Poverty in the News Series

Posted by Kate Butler Feb 2, 2007

The mainstream media has the ability to choose which issues we see in the news. We hear much about how certain businesses or industries are doing; for example, hardly a day goes by when the New York Times, Fox News, or the Washington Post fail to do a piece on oil prices. Another example is digital technology: stories about advances in computer capabilities are everywhere.

By highlighting certain topics, it is evident that other topics and issues must get ignored. One such example of this is poverty in North America. Rarely do mainstream news outlets cover poverty issues in a meaningful and sustaining way. This fact of life leads to a number of questions: why is it that stories about poverty and the working poor do not receive press in the major news outlets? How does this lack of attention on poverty affect public opinion about those who are economically disadvantaged? What does this say about the direction our welfare policies are going in the coming years? How do those who are advocating for fairer policies get the attention of the media, and thus the public?

In the upcoming month, I will delve into these issues and others in a four-part series on Poverty in the News at Suite 101 Mainstream Journalism. Each week in February, I will look at a different aspect of this complicated topic in 4 articles, the first of which will be published tomorrow.