2018/08/02 by Steve Macek
Social Sciences · #Elite Sociology and Global Capitalism #International Development and Aid
paper · pdf · doi:10.7275/democratic-communique.180
P overty is a persistent subject of news coverage.Whether as abject victims of disasters like Hurricane Katrina, as beneficiaries of charity, or as the focus of social policy debates, the poor are recurring characters in journalism's day-to-day narrative.More often than not, though, news media representations of the poor distort or obscure the structural causes of economic deprivation and promote elements of the dominant, neoliberal ideology.A number of scholars have studied how news coverage of poverty has contributed to public hostility to welfare programs, such as the now dismantled Aid to Families with Dependent Children (see, for instance, Gilens 1999).However, there has been a dearth of scholarly attention to how the dominant ideological motifs running through news coverage of poverty in advanced capitalist countries also shape the international news media's representations of the poor in the Global South.In Blaming the Victim: How Global Journalism Fails Those in Poverty, Jairo Lugo-Ocando takes up the ambitious task of analyzing those common themes and of dissecting the institutional and political economic structures that influence how the news media cover poverty around the world.Lugo-Ocando begins the book by noting that poverty itself is a "social construction" and a "contested political concept in the media" which carries with it implicit explanations and ideological presuppositions (18).Merely counting who is and is not poor involves politicized decisions.The US, for instance, defines poverty in relation to a specific dollar amount-adopted in 1964 and then adjusted 1 Macek: Blaming the Victim: How Global Journalism Fails Those in Poverty.