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 [...]
Apr
04
2011
Only Hotheads Talk About the Effects of Budget Cuts
By 19 Comments
Corporate media's preference for"centrism" canoftentranslate intoreporting 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 createssome frictionbetween 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 [...]
Sep
14
2010
Homelessness and Poverty in America: Bad News for Democrats
By 11 Comments
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(coveringSeptember 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 [...]
Mar
16
2009
Will Media Compassion 'Trickle-Down' to All Poor People?
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 [...]
