How the poor are largely erased from media: an introduction

The poor is a social group that suffers in two large ways from media representation: either they are negatively ridiculed or they are erased from the picture entirely. While this blog will explore both of these avenues within the next four weeks, this post will focus on how low-income people in the United States are disregarded by mainstream media. 

All sorts of media, especially television, aid in the blurring of class lines and create the sense that the middle class is the norm. By consistently centering shows around a predominantly white middle class (Friends, The Office, The Wonder Years), the media helps to perpetuate the idea that the United States is essentially a "classless society", when in reality, nothing is further from the truth. The widening gap between the rich and the poor has continued to grow from the 1980s to now without haste. 

More specifically, the media disregards the notion of increasing poverty rates by "presenting the interests of the well-off as general concerns (stock, financial portfolios, leisure time), downplaying structural economic concerns (job, security, income), and emphasizing shared interclass concerns (safety, crime). By downplaying economic insecurity and representing the "middle" as a "state of mind," the media encourage working-class individuals to identify with a politically neutralized "universal" middle class. Thus, the poor are left as an outlier who deviate from the middle class' values and norms. 

We have to wonder why we would erase such a large portion of the population that is growing as we speak. Even though poverty is one of the United States' biggest concerns, the poor are also rarely covered in the news. "Direct references to poverty in televised news programs are particularly uncommon. Consistent with the relative lack of open public discourse about social class in the United States, only 36 stories of the 197 news programs analyzed by Entman made overt references to "poverty" or "the poor," and few stories documented poverty and income distribution." 

This is a problem. As Entman theorizes, the lack of exposure of poverty in the media may cause people to believe that "inexplicably, some people choose to live in deteriorated neighborhoods where they frequently either commit or are victims of crime, or have trouble receiving heath care or finding adequate schools", rather than understanding that poverty is caused by a true lack of finances. 

The absence of proper representation and exposure that contextualizes this social issue has a negative impact on how the poor are viewed, so it can be argued that the opposite case, where the poor are discussed and portrayed would have a positive effect on U.S society. 

Like any problem, it is better to talk about poverty and communicate the concerns it brings rather than omitting it from the media. With information out there, it is easier for the U.S population to understand rather than blame the poor for their economic hardships. 

SOURCES: Bullock, H., Wyche, K., & Williams, W. (n.d.). Media Images of the Poor. Journal of Social Issues, 57, 229-246. Retrieved from http://www.owr.ca/pdfs/MediaPoor.pdf