By Guest
Julian Dobson is Editorial Director of New Start magazine, and this post is reproduced with kind permission from his blog
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a good graphic can sometimes do the job of an entire book. This week the Guardian illustrated the National Equality Panel’s report on inequality within the UK with a double-page spread of graphic delight: elegant, colourful and informative.
This week’s debate is on media portrayals of poverty. The target is sloppy and ill-informed journalism and TV production, and the kind of approach that portrays poor people as ignorant, irresponsible and criminal.
But are the facts and graphics, in their way, as much part of the problem as the bile or ignorance of TV producers and newspaper publishers?
If we can reduce poverty to statistics and trends we can be outraged by inequalities without ever having to engage with those who bear the brunt of inequality. We can present the information in compelling charts, argue the case for more spending on this or less emphasis on that, without ever coming face to face with the human beings whose lives we’re discussing.
The UK has a plethora of think tanks, research departments and national charities who over the years have done a grand job in amassing evidence about the scale and impact of poverty, and have helped to fashion attitudes to poverty within government and the more serious parts of the media.
What they haven’t achieved, arguably, is any shift in the level or nature of engagement with poverty, either within the media or within institutions. People who are poor are still them, out there – to be fought for by liberals, sympathised with by the well-meaning, or condemned when their activities or struggles inconvenience the rest of us.
This post on the UK Coalition Against Poverty’s attempt to work with student journalists is revealing. There is a yawning gap between their lives and the lives of the people they’re reporting on: a gap that can’t be bridged with the occasional foray into a ‘deprived estate’ to grab the opinions of a few poor people before doing a runner.
There isn’t an easy answer to this, other than to spend time with people whose lives have been affected by poverty – not as interview subjects or as grist to the mill of policy debates but as fellow human beings who have the right to tell their own stories. That’s hard and uncomfortable work, and I’m not sure many in the media are ready for it.
[...] how little many journalists know about the lives of those they report on, and how they often don’t take the trouble to find out. Others blamed it not on the journalists themselves but the media as a whole, where a [...]