Blaming the Victim: How Global Journalism Fails Those in Poverty
224
Blaming the Victim: How Global Journalism Fails Those in Poverty
224Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
The books asks many biting questions. When - and how - does poverty become newsworthy? How does ideology come into play when determining the ways in which 'poverty' is constructed in newsrooms - and how do the resulting narratives frame the issue? And why do so many journalists and news editors tend to obscure the structural causes of poverty?
In analysing the processes of news production and presentation around the world, Lugo-Ocando reveals that the news-makers' agendas are often as problematic as the geopolitics they seek to represent. This groundbreaking study reframes the ways in which we can think and write about the enduring global injustice of poverty.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780745334417 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 12/20/2014 |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.30(w) x 8.60(h) x 2.20(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Subjectivity of Poverty
Poverty is arguably the most important single issue in the global news agenda, but at the same time one of the most neglected ones. According to the United Nations' report Rethinking Poverty. Report on the World Social Situation 2010, 'global levels of poverty have changed very little over the past two decades' (2009: 31), while most experts doubt that more than a handful of countries will achieve the targets set in the Millennium Development Goals (Elliot 2011: 43). Despite this, most of the mainstream news media in the West either ignore the subject altogether or seem wedded to the positivist view regarding world poverty levels.
Indeed, scholarly research has pointed out that the average amount of reporting on poverty is negligible when compared to other issues (Golding and Middelton 1982; Devereux 1998; Kitzberger and Pérez 2009). Most observations of the media's coverage of poverty suggest that it tends to be a marginal issue in the daily news (McKendrick et al. 2008; Kendall 2005), while similar studies highlight that the media in general do not do a very good job when reporting poverty (Chouliaraki 2006; Golding and Middleton 1982; Clawson and Trice 2000), as they allocate minimal resources, space and attention to the issue on the one hand, while distorting many facts on the other.
With relatively scant coverage, news about global poverty is effectively an oddity, which tends to come to the fore mostly in cases of humanitarian crises in distant and remote places. News media in the West, such as news wire services and broadcast networks, tend to focus mainly on crises such as famines and wars, while failing to discuss in depth the structural causes of poverty or to provide alternative views of the so-called developing world (Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen 1998: 14; Diaz Rangel 1966: 23). In these predominant systems of representation, poverty is mostly presented as a collateral issue rather than the main topic, while images of poverty are often distorted by the media (Clawson and Trice 2000: 54). These representations tend to create a sense of hopelessness, and the voices of the poor are rarely heard.
The prevalent narratives also appear to suggest that there are profound disagreements on what to do about poverty. Based on a variety of news sources, they tend to suggest very contradictory policies that range from increasing foreign aid to cutting it all together; this is neither new nor surprising, as similar situations have arisen in the recent past. Expert opinions are often represented as diverse and contradictory with regards to issues such as, for example, acid rain, the link between cancer and tobacco and, more recently, climate change, despite broad agreement among the scientific community (Oreskes and Conway 2010: 16). To be sure, the media and journalists have always been susceptible to lobby groups and public relations (PR) efforts from people with vested interests opposing any policy that could potentially affect those interests (Miller and Dinan 2007); this situation has worsened over the years in the face of increasing cuts in the newsrooms (Davis 2008) and the need to rely increasingly on press releases and PR material (Lewis et al. 2008b: 2).
The current media ownership structure and the model that it uses to produce news in the context of the market-driven economy has been flagged as a major reason for bias and misrepresentation of reality (Allan 1999a; Schlesinger 1978; Herman and McChesney 1997), leading to the conclusion that news stories do reflect a reality, but one that is socially constructed (Soley 1992: 12) by the terms of those who own or are capable of influencing the news media.
Therefore, at a time when the media not only transform reality but also create it (Martin Barbero 1993: 28), it is not surprising that poverty, as a by-product of inequality, is presented in the way it is; as a contested term defined by the news values prevalent in journalism cultures. As these cultures have been expressed by practices, dynamics and histories linked to the emergence of capitalism, we must assume therefore that poverty is understood in terms of the mode of production within a particular historical context.
Inequality itself, as the raison d'être for poverty, was effectively missing from the news agenda until the 2008 financial crisis; this despite the fact that the UN and other international organisations have highlighted very clearly for years the urgent need for wealth redistribution on both national and international levels. More pernicious, however, has been the fact that important sections of the media still disregard the issue of inequality altogether. In these cases, the prevalent narrative continues to be that as long as there is growth at the top it would be possible to pull people out of poverty, thanks to the 'trickle down' effect.
Indeed, inequality has been the elephant in the room among the most prominent global news media outlets for decades, being only temporarily highlighted during the US electoral campaign of 2012 which saw President Barack Obama having to come out in defence of greater equality (not without being called a 'socialist' by the extreme right) and several billionaires, such as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, paradoxically calling for higher taxes on the rich.
However, more recently, experts and the media themselves have become more aware of inequality as the key issue. In their seminal work, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (2009) shed light on the problem of inequality by arguing that it brings misery not only to the poor and excluded but also to the rest of society. More and more voices have taken the position of addressing inequality as a priority in policy making (Lansley 2012; Stiglitz 2012) and more recently the central question has shifted from how to achieve growth in order to reduce poverty – as important and problematic as this question is – to how to reduce levels of inequality in order to eradicate poverty altogether.
The evidence suggests that economic growth as a way of reducing social exclusion has reached its limit in many nations (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009: 11) and that inequality is the primary cause of poverty. Despite this almost consensual view among experts on the current situation with regard to poverty and what to do about it, a great part of the news media seems to tell a very different story.
Isolated dark-skinned faces of women and children in remote corners of Africa appear to dominate narratives that tell us, sporadically, very little about the root causes or the nature of the problem. An overall sense of despair and resignation is pervasive, as if nothing can be done except for a laconic relief effort to aid the suffering while at the same time the idea is put forward that foreign aid should be cut altogether, in order to push poor countries into confronting the hard choices they are somehow avoiding.
Meanwhile, the 'growth' narrative is still the dominant feature in these media debates, as if there were no other choices for policy makers. Moreover, the palliatives that have been used in the past to alleviate poverty as a result of market failures, such as foreign aid and the welfare state, are now not only under attack by those who think that they are inefficient, but are also being blamed for creating a trap that keeps people in poverty (i.e. Moyo 2009).
This chapter provides a general overview of how the mainstream media deal with poverty as a global news item and how it enters into the news agenda within the wider frameworks of ideology and political discourses.
By making reference to specific examples in the news, the next section explores some of the most common representations of poverty in the news media and the ideological categories that frame news stories on the subject.
The Elephant in the Room
Let us start by calling a spade a spade: poverty is a political problem and therefore the nature of this problem is the result of the particular political context within which it has developed (Alcock 1993: 13). As poverty is associated with intra-national levels of exclusion and inequality, not every government takes the same approach to poverty. The United States, for example, conceives poverty in different ways to that of many European countries and even to its neighbours, Canada and Mexico. While most European countries place the poverty line at a percentage of the average income of the general population, the United States still treats it in terms of absolute income.
Indeed, many members of the European Union set a relative standard by basically saying that any family group earning 60 per cent or less than the national average should be considered poor. Instead, the current poverty measure in the US, established in the 1960s, measures poverty by an income standard that does not include other aspects of economic status, such as material hardship (for example, living in substandard housing) or debt, nor does it consider financial assets (including savings or property). The official poverty measure in the US is a specific dollar amount that varies by family size but is the same across the country. According to the official guidelines, the poverty level in 2009 was over US$22,000 a year for a family of four and slightly over US$18,000 for a family of three. A similar criterion is followed by the World Bank when it measures poverty by an absolute standard of whoever lives on less than US$ 2 a day around the globe.
Therefore, we can argue that despite having its own rationale, the way in which a given country conceptualises, defines and then measures poverty is, at the end of the day, an arbitrary decision. As some authors have correctly pointed out, there is no single concept of poverty that stands outside history and culture (Lister 2004). It is, in other words, a social construction; different groups and countries perceive and articulate the notion of poverty in different ways.
The problem with this is that since the conceptualisation of poverty involves moral imperatives, it has practical effects and implications for the distribution of resources both within and between societies. Hence, as a contested political concept in the media, poverty entails an implicit explanation, 'which in turn underpins policy prescriptions' (Lister 2004: 3). By defining poverty in a certain way, the state, international organisations and the media set the ground rules about how resources will be allocated and how they will be gathered, that is, taxation, nationalisation, privatisation, and so on).
It is in this context that global news media articulate their own conceptualisation of poverty; a process that means legitimising a certain ideological strand in the society in which they operate and which defines the way in which resources and means of production ought to be allocated. In accepting the definition and measurement of poverty in a certain manner, the news media are in effect ratifying a specific type of policy. This relativism in the way poverty is measured makes the reporting of poverty on a global scale very problematic. Moreover, normal conventions that apply in other areas of news reporting and which set universally accepted standards, such as international law, do not work for every country or region when it comes to conceptualising, defining and measuring poverty.
Journalists tend, at least in theory, to stick to widely accepted conventions. These conventions relate to the attempt or aspiration to perform the 'strategic ritual' of objectivity (Tuchman 1972: 661), moving within well-accepted frameworks when reporting news. For example, it is expected that journalists reporting conflict should adhere to the wider consensus when defining the issues they report. They should describe and explain the events happening on the ground to their audiences in the broader terms of international law (Friel and Falk 2007: 6). In cases such as this, they are expected to make at least some basic distinctions between 'soldiers' and 'civilians' and between 'occupation' and 'liberation', while referring to the conflict in terms of the referential framework provided by the United Nations system and related bodies.
However, these conventions are not as straightforward – or as easy to adhere to – when it comes to reporting poverty. To start with, and despite the prolific use of the term in different contexts, a universal concept of poverty proves to be elusive and problematic at best, because our understanding about it derives from our own 'political' and 'moral' values (Alcock 1993: 6). Therefore, given the diversity of interests and values in the context of the global media, any attempt to define poverty will be mediated through a set of very distinctive and competing notions already present in news agendas.
To complicate matters even further, the definition of poverty by international bodies – which is often used as a benchmark by journalists – varies greatly even within the UN system itself. For instance, the multilateral banks and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have over the years developed an approach to poverty that is very different to that of the World Health Organization or UNICEF (Babb 2009: 165), while other institutions such as NGOs and think tanks will develop concepts and policies on poverty that sometimes contradict each other even when working together on the ground.
Because of this, journalists and news editors have little to relate to in terms of conceptual consensus and standards other than their own ideologies, personal experiences and the authority they confer upon their own news sources, which in many cases are the same people from the institutions named above. As a result, consensus is reached only in critical situations such as famine, genocide, natural disasters and other media events, and only in a way that does not allow for a critical and comprehensive examination of these events' root causes. Even then, the media's role in making the relief efforts accountable to those who donate to them has been very poorly covered by the news media (Gill 1986: 94), while other problems are often simplified and caricatured beyond recognition.
An example of this is the news coverage of famines and their causes, although they no longer tend to capture the headlines as they did in the past (Gráda 2009: 1). Does the term 'famine' imply hundreds, thousands or millions of starving people? Does it occur because of natural causes such as droughts? Are famines cyclical or sporadic? More importantly, what are the conventions of reporting famines in the news?
Niger's food crisis in 2005 is an emblematic case of the above. This crisis was localised in the regions of northern Maradi, Tahoua, Tillabéri and Zinder, and arguably was caused by severe weather conditions and high food prices in a society that faces many levels of poverty. At some point, media reports referred to it as a 'famine', which soon became a political issue. Niger's president, Mamadou Tandja, dismissed reports that his country was experiencing a famine. He went on to say that opposition parties and the UN aid agencies had exploited the situation for political and economic reasons. For its part, the World Food Programme denied that the scale of the problem had been exaggerated; its spokesman, Greg Barrow, emphasised that they did not refer to the crisis as a 'famine' but talked about 'pockets of severe malnutrition' (BBC 2005a). Very few governments acknowledge that their people are suffering in a famine and if they do, they often blame natural causes.
Indeed, one of the problems with the term 'famine' is that it is both contested and politically charged in different contexts. Although famines such as the Irish ones of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or the Bengal famine of 1943 have often been attributed to natural causes such as disease and drought, there is wide consensus that they have often occurred in places that have no food shortages (Sen 1999: 170). They can also be politically sensitive, as they grant carte blanche for intervention and military coups, as occurred in the 1974 Ethiopian famine and the subsequent overthrow of Haile Selassie.
It is well known that many countries suffering from mass starvation were food exporters at the time of those famines (Gráda 2009: 194). In an article in the London Daily Post and General Advertiser from 1 May 1740 (Issue 1722), there is a dispatch from Ireland (dated 22 April 1740) in which it is reported that despite moderate prices of corn and oatmeal, people had forcibly boarded a ship with 50 tons of oatmeal cargo bound for Scotland. We may infer that this must have been some sort of a riot, as after the event the authorities had to 'recover the ship from these people and return it with its cargo to its rightful owners'. After the riots, the authorities had to ban exports from Ireland and distribute several tons of meal and grain among the poor. One of the most interesting parts of this news report was that it blamed the influx of people from the 'North of the Country', whose actions in taking over the ship 'threaten us with famine'; that 'us', of course, being the people living mainland Britain.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Blaming the Victim"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Jairo Lugo-Ocando.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgementsIntroduction
1: The subjectivity of poverty
2: The poverty of ideas in the newsroom
3: What lies beneath?
4: Africa, that scar on our face
5: Visual Journalism and Global Poverty
6: Spinning poverty!
7: The emergence of alternative voices
Conclusions: Beyond the unsustainable news agenda
References
Bibliography
Index