…the skills needed to balance a budget on an inadequate income – when there are no spare resources to cope with unexpected emergencies, such as household repairs, particularly without the benefits of credit cards or a bank account – are rarely considered. Frequently, reports suggest that families in poverty are bad at budgeting. The evidence suggests the opposite is true – they have to be particularly good at budgeting simply to survive.

How true. And how rarely said.

That comes from an updated version of a very useful guide on poverty in the media just published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Written by David Seymour, Reporting poverty in the UK: a practical guide for journalists, does an excellent job of revealing the obstacles and attitudes that keep accurate and fair discussion of poverty out of the media.

There’s a revealing quote from Huw Williams, of BBC Radio 4′s Today programme, on reporting the Farepak collapse that left thousands of people without their Christmas savings in 2006.

And listening back to some of my reports now, they sound a bit like reports from an exotic foreign country. Of course, for many listeners to Radio Four it would have been a journey into a world they probably didn’t know anything about. We really did have to explain who the Farepak savers were, and why the collapse of the firm mattered so much to them.

Again, very true. Yet figures also quoted in the report show how unbalanced all this is. The lastest available stats show that 31 per cent of children were in families living in poverty. That’s 4 million children.

Children grow to be young people and then the next adult generation. And almost a third have direct personal experience of poverty. That’s not a tiny minority. Who would have thought that from the approaches and priorities of the media?

It’s hard to feel optimistic that media reporting will transform itself soon or suddenly. But anyone who thinks it should will find plenty of sound, well-informed argument in Seymour’s guide.