Americans Get Testy With Media After It Disrupts a Presser on Poverty to Ask About ISIS.

[Fawke Em]

40. Yes. Poverty is such a "sexy" topic that you can't talk about

really important things like Kim Kardashian's butt or the negligible amount of terrorism there actually is in the United States for all the media's CONSTANT talk of the poor!

The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism found that out of 52 mainstream media outlets analysed, coverage of poverty amounted to less than 1% of available news space from 2007 to 2012. It's even more astonishing considering that period covered a historic recession.

One of the report's conclusions was that media organizations chose not to cover poverty because it was potentially uncomfortable to advertisers seeking to reach a wealthy consumer audience. As Barbara Ehrenreich, who contributes articles on social issues for Time Magazine, put it:

They don't want really depressing articles about misery and hardship near their ads.

Poverty coverage is seen as non-lucrative, time-consuming and involves high levels of commitment that editors are unwilling to give their reporters in this age of newsroom budget tightening. The greatest irony, however, is that poverty, as Tampa Bay Times media critic, Eric Deggans, told The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard earlier this year "is in some ways the ultimate accountability story – because, often, poverty happens by design".

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/05/american-media-ignores-poverty-issues

(I had to go to a BRITISH newspaper to even find stats on the media's lack of covering the issue).