% of blacks among poor versus % among poor shown on American news

I'll grant, this topic's pretty old, but one of the things that bugs me is that I can't find any new data about it. There were at least two studies between 1999 and 2004 that examined the frequency with which black people appeared in American news coverage involving the poor, finding that blacks were significantly overrepresented. The 2004 study (linked here) also observed that blacks were underrepresented among pictures of the "sympathetic" poor (for instance, five times as many poor old whites were shown as poor old blacks.) Does anyone know of more recent studies on the phenomenon, or have any observations on the phenomenon or its effects?

Well, the way we usually parse it out is, the majority of poor people are white, but disproportionate part of any given non-white (ethnic) minority is poor.

That said, I've never heard of this—not that it's surprising at all—and really couldn't hazard a guess at its effects, specifically, other than that it probably proliferates the "non-whites are lazy fucks that aren't worth anything" nonsense stereotype that uses classism and ties it to ethnicity to produce modern racism.

This should be of use.

In essence, when the media are looking to negatively represent the poor and welfare, they tend to use pictures or video of blacks. When they want to portray a sympathetic image of the poor, they tend to go with pictures or video of white people. I have no idea how credible the statistics are, however.

Edit: oh hey — you said more recent studies. Google Scholar and Citeseer appear not to yield anything informative, so you may be out of luck.

edited 6th Nov '11 1:58:27 AM by ForlornDreamer

This post was thumped by the Eldritch Flyswatter of Horror

^^ Yeah, that book was actually what got me thinking about this. I stumbled across it while trying to find a copy of Writer's Market in the local library.

Well, a recent counter-example wpuld be the Golden Radio Voice guy.

But yeah, poor people of color are a problem, poor white people are a tragedy.

Here is an academic article from 2009 that examines media representation of Katrina victims.

Uh, are we in the same world? Last time I checked, poor non-whites are portrayed as victims of oppression while poor whites are portrayed as inbred retarded rednecks.

Please PLEASE send me the coordinates of that planet so I can visit. Cause that sure ain't how it works on the one they call Earth.

^^ If you mean Positive Discrimination, that doesn't seem to have reached the newspapers yet. (Maybe it's a new guard vs. old guard thing—the papers are still pretty old-fashioned in a lot of ways.)

When you use pictures/video to represent something a lot of it is subconscious. Perhaps to Americans poor black guy=criminal is still something lurking in the subconscious?

@Maciek Ost: I don't think that's true. Diane Sawyer did a special on poor (white) people living in the Appalachians on 20/20 about 2 years ago. To me, that exemplifies the problem with the portrayal of the poor on the news. These poor white folks were portrayed as a tragedy and so sad and sorry. Where's the story about poor Blacks in the ghetto? It's basically a lot of the same situations and just as sad. But poor people being Black is expected, whereas with poor white people it's a huge shocker. Also I agree with teh poster that said it's a case of old vs. new. But I think it's the same mentality, because even if you think poor white people are trailer trash but black people are victims, that's still implying that white people aren't supposed to be poor and black people are.