A People’s History of Poverty in America author Stephen Pimpare answers Amy Goodman’s question (Democracy Now!, 11/25/08) of “what about the way the media conveys” poverty in the U.S.?:
Well, when there is any attention to poor Americans at all, it tends to be fairly predictable. There was a study done in late 2007 by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting of coverage in the major network news broadcasts of stories about poverty, food stamps and homeless. And what they discovered again and again in other studies is that when poor Americans appear in mainstream media stories, they are brought forth in order to tell generic stories of suffering, in the language that FAIR uses. But when we are then turning to what to do about it, poverty, we turn our attention to, well, people that look like me. Academics, middle-class, well-to-do white men, policy experts, elected officials. We discount the possibility those very people we identify for their suffering might have particularly useful knowledge about what solutions might look like.
Read the FAIR Study in our magazine Extra!: “The Poor Will Always Be With Us–Just Not on the TV News” (9-10/07) by Neil deMause & Steve Rendall
