9/6/07
The Poor Will Always Be With UsJust not on the TV newsBy
Steve Rendall and
Neil deMauseThe PDF version of the study is available
here.
According to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data, 37 million Americans—one in eight—lived below the federal poverty line in 2005, defined as an annual income of $19,971 for a family of four. Yet poverty touches a far greater share of the population over the course of their lives: A 1997 study by University of Michigan economist Rebecca Blank found that one-third of all U.S. residents will experience government-defined poverty within a 13-year period. The poorest age group is children, with more than one in six living in official poverty at any given time.
Moreover, the poverty line itself, which hasn’t been changed in almost four decades except to account for inflation, has been widely criticized as an antiquated measure of actual levels of need. Mark Greenberg, director of the Task Force on Poverty at the Center for American Progress, wrote in the American Prospect in April 2007:
Studies of a minimally decent standard of living routinely find that the typical cost is twice as high as the poverty line or higher. Ninety million Americans—nearly one-third of the nation—have household incomes below twice the poverty line, a figure far larger than the official number of 37 million in poverty.
And concern about poverty and inequality, of course, goes beyond those directly affected. According to a public opinion survey by Syracuse University, in 2006, after the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe momentarily placed poverty on the national news agenda, 52 percent of poll respondents called income inequality “a serious problem.” Even the year before Katrina, though, 38 percent of those polled found income inequality “a serious problem” (another 43 percent calling it “somewhat of a problem”).
Moreover, books and television programs delving into the lives of the poor have found notable success in recent years. Barbara Ehrenreich’s book
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, about living as a low-income worker in America, spent over two years on the New York Times bestseller list.
Waging a Living, a documentary about the working poor aired on PBS’s POV series (8/29/06), sparked dozens of screenings and discussion groups across the country. The film’s producer, Roger Weisberg, told Extra! that
Waging a Living generated “more excitement and community engagement than my previous 25 productions.”
Yet despite being an issue that directly or indirectly affects a huge chunk of the U.S. population, poverty and inequality receive astonishingly little coverage on nightly network newscasts. An exhaustive search of weeknight news broadcasts on CBS, NBC and ABC found that with rare exceptions, such as the aftermath of Katrina, poverty and the poor seldom even appear on the evening news—and when they do, they are relegated mostly to merely speaking in platitudes about their hardships.
Methodology and findingsFAIR’s study examined the three weeknight network newscasts—ABC World News, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News—over a 38-month period (9/11/03– 10/30/06). We considered every story mentioning the words “poverty,” “low income,” “homeless,” “welfare” or “food stamps,” compiling a list of all stories that dealt with issues of poverty in more than a passing manner.
It was a short list. During the more than three years studied, there were just 58 stories about poverty on the three network newscasts, including just 191 quoted sources.
(snip)
How are the poor represented?In a handful of stories—primarily on CBS—poverty issues were discussed solely by experts, with no poor people appearing on-screen at all. A CBS story (2/7/05) on George W. Bush’s proposed budget cuts to both farm aid and block grants to fight hunger and homelessness quoted solely elected officials, think tankers and executives of food banks. Another CBS story on problems with the new Medicare prescription drug plan (1/16/06) cited only the Republican governor of Minnesota (who was concerned) and U.S. Health and Human Services secretary Michael Leavitt (who wasn’t); one on the push for an increase in state minimum-wage laws (6/27/06) interviewed several ACORN activists behind the campaign, but no actual minimum-wage workers. (Advocates for the poor, such as ACORN and food bank officials, are an important part of the discussion, but they can’t substitute for the perspectives of those who actually live in poverty.)
(snip)
Special occasionsOverall, both the scarcity and the content of network news coverage conveys the sense that poverty is a problem mostly to be worried about on holidays, when it affects those whose poverty is considered shameful, or during natural disasters. (Twenty-four of the 57 stories in the study period ran during the six months immediately following Hurricane Katrina—during the other 32 months, barely one network news segment a month so much as mentioned poverty or the needy.)
And efforts by the poor themselves to better their lot or affect public policy were almost entirely absent: Three segments of NBC’s “Making a Difference” series (11/15/05, 12/2/05, 3/15/06), for example, all focused on charity workers’ efforts on behalf of the poor—profiling a Philadelphia nun who fights homelessness (11/15/05), for example, rather than someone from that city’s 14-year-old Kensington Welfare Rights Union, one of the nation’s longest-running organizations made up of low-income residents.
(snip)
Neglecting the afflictedWhat FAIR’s study cannot do is show why network journalists assign such a low priority to stories that affect so many. For that we must rely on the journalists themselves, many of whom tell us that the poverty narrative is neither compelling nor good for business, as advertisers aren’t fond of negative stories.
Unlike the powerful sources who are overrepresented on the nightly news, the poor don’t have public relations staffs or corporate communications offices. They are left to depend on the increasingly quaint journalistic ideals that once implored journalists to be champions of society’s underdogs and to comfort the afflicted.
As news seems to be redefining itself as a service for those in upscale demographics, as network news shows find new reasons to avoid covering the powerless, it’s important to remember that the American public is indeed interested in poverty.
Indeed, one “top tier” Democratic presidential contender has built a campaign around poverty, which has caused a flurry of reports suggesting “class warfare” is afoot in the Democratic Party (New York Times, 7/16/07; L. A. Times, 5/28/07). But as John Edwards has traveled around the country campaigning on the issue, he has answered repeated questions from journalists and others about why he thinks poverty is a winning political issue with a response that seems to stun some reporters in its simplicity: “I don’t know that it is. This is not a political strategy. It’s a huge moral issue facing America.”
Those are words that public-minded nightly news executives, producers and reporters ought to take to heart.
Research assistance provided by Matt Briere, Bojin Traykov, Zach Taber and Harrison Magee.http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3172
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