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Racial nature of poverty newsMainstream news skews minority poverty figuresPoverty is shown to be an issue for new immigrants and minorities in the United States and Canada due to mainstream media coverage of those on welfare & the working poor.
The problematic coverage of poverty can be seen with regards to race and ethnicity: in North America, there is a mistaken view that those who live in poverty are not only female, but also non-white. When news outlets do cover poverty issues, too often the racial makeup of the poor is exaggerated. In many different studies of news content, researchers have found that the press is very likely to show those who live in poverty as being a certain race and a certain age. Associating young women of colour with poverty has been going on for many years. President Reagan famously named these women ‘welfare queens’ and blamed them for giving welfare recipients a bad name. Even before Reagan, however, the idea that the poor were ‘the other’ was prevalent. So-called ‘middle America’ has been shown by newspapers and television that those who are poor, likely deserve to be this way. African-Americans are shown to be welfare recipients in newspaper articles and pictures far more than is indicative of reality. In Canada, the situation closely resembles that of the United States: our newspapers distort the number of ethnic minorities living in poverty as compared to those who are white who live below the poverty line. It is not simply a matter of overestimating the number of ethnic minority residents who live in poverty though, that proves to be problematic. Stories about immigrants who are working, and yet still not making enough to live upon, are very rare, as are stories about dismal conditions in which so many new Canadians and Americans are forced to live. In both Canada and the United States, many poor individuals of color live in urban neighborhoods. These neighborhoods often have high levels of violence and crime, and these types of stories do make the news on a regular basis, especially when these stories are about young men of ethnic minorities perpetuating violence against innocents. When middle-class readers and viewers hear and read about the situations in these neighborhoods, the image of poverty becomes further ‘othered’. These neighborhoods do not resemble their suburban lives, and those living on poverty are further marginalized. The urban neighborhood image of poverty is often associated more closely with men of color, but women who live in these settings are certainly stigmatized as well.
The copyright of the article Racial nature of poverty news in Newspaper Journalism is owned by Kate Butler. Permission to republish Racial nature of poverty news in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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