Brandon Krampert
In Motion Staff Writer
One would expect, flipping through the U.S. news, that the poor have achieved a sense of social mobility and that a need for a war on poverty is genuinely in the dustbin of history.
At least, that would be the assumption based on the lack of attention by the media to the real problems of poverty in America, the “richest” country in the world.
Media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting conducted a 14-month study from January of 2013 to the end of February in 2014, observing the coverage of poverty on primetime news programs of major networks such as ABC World News, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News.
They searched for stories that included and discussed the terms poverty, low income, food stamps, welfare and homelessness.
FAIR found that only 23 segments were produced that discussed poverty in the 14-month period, while there was an average of 2.7 seconds per 22-minute nightly news program devoted to the issue.
FAIR also found that the shows produced nearly four times as many stories that included the term billionaire; and over the same period, less than half of the 54 sources in the segments on poverty were people personally affected by poverty.
It makes sense relating this to television news since television is still the primary format for people getting their news in the United States, reaching tens of millions of people each day and during the time where much more people tune in.
Prior to this, FAIR conducted a similar study during the news coverage of the 2012 presidential campaign that turned out to be more extensive including those very same programs, but added PBS News Hour and NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Their conclusion was that the news outlets that were surveyed only devoted 0.2 percent of the 2012 presidential campaign to poverty.
Although, the latter study above isn’t that surprising since Mitt Romney and Barack Obama both tended to conflate issues of financial struggle to strengthening the middle class and in turn, ignoring the deeper woes associated with them.
But this is increasingly an invisibility issue on the part of primetime news shows when 46 million people are living in poverty in the U.S. according to Census records in 2012, which are the latest figures available. The poverty line in 2012 for a household of 4 was only $23,492.
But aside from a lack of media representation of the poor, have they really attained some sense of social mobility? It’s certainly true that compared to any other time period, the poor have significantly more access to televisions, refrigerators, clothing, phones, among other things of that nature.
In fact, more than 80 percent of low-income households have a refrigerator. The costs of these items have dramatically decreased in the last 10 years, as noted in an info graph compiled with data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that accompanied an article on poverty by Annie Lowrey of the New York Times back in April.
Although, these very industries that have experienced declining costs of their products could easily be attributed to the jobs concerning production of these services that are being outsourced to other countries or being subject to automation. According to a report earlier this year by Public Citizen, a consumer-rights advocacy group based in Washington D.C., found that the North American Free Trade Agreement passed in 1994, which made it easier for firms to outsource, has lead to the loss of 1,000,000 U.S. jobs in manufacturing.
While at the same time, the info graph shows that college tuition, childcare, healthcare, food and the like have increased. The very services that is essential to get out of poverty. But this trend is more complex to describe.
In the case of college tuition, costs have risen because state governments have cut higher education spending in recent years. In fact, between 2007-2012 there were only two states that had actually increased spending in higher education.
In the case of health care, even after the passing of the Affordable Care Act, healthcare is still very market driven in this country and compared to other countries with more regulation, our costs are significantly higher.
This is a time where state governments in the double digits have either passed or introduced legislation requiring welfare recipients to take drug tests that end up making welfare more inaccessible to those who need it.
And while congress, who dominantly are millionaires, having no hands-on experience with poverty have passed legislation cutting an estimated 13 billion dollars in the past two years to the SNAP program, is it wise for media organizations to speak so little of poverty?
Like the late civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “A time comes where silence is betrayal,” whether they’re conscious of it or not.