FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
“Locked into our entire social welfare and social science apparatus is the idea that poverty consists in the character traits or the demographic traits or even just the income traits of individuals.”
We talk about the limits of how we talk about poverty with Alice O’Connor. She’s a professor of history at the University of California/Santa Barbara and author of Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in 20th Century US History.
“Our society is generating poverty and inequality, and generating it way more for low-income women of color than it is for anybody else.”
We’re told we’re in a moment of reconsideration, perhaps, of the notion that depriving needy people of assistance would lead to their gainful employment and well-being. A true reconsideration of the 1990s welfare overhaul would require a so-far invisible recentering of the people in its crosshairs: low-income women, particularly mothers raising children on their own.
Vox reported on FAIR’s research on the lack of questions on poverty in the Democratic debates: “The moderators of the Democratic presidential debates did not ask a single question about poverty in any of the nine contests held over seven months, according to a new report released Friday.”
Over 45 million Americans live in poverty—but you wouldn’t think potential leaders of the country are expected to know or care anything about this, listening to the questions asked by the elite journalists who moderated the Democratic debates this primary season. A FAIR analysis of all nine democratic debates over the past seven months shows that not one question was asked about poverty.
Noting all the new construction taking place downtown and then asking “Will it work?” shows a stunning misunderstanding of what redevelopment is supposed to accomplish
AlterNet associate editor (and frequent FAIR contributor) Adam Johnson cited FAIR’s research on media and poverty: Bringing up the issue of poverty to the debates’ sizable audience isn’t superficial: a 2012 study by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting found that cable news mentions of key topics like inequality were inextricably linked to their coverage of […]
In America, as a rule, we shame the poor, ignore the poor, blame the poor for being poor, mock the poor and do little to nothing to protect the poor. Increasingly, however, a new trend has emerged: using the poor as props in shoddy “inspirational” viral content.
Last week I rolled up to 7 World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan for a “Quality of Life Panel” hosted by the Manhattan Institute, one of the city’s most influential conservative think tanks.
“Fox News is one of the leading offenders in terms of advancing narratives and myths and misperceptions that really can end up being the basis for terrible policy, that hurt…everyone but those at the top of the income ladder.”
The growing number of people, many with jobs, relying on some form of aid isn’t enough to shake the notion that economic need is something you can shame people out of. And media recite the protests of polluting industries without interrogating them.
Democrats: Pro-Bombing Softies Under the headline “The Ultimate Argument in Favor of the Iran Deal: The Agreement Would Make It Easier to Bomb Iran,” Politico (8/24/15) reported that “the pact would make it easier to bomb Iran, administration officials have told lawmakers.” Two days later, in a story on Senate campaigns, Politico (8/26/15) was reporting […]
Janine Jackson interviewed professor Felicia Kornbluh on the legacy of “welfare reform” for the August 28 CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
The impression many Americans hold is that people are on welfare because they are lazy. Corporate media often propagate this myth, failing to acknowledge scientific studies that show that most people on welfare live in working households.
CIS does not provide a comparison of the cost of welfare going to immigrant and non-immigrant households–presumably because such a comparison would have weakened its anti-immigrant case.
Elite media, having championed hard for the dismantling of the safety net known as “welfare reform,” were markedly less interested in tracking the human fallout.
Instead of stressing cuts to poverty programs as a way to balance the budget, Ryan was now pushing them as a way to tackle poverty. This, in the eyes of many news outlets, was a welcome shift toward “bipartisanship.”
Paul Ryan says he wants to fight poverty, and he can convince reporters that he means it. But what about his actual record?
This week on CounterSpin: The 50th anniversary of the launch of LBJ’s War on Poverty is generating a lot of press coverage of an issue corporate media tend to mostly ignore. But what’s missing from these conservations? We’ll ask author and professor Stephen Pimpare.
Also on CounterSpin today, In the wake of successful marijuana decriminalization efforts in Colorado and Washington state, pundit opponents of pot are forcefully objecting. New York Times columnist David Brooks says he smoked when he was young, and it wasn’t so bad, but let’s continue to criminalize it; and Fox’s Bill O’Reilly says marijuana, texting, and video games are sending our youth down an escapist road to ruin. We’ll be joined by Columbia University neuroscientist Dr. Carl Hart, for a very different view.
