What do journalism students know about poverty?
January 29th, 2010 by Oxfam UK Poverty Programme Posted in attitudes, uk poverty
The UK Coalition Against Poverty have begun an excellent programme working with student journalists, introducing them to the realities of poverty in the UK and how to report on it. Eileen Devaney, UKCAP national coordinator, reflects on the experience so far…
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation recently produced a guide for journalists on reporting poverty, as part of their public attitudes to poverty project. We were commissioned to promote the resource to journalism educators and support them to cover the subject of poverty in the classroom.
We have done presentations and workshops with journalism post graduate and M.A. students, and the lack of awareness of poverty in the UK shown by the students was quite shocking.
The students were polite, interested, but had very little knowledge of poverty issues. In fact more questions were asked by the presenters of the students’ courses than by the students themselves.
We asked students if any of the different courses they were taking covered poverty or social issues in general, but although they were available none had covered these areas, as they were optional rather than mandatory subjects.
When pushed for input the students asked a couple of questions. One thought that people living on benefits received subsidised bus and rail travel and one thought that benefits included having gas, electricity and water bills paid. A further student informed the group that he had claimed job seekers allowance and that he felt embarrassed at first, however, once some of his friends had lost their jobs and “joined him on the dole, it wasn’t so bad”.
From my point of view I am not surprised that the level of reporting poverty is so poor, as the students had such little awareness of the depth of poverty in the UK, the deep harm that poverty causes society and the desperation people feel when living in grinding poverty.
They also ignore the support that people living in poverty give to each other in communities which are reported as ’sink estates’, and don’t necessarily realise that language such as deprived, poor, worklessness, etc is offensive and demeaning.
This project aims to help journalism students understand what poverty is like in the fourth richest nation in the world. That trying to live on benefits in 21st century Britain is near impossible. That people living in poverty in the UK certainly don’t choose to exist on extremely low incomes. And that aspirations are high despite the inequality and discrimination suffered by those living in poverty.
UKCAP has a short time to complete this project and therefore I see this blog as a wonderful opportunity for people to voice their views on the media. However, I also believe it is a great opportunity for us to help the media understand and find a better way of reporting life in poverty in the UK.
This post was originally published on the Community Links’ blog linksUK, who are hosting articles this week about how people on low incomes appear in the media.
