Comparison of media portrayals of poverty in low-income versus affluent metropolitan areas
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Poverty has become a salient issue for many Americans. The economic recovery from the Great Recession has been uneven, with large portions of the country continuing to live in poverty. The public has a range of views on the subject, shaped by their perceptions of what they believe causes the problem. A significant component responsible for that perception depends on how media organizations represent people living in poverty and the attention they give to the subject. This thesis focused on the amount of coverage that newspapers, based in geographic locations with differing levels of socioeconomic status, devote to poverty, and the degree to which reporters and editors from those publications misrepresent the demographics of those suffering from it. The theoretical framework for this research is agenda setting. The frequency with which journalists devote report on a subject, and how they portray it can determine its importance to the public, and whether people's perceptions are based in reality. The research supports prior work confirming that poverty is not well covered. Newspapers in this study devoted a fraction of their coverage to the topic, less than one percent overall. The Philadelphia Inquirer and Star Tribune cover the subject the most, both nearing two-tenths of one percent. Journalists also misrepresent the demographics of people living in poverty, generally underrepresenting males while some overrepresent females. All publications in the study overrepresent the adults in their articles but include children at proportions less than their actual poverty rates. How they misrepresent racial and ethnic groups could not be well understood because many reporters failed to include that information in their articles. Results from this study can serve as a tool for improving poverty coverage among journalists. It can highlight the publications presenting a more objective view of the subject, allow others to learn from the work of the reporters and editors who managed to correct for their biases to some degree.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. Copyright held by author.