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Poverty Keeps Growing in the U.S.; The Media is Blind to Report on It

Posted by ralph on December 1, 2009

Poverty in the USAJohn Hanrahan writes on Nieman Watchdog

If Michael Harrington, author of The Other America: Poverty in the United States, were alive today and writing an update of his 1962 classic, he would probably not need to change a word of the following observation from that book:

(T)he poor are politically invisible. It is one of the cruelest ironies of social life in advanced countries that the dispossessed at the bottom of society are unable to speak for themselves. The people of the other America do not, by and large, belong to unions, to fraternal organizations, or to political parties. They are without lobbies of their own; they put forward no legislative program. As a group, they are atomized. They have no face; they have no voice….

Further, Harrington wrote, “society is creating a new kind of blindness about poverty. It is increasingly slipping out of the very experience and consciousness of the nation.”

And so it is for the most part today: Invisible in our political discourse. Invisible in the press. Invisible in current discussions of solutions to our Great Recession but all too real for growing numbers of millions of Americans. The mainstream news media should acknowledge an obligation to make these invisible Americans more visible. Perhaps they could devote to the nation’s poor — and to solutions to poverty — even 10 percent of the news space and broadcast news time they give week in and week out to the tiniest ups and downs of the stock market, consumer spending, professional sports, and celebrities famous for being famous.

Read More on Nieman Watchdog

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  • http://www.facebook.com/dannysherwood14895 Danny Sherwood

    The elites like the poor to be invisible so they can make them the boogeyman. They can blame the poor for rising medicaid & other public assistance costs. They can blame them for the urban decay. They will always be the easiest group to beat up on. See how simple it is when you push the poor to the fringes?

  • mwalder

    the only reason the media do not report on numerous issues of importance and interested to the general population, is largely down to the people who control them, and that is the biggest and richest corporations that run the world at the moment, anyone stepping over the mark where they are concerned will either end up dead or have their life so totally devastated, that their life isn't much worth living anyway. so they keep their mouths shut and report what they are told, the things the elite what you to be told.

  • Anonymous

    You either blame the shoddy media or the millions of people who continue to give them patronage. There is access to a far better grade of journalism and reporting on the internet (for those fortunate enough to afford it). The more people switch off the idiot box and seek alternatives the closer the old media pits are to adapting to match or choking on their own irrelevancy.

  • Monkey's Uncle

    “Eat the rich, eat the rich
    Don't you know life is a bitch
    Eat the rich, eat the rich
    Out of the palace and into the ditch”

    Krokus

  • http://twitter.com/Dumbsaint Dumbsaint

    You either blame the shoddy media or the millions of people who continue to give them patronage. There is access to a far better grade of journalism and reporting on the internet (for those fortunate enough to afford it). The more people switch off the idiot box and seek alternatives the closer the old media pits are to adapting to match or choking on their own irrelevancy.