Poor News

Steven Harkins obtained his ESRC funded PhD on print journalism representations of poverty at the University of Sheffield, UK. He is now a Lecturer in Politics, Sociology and Research Methods at Fife College, UK.Jairo Lugo-Ocando is Director of Executive and Graduate Education and Professor in Residence at Northwestern University in Qatar.

• Introduction/ 1.The poverty revolution: From individualism to collectivism and back again/ 2. A poor ‘fourth estate’: The poverty of politics and the politics of poverty in the newsroom / 3. Blaming the Victims: Moral Panics, Welfare Reform and Scapegoating/ 4. Poor Sources: Giving a voice to the voiceless? How people living in poverty are excluded from the news/ 5. From Rags to Riches: Poverty and Ideology in the news/ 6. News after next: Resistance and adaptation in the digital age/ Conclusion/ Bibliography/ Index

Harkins (Fife College, UK) and Lugo-Ocando (Univ. of Leeds, UK) suggest that British journalists report about poverty as it is depicted by Britain’s political and economic elites. The authors note that British news organizations occasionally challenge government and institutional claims about the status of the UK’s impoverished populations. However, the authors suggest, overall news coverage reflects elite views about who deserves welfare and whether public policies to counter poverty are pragmatic. In a commendable use of mixed methods in mass communication research, some of the authors’ conclusions are based on a content analysis of 2,214 articles published in four British national newspapers between 1985 and 2015, and some of the analysis is qualitative. The text provides helpful footnotes and a comprehensive bibliography. The book is an excellent companion to a recently published book by Michael Clay Carey, The News Untold: Community Journalism and Poverty in Appalachia (Univ. of West Virginia, 2017). Recommended for collections in sociology, social and economic disparities, journalism, and mass communication research. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.