Community Links

A few months ago a BBC producer asked if we could put her in touch with people willing to talk to Melanie Phillips about their experience of being unemployed and on benefits. We declined – we didn’t feel we knew anyone in the right position. The second of two episodes aired on Radio 4 yesterday (my review of the first episode here, second episode here).

It did made us think a lot about the role we, as a grassroots charity working in one of the poorer London boroughs, could play in influencing public attitudes to those on benefits, and how we should interact with the media on this issue.

Then we thought we’d draw on the collective wisdom of our readers, and open it up for debate. So for a week starting on 25^th January, this blog will be devoted to discussing the importance of the media in influencing public attitudes to poverty. We’ll be commissioning posts from a wide range of contributors – if you’d like to write something, please do get in touch

To get people thinking, and as a brief introduction, here are some assertions. Feel free to disagree.

The media is important because it can influence public opinion. If the media present poor people as scrounging, benefit-cheating, crime-ridden layabouts, people who are not poor might believe that’s the case. If the media present poor people as just like everyone else but trapped by a system and really quite keen to be less poor, then people might believe that instead.

Public opinion is important for the way individuals and government treat those in poverty. If the not-poor 4/5 of the population have a stereotyped and negative view of the poor fifth, they will tend to treat them accordingly – in job interviews, in shops, in the doctor’s surgery, on the street. This helps keep people poor. And if the government believes that a crackdown on benefit cheats would be more popular than a raise in benefit levels, you can guess which they’ll announce. This will also keep people poor.

In the last few years the media has largely misrepresented and stereotyped poor people, in two ways.

1) In documentaries that claim to highlight poverty, but are perceived – very strongly by those featured in them – as a deliberate misrepresentation. This came across clearly at a fascinating event last year (part of JRF’s excellent work on public attitudes), where people with connections to programmes like Rich Kid Poor Kid, or The Tower, highlighted the ways in which they felt the programmes had wronged them and their communities.

2) In news and comment that selectively covers poor people who are also criminals (anti-social behaviour, knife crime, benefit cheats etc). Many people’s only experience of poverty is through the media, and without any coverage of the law-abiding majority of poor people, they are left with the impression that poor equals criminal. The award-winning blogger NightJack controversially called this the problem of the Evil Poor, Neil Robertson made the point that what they really are is the ‘visible poor‘.