'CBS Evening News' Ignores Lower Count and Hypes Most Dire Homeless Guesstimate

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Two days after the National Alliance to End Homelessness released its survey which estimated that in January of 2005, “744,313 people experienced homelessness,” the CBS Evening News on Friday picked an earlier, more dire, guesstimate covering an entire year from the group with a self-interest in making homelessness seem as ominous as possible. Introducing an “Assignment America" piece from Steve Hartman on a homeless shelter in Gloucester, Massachusetts that “could be a museum, or at least a bed and breakfast” since it's “350 years old and beautifully restored,” fill-in anchor Russ Mitchell declared, “It's a sad truth: Too many Americans don't have a house to call their own. Over the course of any year, some 600,000 families find themselves homeless, and that includes more than 1.3 million children.” On screen, viewers saw matching numbers attributed to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, but in a study released on Wednesday, the group reported that its month-long survey located “98,452 homeless families."

A page on the group's Web site contends: “Most Americans underestimate how the problem of homelessness affects families. About 600,000 families and 1.35 million children experience homelessness in the United States.”

But for a report released on January 10, “Homeless Counts,” the group used “local point-in-time counts of homeless people to create an estimate of the number of homeless people nationwide. As with all data, the counts included in this report are not perfect and have numerous limitations, but they are the best data available at this time.” The organization determined that “in January 2005, an estimated 744,313 people experienced homelessness” as “59 percent of homeless people counted were single adults and 41 percent were persons living in families. In total, 98,452 homeless families were counted.”