By Maeve McGoldrick
In 2004 Gordon Brown described how Michael Buerk’s report from Ethiopia on the famine 20 years earlier had spurred the country into action, with people feeling that “we cannot be this rich and see people that poor“. Gordon Brown, then chancellor, told the media that world poverty was the most important issue of our generation and called on the media to help fight global poverty. In doing so he warned that mass amounts of awareness would not guarantee effectiveness, that the first media drive to tackle poverty in Africa in the 80’s had a huge effect on the UK, but the second time around in the 90’s it was less successful in practical terms “Having shocked people in the 1980s, it is harder to re-shock them and re-shock them again” he said
This was the situation six years ago, where world poverty was high on the then chancellor’s agenda and the media was seen to play an important role in combating it. He acknowledged how the media worked; how stories had to be new and shocking to sell and that this reality presented a huge barrier to keeping the interest of the general public and making a practical impact when addressing poverty. Unfortunately six years later it does not seem that this has changed, if anything is has got worse over the years. It may be that tools for communication have advanced to the point where there is so much information instantly available that we are much more likely to register the most shocking of stories. Or that we are so swamped with information that we pass off the familiar as old news, yesterday’s stories.
Yet in recent years there has been increasing coverage of poverty in the UK. One leading paper even created a post for a poverty and development correspondent. Yet coverage of poverty in the UK remains very different from poverty in developing countries. It is largely assumed that people here do not go hungry because of poverty, that the welfare system supports people who would otherwise be poor and that being poor is a result of laziness, an unwillingness to contribute to society. It is shocking to hear that there are still people who spent this particularly cold winter without heating, that there are people, families, in the UK that had to rely on food donations over the holiday season. It seems peculiar that these stories are not told in the same way or hold the same interest as they are as shocking as the poverty Gordon Brown spoke of a number of years ago. Surely the same principle applies ‘we cannot be this rich and see people that poor’ Then maybe the problem is that we do not see people here as ‘that poor’.
We at Community Links, like many similar organisations, are often contacted by journalists seeking out a family or individual to be a case study for a poverty story they wish to report on. This can be a great opportunity for individual people to get their voice heard and counteract stereotypical portrayals of people experiencing poverty; however it remains incredibly difficult to find people who want to speak about their experiences. People we have spoken to say hesitation comes from a fear of being judged and misrepresented by the media. Poverty has become an entertainment story of life styles, benefits and worklessness, social mobility, fraud and even horrendous crimes of abuse, probably because these are shocking to read about and therefore sell papers.
There does seem to be a journalistic appetite for real honest stories but there is also a lack of willing ‘case studies’, real people with real stories to share their battle with poverty with the rest of the nation in order to convince them to care. If done right it can be an incredibly empowering experience but if it is a negative, limited story it doesn’t help solve the problem, in fact it makes it worse. We don’t currently have a famine in the UK with the horrific pictures in Michael Buerk’s famous reports and we shouldn’t need one to get poverty reported with the same respect.
As a campaigner I question why we are trying to get poverty in the media: to bust myths or to get the nation to care and take action to end it? Must we keep shocking readers with poverty stories to spur this country into action again?
Unfortunately I think that the two are interlinked -to get the public to care, and for government to prioritise tackling poverty we must first tackle the stereotypes that currently exist and maybe this requires putting people in a vulnerable position as case studies to make the nation realise that poverty does exit in the UK and it is no less inexcusable than in developing countries.
