Homeless Coverage in the New Millennium: Narratives on Homelessness in the Media in Toronto in 1998 and 2023


Valentina Ornelas, Wilfrid Laurier University

The Ciy of Toronto has the distinction of being the most populous city in Canada, as well as the one with the greatest number of homeless individuals. Toronto residents, for the most part, learn about homelessness through their own observations and through media outlets (Krewski et al., 2006). It is important to investigate how the media portrays homelessness, as this can influence the public’s opinion about this topic. The depiction of homelessness and the influence of media representation on public opinion can convey signals about the reasons for homelessness that may deviate from the actual root causes of the issue. Only two times in the past 25 years, in 1998 and 2023, has the City of Toronto declared homelessness an emergency. This research will investigate how media outlets have framed homelessness in Toronto, ON, at two crisis points: prior to the emergency declarations of homelessness made by the municipal government in 1998 and 2023. This project will compare coverage from two national news media sources, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and the National Post, in the six months prior to the emergency declarations, to determine whether the two media outlets take on different ideological stances on the topic of homelessness, as well as explore the dominant framings of homelessness in each publication. The six months prior to the emergency declarations were chosen, as this time period provides a window into the news media discourse at the time when policymakers were considering making a declaration. This research project will employ content analysis as its methodology to determine how the media represents the topic of homelessness and the perceptions of the public. To develop frames specific to media coverage of homelessness in Toronto, I will undertake several steps. First, I will establish what the literature identifies as some common themes under each frame type—thematic, deviant, solution, and episodic—concerning media coverage of homelessness. Next, I will randomly select ten articles from the subset of articles being analyzed and apply the preliminary frames and themes, developed through exploration of the literature, to test their appropriateness and applicability for each frame. Then, the themes associated with each frame will be modified based on this initial analysis and applied to the rest of the data set. As articles are analyzed, further adjustments and/or new additions to the themes may be made to ensure the analytical framework captures the major currents of discussion. Once all articles are analyzed, I will explore both the frequency with which each frame is used in the National Post and CBC’s coverage in both 1998 and 2023, as well as the substantive thematic content of each frame, paying attention to similarities and differences. I will then use these findings as a basis to support potential explanations for these differences, rooted in the literature on news media framing and homelessness, for example, the changing social context of homelessness between 1998 and 2023 and/or the ideological orientation of the news media sources. I anticipate the findings from this research, which I will share in this conference presentation, will help us explore the impact of media representation on public awareness and policy responses, which, in turn, offer critical insights into how early media portrayal may influence or prefigure subsequent emergency policy measures and societal attitudes towards homelessness within the City of Toronto.

Non-presenting author: Laura Pin, Wilfrid Laurier University

This paper will be presented at the following session: