How should the media portray poverty?
January 26th, 2010 by Will Horwitz Posted in Inequality, Welfare reform, attitudes, livelihoods, migrants, uk poverty
Will Horwitz works on communications for East London Charity Community Links. He is also an alumnus of Oxfam’s UK Poverty Programme. (Community Links are spending this week debating how the media portrays poverty).
A couple of years ago a headline in the Mail screamed “Welcome to Britain, land of the rising scum…. We’ve cornered the market on welfare layabouts, drug addicts and feral gangs.” An extreme example, certainly, but still perhaps illustrative of the way people on benefits, unemployed, or on low incomes are portrayed in the media.
Significant research over the last few years has shown how, even in less vitriolic publications – across newspapers, TV, and radio – depictions of people in poverty are unrepresentative, overwhelmingly negative, and often have scant respect for the individuals featured, despite the best intentions of many journalists.
We’ve decided to spend a week debating this on the Community Links blog. We’ve invited contributions from a wide range of people, from award-winning bloggers to young people from Newham. New ones will be going up every day. The first is a fascinating look at how coverage of the Edlington attacks illustrates the media’s focus on the ‘visible poor.’ Sign up for email updates or follow the RSS feed if you’d like to be kept up to date.
A couple of weeks ago I suggested some reasons why media portrayals of poverty are so important, and below are some questions to consider throughout the week. If you’d like to write a post then please get in touch, otherwise please do let us know your thoughts in the comments boxes under each post.
Finally, thinking and writing about these issues is important, but doing something is even more so. I hope we can arrive at some new ideas or new commitments to do something differently by the end of the week. In the meantime, please join the debate.
Some questions to consider
- Does it matter how the media portrays poor people?
- Are ‘poverty’ and ‘poor’ even the right words?
- Should charities engage with the media on this issue?
- Are you already doing work to change the way people are portrayed?
- What else could we do (as charities, individuals, journalists?)
- How does it feel to be portrayed in one of these programmes?
- What’s it like, as a journalist, trying to cover stories about these issues?
