Newswise — When a Columbus Dispatch reporter recently discovered a homeless man with a golden voice, the story became a sensation, creating a media firestorm driven by the 24-7 celebrity culture.
For Washington and Lee University journalism professor Edward Wasserman, a nationally renowned media ethicist, the saga of that homeless man, Ted Williams, meant something more — a cautionary tale for his students.
Wasserman, the Knight Professor of Journalism Ethics, is concerned with the way media cover issues of poverty. Working with Washington and Lee's Shepherd Program for the Interdisciplinary Study of Poverty and Human Capability, Wasserman has developed a course in which students explore the way all media — newspapers, television, movies — not only depict the poor but also how they fail to to portray the poor accurately to affluent audiences.
In addition, he and the students have created a website, on.poverty.org, as a service to journalists who are reporting on these issues. The site is a way to aggregate and organize coverage about poverty.
And as he considered the phenomenon of the golden-voiced homeless man who rose, fell and may or may not rise again, Wasserman thinks it corresponds to a cherished cultural archetype that typifies the way media see the poor.
"In the first instance, the news places a tremendous emphasis on homelessness as emblematic of poverty," Wasserman said. "If you ask most non-poor people about poverty, you will probably hear about homelessness. But the homeless population, which is desperately poor and very needy, is not typical of the poor.. There is an enormous amount of mental illness and substance dependency with this group.
"The typical reality of not having money in this society is that people don't earn enough because they don't get paid enough. That's a much more disturbing reality because it goes to the structure of equality and our society’s growing inequality. The media are not comfortable with that."
The story's appeal, Wasserman said, is the message that society is willing to reward someone, as the Williams’ story illustrated.
"The belief is that the system is porous and that you can rise," said Wasserman. "But, in fact, vertical mobility numbers are not very good for American society. But it is so ingrained in our beliefs about ourselves, since as long as the system is porous and is ready to reward you, you can't blame the system for the fact that you're not doing better than you are. You need to blame yourself."
As he considered the way in which popular media cover issues of poverty, Wasserman said the primary role is "to reconcile the non-poor population to the existence of poverty," though he admits that may be a harsh way of putting it.
But, he adds, the media serve mostly the non-poor population with certain kinds of messages and stories that it wants to hear about the poor.
"One of the main things is that non-poor people want some reassurance that the existence of the poor is not really a comment on the overall justice of the economic system in which they operate," he said. "They want some reassurance they haven't done anything wrong — within limits. I think it is a matter of reconciling this, getting people to accept this as OK — not desirable but acceptable. Probably the biggest story that is told is that people are poor because it's their fault. Once you buy into the notion of poverty as the economic system's rough justice — you get what you give, and if you don't give enough because you lack capacity or you lack drive — then tough. In our culture, that is the dominant explanation."
In one recent session of the class on poverty and media, Wasserman guided the students through a discussion of the way that the poor have been portrayed in such recent movies as “The Blind Side,” “Winter's Bone” and “The Town.”
"Most of us, knowingly and unknowingly, have heard and seen the various characterizations of poverty, but have never stopped to think about the message that each portrayal sends," said Elise Hansen, a sophomore from Lexington, Va.
Wasserman has also had the students examine popular television sitcoms, comparing and contrasting bus driver Ralph Kramden from “The Honeymooners” of the 1950s with delivery man Doug Hefferman of a far more recent vintage in “The King of Queens.”
"The students need to see if they can determine what implied meanings are embedded in these stories," said Wasserman. "I want to blow the whistle on some of the caricatures that we see and usually take for granted."
For Hansen, the approach has caused her to take a second look through "another analytical lens.
"When we talk about movies and books that I have seen or read before, I think about them in a whole new light," she said.
Getting the students to understand how they are consuming the media is one thing. Altering the way media do their jobs of reporting on poverty is entirely another matter.
In some measure, Wasserman hopes that the http://www.onpoverty.org website might become a place where such conversations occur with some regularity.
"I'm not sure that I have a grand plan," he said, "but I'm more focused on process. The first thing to do is to get journalists who are doing this to be talking to one another, and they're not. There is not a society of poverty journalists. There is a society of business editors. Coverage of the top end of the economic pyramid is understood to require specialty skills and specialty beats. There is nothing comparable for the bottom base of that pyramid.
"Consequently, what we now have is a media environment in which it's not just that poor people are not being covered or written about, but where the larger world is not seen through a lens that is intelligible to people with less money. Not everything about the economy can be learned from the way the stock market moves. And, in fact, for so many people, the way the market moves is actually a disadvantage. But that is not the story we're usually telling."
If the stock market dips in response to indications of an upward movement in wages, noted Wasserman, that news is presented as bad economic news.
“Bad for whom?” he asked. “If the administration presses China to let its currency drift upward against the dollar, the news is presented as prudent and necessary. But it’s hardly good news for low-income people whose meager living standards depend on cheap Chinese imports, which are about to get a lot more expensive. The point is, there’s a class bias that’s so ingrained we don’t think about it.”
RSS