Portraying Poverty in the News

Media outlets represent the poor as essentially different

Feb 3, 2007 Kate Butler

The mainstream media presents those who live in poverty as being inherently different from the rest of society by creating artificial divisions and dissimilarities

In North America alone, millions of individuals live in conditions that we consider to be below the poverty line. However, for many of us, poverty is an affliction that seems rather foreign. Few stories about issues surrounding the debate on poverty make it to the mainstream, and when articles about those living in poverty do appear, these stories are too often negative and have no contextual information.

There are three main reasons why poverty issues do not receive much attention, or positive coverage: the feminization and racialization of poverty in the media, the complexity of the issue itself, and the unpopular nature of these types of stories with elites in society. In this opening article on poverty in the media, we will examine the first of the above-mentioned reasons.

The first reason for the lack of stories about the poor has to do with how those living in poverty are portrayed. Living below the poverty line is increasingly shown as being fundamentally different than living a middle-class existence. When stories about the poor do appear, often individuals in these stories are seen as ‘the other’. By ‘othering’ the poor, newspapers further distance readers from those living in these conditions.

In examining why poverty issues are so often couched in terms of ‘the other’, it is essential to recognize the gendered and racial nature of the issue: poverty is not an equal opportunity hardship, but the extent to which it is portrayed as being an affliction suffered mainly by women or people of color is exaggerated by the media. Although women, along with ethic minorities, are more likely to live below the poverty line than are men, the media take this reality to mean that portrayals of poverty ought to focus exclusively on these groups of people.

This is not to say that men, or even white men, are never shown to be poor: in fact, white men who have a drug or alcohol addiction or mental illness are often portrayed in the mainstream press. However, these troubled men are seen by the middle-class reader of the paper to be essentially different from them, in much the same way that poor single mothers, and new immigrants to North America are different. The ‘othering’ of the poor, therefore, certainly includes white men; however, these white men are almost always shown to have a serious affliction that makes them undeniably different.

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