{"id":172215,"date":"2026-02-10T18:48:35","date_gmt":"2026-02-10T18:48:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/172215\/"},"modified":"2026-02-10T18:48:35","modified_gmt":"2026-02-10T18:48:35","slug":"super-bowl-bursts-popular-right-wing-media-myth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/172215\/","title":{"rendered":"Super Bowl bursts popular right-wing media myth"},"content":{"rendered":"

I always thought the idea of San Francisco<\/a> as a dystopian nightmare<\/a> was some kind of bit. An exaggeration made meme, something people said with a wink to signal their politics more than their understanding of reality. I didn\u2019t realize just how many Americans actually believe it so deeply that they could travel across the country, step off a plane and walk through one of the most visually stunning cities on the continent \u2014\u00a0only to be shocked that they were lied to.<\/p>\n

Super Bowl<\/a> visitors who discovered the truth over the weekend got a glimpse behind the curtain of right-wing media manipulation. While the game between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots was played about 40 miles south of San Francisco, much of the NFL\u2019s activities and media opportunities were staged in the city that\u2019s served as conservative media\u2019s favorite punching bag for decades. What right-wing media does exceptionally well is curate reality by looping the same context-free footage<\/a>. With former Speaker of the House \u2014 and San Francisco resident \u2014 Nancy Pelosi<\/a> serving as a convenient caricature of liberal elites, Fox News<\/a>, MAGA<\/a> talk radio and right-wing social media influencers have relentlessly portrayed the city as a dystopian hellscape of human feces, discarded needles, rampant crime and zombie-like drug addicts stumbling through streets abandoned by anyone with sense or resources.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Eventually, mainstream outlets \u2014 afraid of being accused of bias \u2014 often start to treat such right-wing narrative as a legitimate debate. If we\u2019re lucky, the actual truth one day emerges, but by then the false portrayal has already done its damage, shaping policy debates and even electoral outcomes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The collective cognitive dissonance on display in San Francisco during Super Bowl LX exposed how warped many American\u2019s perceptions of our greatest cities are.<\/p>\n

The collective cognitive dissonance on display in San Francisco during Super Bowl LX exposed how warped many American\u2019s perceptions of our greatest cities are.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no denying that San Francisco faces serious challenges. Anyone who actually lives there \u2014 or has lived there, as I have \u2014 knows that. Wealth inequality is glaring<\/a>. Housing costs are obscene<\/a>. The fentanyl crisis is real<\/a>. The pandemic greatly exacerbated existing fractures and hollowed out<\/a> downtown retail.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s the part that the propaganda machine depends on people not understanding: None of these problems are unique to San Francisco, and none of them tell the whole story of the place.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If the city were truly the apocalyptic hellscape it\u2019s been portrayed as by conservative media over the last decade, why would the NFL \u2014 one of the most brand-conscious, risk-averse organizations on earth \u2014 stage its biggest week of the year there?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Scroll through social media and you\u2019ll find NFL reporters and podcast bros posting video after video of themselves walking through San Francisco in disbelief.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, who has spent years cultivating an audience that overlaps heavily with conservative media consumers, took his followers on a pizza tour of the city and surrounding areas, ultimately crowning a spot in Oakland as the best. Jake Malasek, the company\u2019s content creator who was visiting from Florida, tweeted<\/a> his surprise: \u201cI may have been too harsh on San Francisco in terms of its beauty. This is pretty sweet.\u201d Senior Barstool producer TJ Hitchings was effusive about the city\u2019s iconic Tonga Room, calling<\/a> it \u201cthe best bar I\u2019ve ever been to in my life.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Perhaps most striking was the conversion of Pat McAfee, the ESPN host whose show caters to a young, predominantly male audience. During his first national broadcast from San Francisco, McAfee was candid about his expectations<\/a>: \u201cWhat we thought we were walking into here was, uh, a dump. It\u2019s not at all. It was a beautiful walk this morning.\u201d He elaborated during an interview with San Francisco 49ers legend Joe Montana. \u201cWe were so surprised by what we had been told and expected versus when we walk through the streets and got here,\u201d McAfee said. \u201cThe buildings are beautiful. There are so many hills, there were people running, it was a very active city. It felt like, I\u2019d not known this about San Francisco.\u201d<\/p>\n

California Gov. Gavin Newsom tweeted<\/a> the ESPN host\u2019s comments approvingly, recognizing the rare opportunity for actual reality to puncture the bubble of manufactured perception.<\/p>\n

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter<\/a>, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But not everyone got the memo. Boston radio hosts Michael Felger and Tony Massarotti still described<\/a> San Francisco as a \u201czombie apocalypse,\u201d likening it to the \u201cMad Max\u201d films. When confronted with reality, some people update their beliefs. Others double down because the myth is more useful to them than the truth. Felger and Massarotti\u2019s resistance to reality, even in the face of direct contradictory evidence, speaks to how deeply these narratives have been internalized on a broader scale.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Cities across America, regardless of their political orientation, are grappling with similar crises as those experienced by San Francisco. The opioid epidemic continues to ravage red and blue states alike. From Los Angeles to Phoenix to Austin to Atlanta, homelessness has become a national emergency. But San Francisco is arguably the most liberal major city in the United States \u2014\u00a0and that is precisely why it\u2019s been turned into a boogeyman.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Right-wing commentators need liberal governance to fail spectacularly in the public imagination; their entire political project depends on convincing people that collective solutions don\u2019t work. If San Francisco can be reduced to a cautionary tale, then universal healthcare, housing investment, addiction treatment and worker protections can also be dismissed with a sneer: \u201cDo you want your town to become like that?\u201d<\/p>\n

The narrative gives them permission to feel that their communities, despite confronting their own struggles with economic decline, opioid addiction and lack of opportunity, are morally and practically supreme to degenerate liberal cities.<\/p>\n

This mythology serves another purpose for Donald Trump<\/a>\u2018s MAGA coalition: It allows them to maintain a sense of superiority among conservatives in small-town and rural America. The narrative gives them permission to feel that their communities, despite confronting their own struggles with economic decline, opioid addiction and lack of opportunity, are morally and practically supreme to degenerate liberal cities. Never mind that many small towns now have higher per-capita crime rates than San Francisco. Never mind that the romanticized vision of Mayberry hasn\u2019t existed for decades, if it ever did. The comparison isn\u2019t based on facts; it\u2019s based on the comfort of believing that one\u2019s own political tribe has the answers while the other side\u2019s policies inevitably lead to ruin.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s wild is how fragile the myth turns out to be. Super Bowl LX forced a confrontation between a false narrative and reality in a way that political discourse rarely allows. Sports media figures and podcast bros couldn\u2019t simply dismiss San Francisco sight unseen because they had to be there for their jobs. And once there, the gap between what they\u2019d been told and what they actually experienced was too large to ignore. You can\u2019t Fox News your way past a beautiful morning walk. Some, to their credit, publicly acknowledged their surprise.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a Californian by birth. I\u2019ve spent years of my life in the Bay Area. I know its flaws intimately. I also know why people all over the world want to live there, why it\u2019s expensive and why it inspires such fierce loyalty. The reasons are not despite the city\u2019s progressiveness; they are intertwined with it. San Francisco\u2019s openness, creativity and diversity, and its dogged insistence on trying to build a society that takes care of more than just the winners, are its very strengths.<\/p>\n

Members of the right-wing media aren\u2019t dumb \u2014 they understand the power of cities, which is why they spend so much time trying to destroy them symbolically. Cities are where diversity is unavoidable and where art is cultivated. Where people see, up close, that difference isn\u2019t dangerous. That\u2019s why they must be caricatured. That\u2019s why California, in particular, must be turned into a national warning label.<\/p>\n

This won\u2019t be the last time. The World Cup is coming this year<\/a>. The Olympics will be held in Los Angeles<\/a> in 2028. On Monday, the NFL announced that L.A. will also host next year\u2019s Super Bowl<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Millions of visitors are going to experience American cities that they\u2019ve been told are unlivable wastelands. They\u2019re going to see that Seattle didn\u2019t burn to the ground. That Portland still exists. That antifa did not, in fact, take over the charred remains of the West Coast. They\u2019re going to see vibrant, complicated, imperfect places that are nonetheless worth loving and defending.<\/p>\n

Read more<\/p>\n

about right-wing media<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I always thought the idea of San Francisco as a dystopian nightmare was some kind of bit. An…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":172216,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-172215","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-francisco","8":"tag-san-francisco","9":"tag-san-francisco-headlines","10":"tag-san-francisco-news","11":"tag-sf","12":"tag-sf-headlines","13":"tag-sf-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172215\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}