just:words

Ran across this article today in the Guardian. Recommend giving it a read. As America tries to drag itself out of recession, 15% of people here live under the poverty line. Why isn’t that a news story?

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.

guardian: About 15% of Americans live in poverty