Media Poverty Representation

One of our key issues is representation of poverty in the media.

How are people in the poorest areas represented? Are they shown to be stupid? Uncultured? Lacking in future aspirations? Are white and ethnic minority people represented differently?

Is the stereotype of your typical person lying in poverty, clad in a hoodie, strutting down the street with a stuttered stagger in his step, blazing the latest Jay-Z record from their phone whilst their oversized gold pendants dangle loosely about their person? Or is this just what the media like to portray?

How far from the truth is this?

7 thoughts on “Media Poverty Representation

  1. It’s part of the truth, but only PART of it.

    The poor people you won’t see are the ones lying low in their homes. People lacking in confidence in their own abilities perhaps? the elderly (you can’t live well on a state pension)?

    Also the parents of those deliquent children you speak of. They have no control of their children, and rather than through fault of their own, it is through street culture…

    We need to tackle the root of this street ‘culture’ and boredom of the youth living it…. before the image that conects to i can be erased.

  2. Poverty is reprsesnted in bad way in the media. Certain groups are blamed more than other. Some people are used as scapegoat.

  3. lol, I am going to have to agree with you Shibby 🙂

    no matter what the exact statistics are though, we have to treat thew media ambiguously. We just DON’T KNOW what is true. Wisest thing to do is treat it that way.

    Obviously especially true outside of the news channels (esp the BBC which has a decent track record).

    It is also a good idea to look up which organisations are self-moderating and look up controversy. You learn most this way!

  4. The BBC has a good track record? No no no no…their reporting is as biased as you can get!

  5. It’s less stupid than Fox and more globally inclusive than Al-Jazeera.
    That makes it better – not perfect but sometimes better is best.

    People from around the world tune into the BBC because their own news media is so limited/biased/otherwise crappy.

    Of course, depending on your particular politics, you might like Fox…

  6. I’m still not a fan though.They have a tendency for bias. For example, their middle east correspondant Orla Guerin, who they had reporting for them during the Israel-Palestinian conflict the most ridiculosuly one sided news bulletins. Shockingly, it turned out she was dating a Palestinian.

    And with Turkey, you’d think that the government just randomly decides to make the lives of the Kurds difficult for fun, when the reality is that they struggle to deal with the Kurds terrorism. So, I don’t like them as they tend to see battles from a biased perspective from whichever side is perceived by the general public as weakest. It’s just points scoring among their target audience and attempting not to offend certain minorities, in doing so alienating less sensitive minority groupings.

    I would describe the BBC as about as impartial as a fat man to cheesecake!

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