Dori: Beware of news outlets spinning PR responses to ‘Seattle is Dying’

Eric Johnson at KOMO 4 told us that right after “Seattle is Dying,” that media outlets would slam the TV station for its documentary about homelessness and crime.

And sure enough, plenty of news sources strongly criticized “Seattle is Dying” in the weeks after it premiered.

The thing is, some of these media outlets are funded by the same community stakeholders, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, that signed onto a letter stating that things are not as bad as the KOMO special would have us believe.

What Eric Johnson said is weird is that all these stakeholders, philanthropists, and government officials have hired a PR agency to produce a counter-offensive to tell us that things not as bad as we all know that they are on the streets of Seattle.

RELATED: Why are Bill and Melinda Gates sponsoring this bogus homelessness poll?

Johnson told us to look for op-eds and even news coverage in the coming weeks that would essentially act as a cheerleader for the city and the county government. And sure enough, he was right. We’re starting to see those articles now.

A headline in The Seattle Times on Friday reads, “King County homeless count drops for the first time since 2012,” and I’m seeing that same report on all the TV stations as well. This is exactly what Eric Johnson told us was coming down the pipeline. This is the media colluding with government to tell us that things are not as bad on the streets as they quite obviously are.

When the media is the lapdog of government instead of the watchdog, that is a dangerous, dangerous time.

And when we find out that some websites that are supposedly journalistic are funded by same the philanthropic organizations that are part of this homelessness-industrial complex, we have to be very careful as news consumers.

We’re going to get a lot of stuff that news outlets will try to spoon-feed us that is part of a PR campaign, not a reflection of reality.

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