting and self-government,” he said, noting that “the twenty-first century has changed the role of news in public life.”
“The schoolhouse metaphor has given way to another metaphor: the church. Americans are increasingly using news to support a shared ideological belief,” he said. “Conservatives look to Tucker Carlson to confirm Nancy Pelosi’s evils and deplore the dangers of ‘creeping socialism.’ MSNBC viewers are tuning in to see if Trump will be indicted for his role in the Capitol riots following Biden’s election.”
“In many ways, our choice of news is a choice of worldview,” he continued. “Believers don’t go to church to learn something new about what happened to Jesus. You participate in a community of values.”
In an interview with SFGATE, Sam Singer, one of San Francisco’s top communications strategists, approached San Francisco’s image problem from a PR perspective. A former journalist, Singer has worked with Chevron, Airbnb, Disney, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others (SFGATE and the San Francisco Chronicle are both owned by Hearst but operate independently).
“Perception is reality,” he said.
Singer believes San Francisco’s image in the media and beyond “lies somewhere between ‘The Wire’ and ‘Squid Game.'”
“San Francisco has an ingrained and significant image and reputation problem,” he said. “Actually, I would say that the city is in crisis mode.”
Singer said San Francisco’s publicized corruption problems at City Hall and the Building Control Board are contributing to the city’s reputation. He noted what he called the city’s unwillingness to arrest and prosecute criminals, leading to viral videos showing thieves running out of Walgreens with their loot or ripping up Neiman-Marcus with stolen designer purses. (The Mayor’s Office and Chamber of Commerce did not respond to SFGATE’s request for comment.)
Singer also said the city’s housing shortage, evidenced by visible homelessness, makes San Francisco feel inhospitable to tourists and locals alike.
“You see a post-pandemic city that has a pandemic of mental health issues, substance abuse, crime and corruption. And the city has to start addressing those issues or it’s going to keep falling behind,” he said.
Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness, spoke out against Singer.
“Homelessness is not a PR issue,” she told SFGATE. “It’s a poverty problem. It’s about racism. And it’s an issue of disability and homophobia. These are huge systemic issues that need to be corrected.”
For Friedenbach, the question isn’t necessarily why San Francisco has such a serious homelessness problem, but rather why such a prosperous city has such poverty.
“I keep hearing from many visitors, ‘Why don’t you have guaranteed accommodation?’ And it’s a great question because almost every other westernized country does it,” she said.
While viral videos like the ones mentioned above are fueling the perception that crime is on the rise in San Francisco, that’s not exactly the case, according to crime statistics.
At a news conference in July, San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott noted that there were no cases of rape, robbery and theft in San Francisco. Homicides and serious assaults were fairly stable between 2015 and 2021, but the number of gun violence victims nearly doubled in 2021 compared to the previous two years.
Crimes involving motor vehicles, including burglaries and thefts, have both seen increases since 2020. Scott also noted that burglaries in general increased in 2020 and 2021.
“There’s a lot of misinformation out there in San Francisco,” Scott said. “But at the end of the day, we need to use that data to make decisions about our policies and our investments.”
A rise in certain crimes is not a problem unique to San Francisco. New York and Los Angeles, among others, have also seen a surge in pandemic-era crime, according to local media and police departments.
But for many, the question remains: How does San Francisco make its image?
From the point of view of PR expert Singer, the city must first admit to its problems.
“Anyone who makes their money in communications, PR, reputation management or crisis communications will not try to tell you to sweep the issues under the rug,” he said. “You have a problem and you have to act.”
He said he will urge the mayor “not only to declare a crisis on the streets of San Francisco, but also on theft and petty crime.”
In Singer’s opinion, the city also needs to increase “accountability for results from city officials and nonprofit organizations” and develop not only a better communications plan, but also an operational plan.
All big cities have problems, and sometimes conspicuous ones. But as we who live here know, these issues go well beyond the realm of PR. Can San Francisco adjust its image to reflect the reality of life here? We will see. The problem, as Friedenbach noted, is deadlocked.
“I think San Francisco is being used as a symbol of a progressive left city by conservative interests that are grossly exaggerating the situation here,” she said.
