youthmoney

The following incident from a new report on poverty and the media rings true. A woman points out how the media often know exactly what they want before they arrive:

Somebody came to the house. We had just had prawns. I had got them cheap. They [television crew] said that we needed to see us eat something and could we boil an egg. I just boiled the egg to keep them happy.

From The media, poverty and public opinion in the UK.

It looks like a worthy report. But despite talking to working journalists, the researchers don’t seem to have uncovered anything like the full reality of the resistance to reporting poverty. Among suggested ideas for improving coverage is for the media to develop “Increased willingness to challenge existing perceptions of poverty and realise that good copy can be gathered by doing so.”

Yeah, right. Optimism is good. But this needs to be put alongside a widespread attitude, which is implicit and sometimes explicit. It is that editors simply don’t want poor people cluttering up their pages except in particular and limited ways because they think it puts off readers.