Radio hosts author/social activists Tavis Smiley and Cornel West are on anti-poverty tour, trying to draw attention to issues that are neglected in most political discussions--and all but absent in corporate media.

The good news, in theory, is that they're getting some national TV attention. But this is one of those cases where you start off wishing there was more media coverage--until you see what kind of coverage you get. Then you're wishing for something else.

Appearing on CNN's American Morning (8/8/11), host Carol Costello got off on the wrong foot, quoting from a letter from a CNN viewer:

This is from Stacy, she says welfare in theory was a good thing, but it's become a way of life for generations. The poor actually have it better than the middle class.

Perhaps the intent was to ridicule that absurd point of view--that's certainly how Smiley responded. But Costello seemed to be indicating that this viewer maybe had a point:

But, Cornel, put it this way, Cornel, the Heritage Foundation, this is conservative organization. They did this study. They say the poor in America today, are unlike the poor in America years ago. In fact, most of the poor in America live in a decent house. They have TVs. They have microwave ovens and they even have a refrigerator. What are they complaining about?

Those Heritage talking points, courtesy of analyst Robert Rector,  have been a staple of media coverage of poverty--see Extra!, 1-2/99. Though I think Costello is going a little further than even Rector would--unless he, like her, really thinks there's something weird about how the pampered poor "even have a refrigerator."

When West begins talking about the gap between the top 1 percent and the rest of us, Costello interrupts to say: "Those people pay the taxes in America and the poor don't pay any." That's not true , though it's the kind of thing you're likely to hear on right-wing talk radio.

But perhaps the most revealing moment came after the interview had ended, when the CNN hosts were chatting among themselves. That's when Costello said this:

And, frankly, I think to an extent the poor have been demonized because many people in America think they're leeches on society. They're just, you know, sucking everything out of us.

Like the question that started off the interview, a charitable interpretation is that Costello doesn't agree with what she's saying.

But given her attitude during the interview, it's more likely that when she talks about how "many people" think the poor are "leeches...sucking everything out of us"--a sentiment that I doubt is all that widely shared--she's talking about herself.

Update: Carol Costello responded on Twitter to our criticism:

@FAIRmediawatch and u r fair? Wow.

Corporate media's preference for "centrism" can often translate into reporting that casts two sides of a debate as equally belligerent or unwilling to compromise.  ABC reporter Jonathan Karl's report yesterday on This Week (4/3/11) offers a perfect example of the absurdity of this worldview.

His focuses was on the battle over the federal budget. On one side are Tea Party activists who want deeper spending cuts.  Karl notes that this creates some friction between the activists and GOP leaders. Then there's the other side of the debate:

KARL: Democrats have their hot heads, too. One Obama administration official said the Republican bill, which cuts $5 billion from the Agency for International Development would kill kids. That's right. Kill kids.

RAJIV SHAH, USAID ADMINISTRATOR: We estimate, and I believe these are conservative, that HR 1 would lead to 70,000 kids dying.

Karl then turns to former Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean saying that Democrats could benefit from a government shutdown. Karl closes with a snide reference to the choice confronting lawmakers: "Compromise with extremists out to kill kids?"

Budget cuts have actual, real world consequences--especially when you're talking about health aid to the Third World. This is not in serious dispute. But apparently talking about those effects is a problem.

What Karl considers hot-headed extremism is Shah's claim that deaths will occur due to, among other things, cuts to USAID's anti-malaria programs. Others will die because they would lose access to life-saving medicines. Others will die at birth.

New York Times food writer Mark Bittman points out that many anti-poverty organizers have organized a fast to draw attention to the GOP budget cuts. He's joining them, and writes that some organizers are praying that God create a "circle of protection" around the world's poor and hungry.

What a bunch of hotheads.

After Hurricane Katrina, the airwaves were filled with media promises to pay attention to long-neglected stories about poverty and racism. As FAIR documented (Extra!, 9-10/07), that promise didn't amount to much; three years of newscasts (covering September 2003 through October 2006) provided just 58 stories about poverty.

On September 12, ABC World News devoted almost 100 words to the news that, according to anchor Dan Harris:

170,000 families were homeless, rather, in homeless shelters in 2009. That's a 30 percent increase in two years. Meanwhile, the Census Bureau is expected to announce this week that as many as 15 percent of American families lived in poverty last year, up from 13.2 percent.

Harris' set-up for this brief report--that was pretty much the whole thing--was to announce that these were "some new economic numbers that could prove troubling for Democrats trying to hold onto power in Congress." And probably even worse news for the homeless families.

Noting how "media have been pelting us with heart-wrenching stories about the neo-suffering of the Nouveau Poor"--"Sales of Gulfstream jets declining!"--Barbara Ehrenreich pretends (Barbara's Blog, 3/12/09) to be "tempted to delete 'class inequality' from my worry list" before doing some actual reporting:

But hard times are no more likely to abolish class inequality than Obama's inauguration is likely to eradicate racism. No one actually knows yet whether inequality has increased or decreased during the last year of recession, but the historical precedents are not promising. The economists I've talked to--like Biden's top economic advisor, Jared Bernstein--insist that recessions are particularly unkind to the poor and the middle class. Canadian economist Armine Yalnizyan says, "Income polarization always gets worse during recessions." It makes sense. If the stock market has shrunk your assets of $500 million to a mere $250 million, you may have to pass on a third or fourth vacation home. But if you've just lost an $8 an hour job, you’re looking at no home at all.

Reminding us that "I'm a journalist and I understand how the media work," Ehrenreich writes that "when a millionaire cuts back on his crème fraiche and caviar consumption, you have a touching human interest story. But pitch a story about a laid-off roofer who loses his trailer home and you’re likely to get a big editorial yawn." In other words, "'Poor Get Poorer' is just not an eye-grabbing headline, even when the evidence is overwhelming." Read the current issue of FAIR's magazine Extra!: "The Recession and the 'Deserving Poor': Poverty Finally on Media Radar--but Only When It Hits the Middle Class" (3/09) by Neil deMause

Hoping for "a trickle-down of a different sort, of compassion," media writer Edward Wasserman gives his personal take (Miami Herald, 3/16/09) on resurgent media interest in (some) impoverished Americans:

My own sense is that, in general, coverage of the poor has been so bad for so long that if indeed there is growing interest in the newly impoverished--even with the undertone of disdain FAIR finds toward other poor people--it's still an improvement. I've followed media treatment of poor people for the past several years as supervisor of a student-run website for journalists, www.onpoverty.org. The site aggregates poverty news from all over the country, broadcast as well as print.

Seldom does the reporting amount to much. Coverage is meager. It tilts strongly toward two areas: first, the homeless, particularly community responses to the blight associated with homelessness; second, bureaucratic foul-ups and corruption in delivering support to the needy.

In the reports, poor people don't often speak; they're spoken about. Rarely are the working poor or their struggles covered at all. Instead, emphasis is on those who are dependencies, burdens on the rest of us, taxing the good will and ingenuity of beleaguered officialdom.

In short, "the media overwhelmingly do what they do best, report on officialdom--market mavens, business owners, policymakers, lenders and the like--not on the people whose personal calamities constitute the real history of this economic disaster." See the current issue of FAIR's magazine Extra!: "The Recession and the 'Deserving Poor': Poverty Finally on Media Radar--but Only When It Hits the Middle Class" (3/09) by Neil deMause.