Prioritising Poverty: How Does Media Coverage Of Poverty Impact On Our Ability To Solve It?

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Prioritising Poverty:

How does media coverage of poverty impact on our ability to

solve it?

Rosie Parkyn

Masters Communication for Development, Malmo University Project Work

Final submission: 5th _{September 2018}

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Abstract:

This project work seeks to explore the potential for media and communication approaches to contribute to reducing poverty in the UK. This took place through extensive desk research, qualitative interviews with poverty campaigners and experts, a content analysis across a week of mainstream media output and a discourse analysis focussed on the publication of a significant independent report criticising the progress of the Conservative Government’s flagship welfare reform programme Universal Credit, once described as one of the Conservative Party’s major success stories.

The study found ample potential to communicate about - and report on - poverty more effectively, particularly given that current levels of coverage are low but not as

negative or stigmatising as they have been historically. I tentatively conclude we may be experiencing a shift in discourse around welfare and poverty issues in the UK that may provide an opportunity to infuse new narratives which accord people living in poverty visibility and respect, build public consensus that poverty is an issue which must and should be solved, and expand the range of solutions under discussion.

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Table of Contents:

Introduction page 4

Theory and methodology page 7

Omissions and reflections page 10

What is poverty? page 12

Literature review page 14

Does the media cover poverty, and, if so, how? page 14 How are people living with poverty reflected and represented? page 15

The experience of living with poverty page17

The information needs of people living with poverty page 19

Public opinion and poverty page 21

The changing media landscape: the discursive practice page 24

Qualitative research page 26

Content analysis page 28

Discourse analysis page 36

Conclusions and recommendations page 41

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Introduction:

There is a lot of suffering competing for the UK public’s attention at this moment in time, permeating all aspects of our always-on lives if we choose to allow it. Yet, whilst we more easily bear witness to events which might concern us – in Syria, in Rakhine, in Yemen, in the Mediterranean – we seem unable or unwilling to alleviate the suffering, no matter how much we may express our outrage. Greater accountability or consensus for action have not followed greater knowledge. Do we need new ways to understand how others live, and build a more effective empathy?

I have been a practitioner in the field of media development and development

communications for ten years, working with and through media to ensure that people in the global south are supplied with the information they need to make decisions, have access to platforms which enable them to reflect and represent themselves in the issues which matter to them most, and the means to build social cohesion and hold power holders to account. I have come to understand how profoundly the media can influence the way people see the world and each other, shaping attitudes, decisions and social norms and enabling action. It is not the only means through which these processes are powered, but the media is an integral part of social change, albeit to different degrees dependent on context and the issue at stake.

In recent years, I have seen my own country, the UK, become increasingly fragmented. The fault lines laid themselves bare in the Brexit vote, described by writer Darren McGarvey as “perhaps a glimpse of what happens when people start becoming aware of the fact that they haven’t been cut into the action but have no real mechanism to enfranchise themselves beyond voting…(and the moment when)…middle class liberals, progressive and radicals…were suddenly confronted with the vulgar and divided

country the rest of us had been living in for decades (McGarvey, 2017, pp 147 - 148).

The immediate aftermath saw a brief shift in media focus towards the communities which had voted to leave, but this soon turned back to Westminster and the political

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fallout, including negotiations with the EU. This may have diminished the prospect of a national conversation in which radical solutions to the issues which precipitated the vote in the first place could be proposed.

Since the Brexit vote, concerns have been raised that the UK is seeing increases in the numbers of people living in poverty. The Institute of Fiscal Studies has predicted that absolute child poverty will rise from 15.1% in 2016 to 18.3 % in 2020/21 (Brown, 2015, p2), whilst researchers report that 1.252 million people experienced destitution at some point during 2015 (Armstrong, 2018, p6). The Trades Union Congress published a report in May 2018 stating that the number of children living in poverty within working households would rise to 3.1 million in 2018, as compared with 2.1 million in 2010 (TUC, 2018).

The research piece which follows was shaped by the question of whether the tools, concepts, theories and approaches deployed by the global communication for development and media strengthening sector might effectively be applied to

addressing this issue in the UK. The broad question I sought to explore was ‘how can

media and communication contribute to reducing poverty in the UK?’ There is already a

body of literature examining the way in which people living in poverty are reflected in the media here. I intended to review and synthesise this alongside original research framed by discourse analysis approaches, concluding with recommendations about future strategies for media and communication work in this area.

My decision to pursue this question had been made independently and was inspired only by interest in understanding the issues in greater depth and bringing my

professional experience to bear upon them. However, preliminary research revealed that one of the largest and most influential social justice organisations in the UK, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, had also come to the view that mass communication was more central to its mission to end poverty than it had once believed (Interview with Abigail Scott, 2018). No longer a service function tasked with conveying the organisation’s highly respected research outputs to a discrete audience of

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makers, the communications team was now set to play a central role in building the public will to solve poverty (Interview with Abigail Scott, 2018).

Here there were some connections to be made with the global development sector, which has undertaken extensive self-examination of its public communication efforts, including the decision in 2018 by Comic Relief to end the practice of using celebrities to promote its work – an approach which had been criticised for perpetuating white saviour stereotypes and poverty tourism. The sector is also in perpetual debate about the risks inherent in asking potential supporters to understand and treat the symptoms of poverty rather than the complex causes. But it has also enjoyed significant success in building public will to address poverty through mass movement campaigns like Make Poverty History. The UK development sector’s ongoing battle with some quarters of the British Press should not be forgotten, but the policy commitment to spend 0.7% of GDP on aid even while other departmental budgets are slashed remains intact – for now. And there is evidence to suggest that despite the safeguarding

scandal of early 2018, the sector’s core supporter base is resilient – for now (Green, 2018).

This paper is organised as follows: The first section sets out the theoretical concepts and methodological approaches which underpin the literature review and the collection and analysis of the empirical data. The second section notes omissions in and reflections on the research design. The third section explores definitions of poverty. The fourth section is an extensive review of the existing research literature across a number of sub-questions: i) Does the media cover poverty, and if so, how? ii) How are people living with poverty reflected and represented? iii) The experience of living with poverty iv) The information needs of people living with poverty v) Public opinion and poverty and iv) The changing media landscape in the UK: the discursive practice. The fifth section is a summary of the qualitative interviews conducted, whilst section six details the content analysis, and section seven the discourse analysis. The final section contains conclusions and recommendations.

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Theory and Methodology:

This study draws heavily on media effects theories, specifically agenda-setting theory and representation theory, in attempting to understand the interplay of contemporary media coverage of poverty issues and the prospects for public support to end poverty. I also expected to touch on perspectives from social psychology as these offered relevance for the dramatically transformed way in which media consumers now encounter and interact with media output within social networks. Such networks can extend and amplify the reach and influence of ‘ordinary’ people and elevate them alongside or in competition with ‘authoritative’ voices from the media or groups of experts. This type of peer influence long predates digital media, but may offer one means of considering media effects research – developed when media consumption was based on a more linear pattern - in the context of the contemporary media landscape.

Such networked communication provides opportunities, but may also mean that communicators working to end poverty will need to broaden their reach and scope to be effective. Separately, theories from social psychology – and cognitive psychology - are becoming more prominent in communication for development discourse and as part of wider discussions about the limitations of rational, fact-based communication and information in influencing action. However, it should be noted that this group of theories were of secondary importance to the below.

Agenda-setting theory is central to an understanding of the relationship between media output, public opinion and the policy-making processes which can address poverty. According to this theory, substantiated by multiple research studies since it was first developed, the media can influence the public’s understanding of which issues matter – if not their opinion on these issues - by giving them increased

attention. The public learn about issues and attach importance to them based on the prominence and volume of coverage accorded them by journalists and editors, who in turn shape and filter political realities (McComb and Shaw, 1972, p176). Related – and ever-evolving - theories around framing, whereby the way in which issues are

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presented affects what people think about them more than the facts pertaining to them, are also relevant here. Whilst journalists may intend to report in their own words, these words can be – consciously or unconsciously – shaped by press releases. This enables organisations seeking coverage on particular issues to influence the language through which issues are presented by the media. However, the question of whether it is the media, political actors or, indeed, the public which sets the agenda for the other two is also hotly debated, as covered in the literature review which follows.

Hall’s representation theory is also highly relevant to questions of the relationship between media output and public and political attitudes towards particular groups within society. Hall’s analysis about how stereotyping creates division and promotes acceptance of a status quo which perpetuates disadvantages are key. He describes stereotyping as when a person is, “reduced to a few essentials, fixed in Nature by a few, simplified characteristics” _{(Hall, 1997, p249). This is simultaneously deterministic}

and dehumanising: stereotypes can’t evolve and it is difficult to empathise with them, therefore there is limited value in - or will to - engineer change. Stereotyping, which the media plays a central role in amplifying, reinforcing and holding in place, can increase social exclusion. It can “divide the normal and the acceptable from the abnormal and unacceptable. It then…expels everything which does not fit, which is different (Hobbs cited in Hall, 1997, p258). This theory was core to understanding the consequences of particular representations within media coverage, and drove a more impassioned investigation into the motivations behind it. Taken together, agenda-setting theory and representation theory underscore the significance of editorial decision-making for already marginalised sectors of the population.

My methodological approach and organising principles were heavily informed by Fairclough’s discourse theory. It is highly complimentary with agenda-setting and representation theories, and Fairclough’s three dimensional model provides a relevant analytical framework for the questions I sought to answer in acknowledging that media content is both constituted and constitutive, and that discourses reproduce and

change knowledge and power relations (Phillips and Jorgensen, 2002, p66). This seemed wholly appropriate when trying to understand what lay behind media

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coverage of poverty and how media and communication about poverty might be adapted and improved to contribute to solving – as opposed to entrenching – the issue within the structural and societal arenas. The action-oriented role of critical discourse analysis in generating insight which drives social change resonated with this study (Phillips and Jorgensen, 2002, p64).

Expanding the lens beyond the content to explore the discursive practice necessitated the extensive literature review, in particular to understand pressures and power dynamics impacting on editorial decision-making, but also to examine poverty reporting against the wider political and economic context and consider the links between the two. It would be impossible to identify causal relationships between different – and ever-changing - variables within such a complex and broad ecosystem, but it was important to draw potential connections and identify signs of shifting narratives.

Discourse analysis thus informed the design and delivery of three short phases of empirical research, as follows. Phase one involved six open-ended qualitative interviews with four practitioners working on poverty issues and two people

experiencing poverty. My intention was to expand on the preceding literature review with a more fluid exploration of the challenges and opportunities inherent in

communicating about poverty issues. Phase two involved a round of rudimentary content analysis designed to assess the extent to which issues associated with poverty were apparent in the media over a five day period in May. Whilst this was necessarily light touch given limited resources, the systematic and quantitative nature of the content analysis approach would provide an empirical snapshot of the extent to which the media were really covering poverty issues. This would be less susceptible to selection bias (Hansen, 1998, p91). In a departure from one of the more common applications of content analysis, I did not intend to examine the influence of this sample of coverage on public attitudes, but rather explore which dimensions of poverty were reported most frequently (if any), what basic characteristics were present in the coverage, and what the source of the coverage was. This would generate some insight into whether the media is prioritising poverty, whether it is

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currently reflecting or diverging from the description and analysis of poverty which is advanced by anti-poverty campaigners, and what this might mean for a shared understanding of the issue.

In line with Hansen’s guidance to enrich content analysis with more qualitative methodologies (Hansen, 1998, p9), I later undertook a deeper analysis of a series of articles and broadcast news items published and aired over the 24 hour period following the publication of a significant independent report on Universal Credit, the British government’s flagship reform of the benefits system. The fact that

simultaneous reporting would take place on a single text offered an unrivalled opportunity to reflect on how that text was interpreted by different media outlets. The literature review would be foundational in building my understanding of the wider discursive practice relating to the production and consumption of these pieces of content. Hence the strands of research were highly interconnected.

Omissions and reflections:

Whilst recognising the diverse range of experiences, characteristics and identities within this group, I had hoped at the outset to interview a larger number of people experiencing poverty. Their reflections on how they see themselves and how the issues that affect their lives are portrayed in the media seemed a vital dimension of this research, particularly given my suspicion that one factor in the misrepresentation or under-representation of issues around poverty in wider discourse was lack of

meaningful inclusion or participation by those affected in certain key aspects of British life. I was also learning - thanks to this study – of an increasingly important and

empowering set of principles within anti-poverty movements globally of ‘nothing about us, without us’.

In addition, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation sought to reach a yet-to-be-defined swath of “undecideds” with their communication efforts (Abigail Scott interview, 2008). Their intention was to divert energy away from a circular argument with those who held a firm ideological commitment to reducing the welfare budget, and focus

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instead on the persuadable or latent supporters of anti-poverty policies and strategies. Whilst such segmentation is crucial, and has been highly effective when used to

mobilise around other social issues or to get out the vote, it was important to this study to recognise the principle that building support to end poverty should not just comprise of one social group being communicated with about another. The 20% of the UK population experiencing poverty should be a core part of that public will and that public’s ability to take action, and should also be informed and mobilised, as opposed to being viewed as the passive beneficiaries of other people’s campaigning.

It did not occur to me initially to co-design the research with people living with poverty, and I have to thank colleagues at ATD Fourth World for not only suggesting but expecting it. Unfortunately my encounter with them came towards the end of the study, after many months of chasing potential interview subjects through other organisations. During those months I had ample time to speculate about the reasons that people were not coming forward to participate in the research, and I assumed that lack of time and lack of incentive were key. I could not promise the people I interviewed that telling me their story would make their lives any better, and I never escaped the sense that this was an extractive and inherently imbalanced process from which I stood to gain more than them. Co-designing the research would have been a more rewarding process for all concerned, and would likely have resulted in a different research question.

In conducting this research, I was forced to recognise my own distance from people living in relative geographical proximity but inhabiting vastly different lives from me. Part of my motivation for researching this issue was to build my understanding of those lives and how they might be improved through individual empowerment and systemic change. My lack of existing connections and trust relationships within these communities made the research more difficult on a practical level, but also inspired some useful personal reflections about my own motivations and role that I might not have confronted otherwise. The most important learning I took from the experience, which may well contain the seeds of a broader lesson, is that lack of day to day contact between people in different social groups is one of the most significant barriers to

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more effective communication around these issues, as well as to creating the environment for more effective pro-poor or anti-poverty policies.

What is poverty?

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation describe poverty as “when a person’s resources (mainly their material resources) are not sufficient to meet their minimum needs (including social participation)” (Armstrong, 2017, p6). Academics Stewart Lansley and Joanna Mack, who conducted four poverty exclusion surveys between 1983 and 2012, consulted with the British public to create a list of essential household items necessary to meet those basic needs. This basket changed over time. For example, the internet might once have been a luxury, where daily access to broadband might now be required by Jobcentres (Armstrong, 2017, p24).

Whilst this was a methodological process designed to inform poverty measurement, a negative discourse - seemingly fuelled by anecdote - around the goods owned or available to people living in poverty has often been present in the media. In 1986, for example, a Daily Mail headline ran ‘Fed, clothed and housed, with money for cigarettes and TV and £680 for Christmas presents. Is this what we now call poverty?’ (cited in Harkins, S. and Lugo-Ocando, 2017, p182). This commentary from Wise relates to the United States but is equally relevant in the UK (Wise, 2018):

“One of the more prominent tendencies within the modern culture of cruelty is to chastise the poor for possessing any material items remotely connected to middle-class normalcy, as if somehow the possession of refrigerators,

microwaves, or televisions demonstrates that the poor in America aren’t really suffering…Though it should hardly need to be said, today’s poor do not live in the early nineteen-seventies, let alone the nineteenth century; they live in the present, in which the ability to be part of the mainstream requires one to be able to do things and have things that previous generations didn’t do or have”

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From 2008 onwards, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation published a Minimum Income Standard needed to pay for the items in the basket. In 2016, this was £17,100 before tax for a single person (Armstrong, 2017, p25). This was the same year they began to measure destitution as well as poverty (Armstrong, 2017 p7).

Such definitions matter enormously in poverty discourse. The debate in the UK is open to obfuscation by the fact that two different measures of poverty compete within political and media narratives. Each enables the drawing of contradictory conclusions about whether poverty is rising or declining at different points in time, and the back and forth about whose measure is most valid – and therefore what the true picture is - can act as a diversion from deeper discussion about how poverty affects people and might be addressed. This is described by Redden as “rationalising” poverty by

“emphasising numbers over arguments” (Redden, 2014, cited in Harkins, S. and Lugo-Ocando, 2017, p180).

In the 2015 General Election, “politicians could and did pick the one that helped make their case and leave the rest behind” (Moy, 2015). The poverty denialism which this can enable isn’t new; in the mid-1980s the editor of the Star was instructed by the paper’s owner to spike an article about the Conservative budget on the basis that, “There aren’t any poor. You can take my word for it. There are no poor in this country” (Curran and Seaton, 2003 cited in Harkins, S. and Lugo-Ocando, 2017, p180). This idea that real poverty doesn’t exist is also present in interviews and focus groups conducted with members of the British public (Frameworks, 2018, p3) Whilst the qualitative nature of the research means this view cannot be extrapolated to the population at large, it raises further questions around what the public may need poverty to look like in order to acknowledge its existence, particularly if acknowledging its existence is at odds with an individual or group’s belief system. As Golding notes, “the British do like their poor to look the part” (Golding, 1991, cited in McKendrick, Sinclair, Irwin, Scott, & Dobbie, 2008, p 50).

A household is in relative poverty when its income falls below 60% of the median household income, with median income measured after taxes and benefits to assess

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spending power and equivalised for the number of people in a household; whilst absolute poverty is measured in relation to an agreed standard of living set in 2010/11. (Full Fact, 2018). In underscoring the different results these definitions generate, fact-checking charity Full Fact calculates that absolute poverty has fallen in the last ten years, whilst the number of children living in relative poverty after housing costs has risen over the last three years. The Department for Work and Pensions state that neither of these shifts – whether up or down – are statistically significant (Full Fact, 2018). It is worth noting that whilst the scale of these numbers matters greatly, they are unlikely to elicit wider public engagement if presented in isolation (Frameworks, 2018).

People living on low incomes will often access the benefits system and may be further impoverished by cuts to welfare, and so debates around poverty and the benefits system are often conflated. This can make it difficult to get an accurate picture of public attitudes to these two issues.

Literature review:

This was broad, encompassing theoretical and empirical studies but also media

commentary, it cut across a number of sub-themes, including the historical perspective on media coverage and political discourse around poverty, public attitudes to and understanding of poverty, as well as the experience and psycho-social impacts of living with poverty.

Does the media cover poverty and, if so, how?

The review was anchored around a seminal mixed-methods research study carried out by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2008 entitled ‘The Media, Poverty and Public Opinion in the UK’ which made a number of important observations in relation to reporting about poverty in the UK and overseas during that period. It concluded that poverty was not particularly visible in the media and did not feature as an issue worthy of dedicated news coverage, but was instead presented in relation to other issues

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deemed more significant. In addition, people experiencing poverty were rarely heard from, and the existence of poverty was not contextualised in relation to wider social processes but rather as an “abstract occurrence” illustrated by “individualised images” (McKendrick, Sinclair, Irwin, Scott, & Dobbie, 2008, pp. 31 – 32). In assessing the implications of this, Scott is cited “it becomes difficult to construct an understanding of poverty as a structural outcome of inequalities, and therefore to develop the basis for a collective response to it.” (Scott, 1982, cited in McKendrick, Sinclair, Irwin, Scott, & Dobbie, 2008, p 57).

This is reinforced by Chauhan and Foster’s 2014 study applying Social Representation Theory to the analysis of 271 newspaper articles published in 2001 and 2011. They say: “With a lack of discussion on the wider socioeconomic causes and contributing factors, poverty within the UK appears as an “orphan phenomenon with an unknown genesis” (Chauhan and Foster, 2014). These strands of analysis are echoed and expanded upon in 2018’s “Poor News, Media Discourses on Poverty in Times of Austerity”, which argues that the media either ignores poverty altogether, despite evidence that inequality is growing, or frames it as “private troubles for individuals rather than as public issues which affect wider society” (Harkins and Lugo-Ocando, 2017, pp. 17 - 32). For Chalaby, poverty is not a “newsworthy fact” (Chalaby, 1998, cited in Harkins and Lugo-Ocando, 2017, p110).

How are people living with poverty reflected and represented?

Chauhan and Foster reference a body of research evidencing negative stereotyping of people living with poverty, citing a range of academics who argue that this has led to the poor and welfare recipients becoming “one of the most unpopular groups within modern society” (Bullock, Fraser Wyche, & Williams, 2001; Fiske, Xu, Cuddy, & Glick, 1999, cited in Chauhan and Foster, 2014, p5). Their own research supports this, and they conclude that that “the media coverage captured in our data set leads to creating the poor as the ‘problematic other’” (Chauhan and Foster, 2014, p12). For Katz, people experiencing poverty are also constructed as “menacing (a threat to) the rest of us “(Katz, 1990, cited in Harkins and Lugo-Ocando, 2017, p28). They are also blamed for

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their own poverty (Harkins and Lugo-Ocando, 2017, p109). Golding and Franklin trace back the origins of this discourse, arguing that scroungerphobia rhetoric began in the UK as early as the 1970s when “social derision” and demonisation of welfare recipients became more commonplace, supplying and normalising derogatory language for use in future media coverage which would ultimately contribute to an environment of

reduced support for the welfare state (Golding and Franklin, 1982 and 1999, cited in Harkins and Lugo-Ocando, 2017, p 106).

An article published by Al-Jazeera in April 2018 supports the idea that this discourse is constant: “A Brit buying the daily Mirror in 1976 would have come across an article entitled ‘Cheated by the dole queue fiddlers’. Now, in 2018, a recent headline in the Sun screamed ‘Hod a Liar: Benefits cheat who swindled $67,612” (Aljazeera, 2018). Jensen highlights the role of entertainment television shows such as ‘Benefits Street’ and ‘On Benefits and Proud’ in reinforcing negative stereotypes. Whilst they purport to elucidate the reality of life on welfare, Jensen argues that careful editing

sensationalises those lives for entertainment, with negative consequences for the participants and others living with poverty (Jensen, 2014, cited in Patrick, 2016).

Notions of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor have been consistent features of poverty discourse for generations, though they found new energy within the post-War

neoliberal consensus (Harkins and Lugo-Ocando, 2017, p 18). The suspicion directed at benefit recipients has served to “transform the social problem of unemployment into a public crisis, if not moral panic, about welfare scroungers” (Franklin, 1992, cited in Harkins and Lugo-Ocando, 2017, p 108), despite the fact that welfare fraud was significantly overestimated (Deacon, 1973, cited in Harkins and Lugo-Ocando, 2017, p 107). A 1982 study concluded that news coverages focussed consistently and

disproportionately on the undeserving poor (Golding and Middleton, 1982, cited in Harkins and Lugo-Ocando, 2017, p 112). This creates an inextricable link between welfare and the ‘undeserving’ poor (Harkins, S. and Lugo-Ocando, 2017, p 107) and the perception that the need to claim benefits is a “problematic attribute” (Patrick, 2016, p2).

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For Hall, this demonisation is a deliberate aspect of the maintenance of the existing social order, setting up “a symbolic frontier between the ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’, the ‘acceptable’ and the ‘unacceptable’, what ‘belongs’ and what does not…Us and Them” (Hall, 1997, p 258). Following Hall’s analysis, it is immediately obvious how the media representations discussed above would then fuel and exacerbate social exclusion, as well as the sense that change for the stereotyped group is neither possible, nor necessary, nor desirable. Their situation and their boundaries are fixed. Indeed, this is the natural order of things (Dyer, 1977, cited in Hall, 1997, p259). Some have argued that whilst this feature of British life whereby the poor are regarded as inferior is not well acknowledged, it is necessary that we regard such discrimination as ‘povertyism’ and legislate in a way that would also shift social norms around its acceptability (Kileen, 2008). Scott supports this argument: “Inequalities are accepted by people in a factual way, not a moral way, just as they accept the weather – there is apparently nothing they can do about it. These inequalities, however, are justified by those who are privileged in terms of particular vocabularies of motive (Scott, 1982, cited in McKendrick, Sinclair, Irwin, Scott, & Dobbie, 2008, p57).

The experience of living with poverty

Walker’s seminal 2014 research on the experience of living with poverty in six countries argues that discrimination and stereotyping are highly effective in creating shame and division in every context studied. In an article referencing this research he says that “While people experiencing poverty seek social engagement and social acceptance, they often cannot afford the former and are not afforded the latter. Indeed, their attempts at engagement are often rejected and used as evidence to justify existing differentials: ‘the poor’ are poor because ‘they’ try to be like ‘us’” (Walker and Chase, 2014, p10).

This situation is self-perpetuating: the shame connected with financial restrictions on participation is felt internally then reinforced by interactions with wider society, through encounters with policy and service delivery processes seemingly designed to exacerbate the sense of individual failure and unwelcome dependence on a scornful

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and dehumanising system, and “through the fallout of political and media discourse”(Walker and Chase, 2014, p 10). Walker and Chase are clear on the consequences for the individuals’ lives and for wider anti-poverty efforts: “Shame, recognised by psychologists as the most invidious of the social emotions, undermines self-esteem and causes people to retreat socially, thereby lessening their social capital while reducing their sense of agency and personal efficacy” (Walker and Chase 2014, p 12).

Ruth Patrick supports this view, arguing that welfare reform has pushed people further away from the Labour market and makes people less likely to vote (Patrick, 2015). Shame, then, which is driven by stigmatisation, in turn reinforced by the media, is likely to lesson rather than improve someone’s chances of building a successful, happy and productive life.

Sheehy-Skeffington and Rea’s systematic review on the evidence around poverty and decision-making further explores the psycho-social impacts on living with poverty (Sheehy-Skeffington and Rea, 2017). The study may – and may deliberately seek to - provide a counter to the prevalent, long-standing narrative whereby the individual is to blame for their own circumstances and responsible for improving them. It does this by providing evidence of the additional layer of challenges created and perpetuated by the experience of living in poverty. These include that poverty shifts a person’s focus towards addressing short rather than long-term needs or threats; that it can affect the cognitive process of all people regardless of intelligence level; that people living with poverty tend to place themselves further down the social hierarchy and that children from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds “report a lower sense of belonging at school and greater exposure to negative incidents such as bullying or sexual harassment. These findings might explain the robust association between living in poverty and demonstrating more aggressive, and less co-operative, behaviour at primary and secondary school” (Sheehy-Skeffington and Rea, 2017, pp 1 – 3). Such research matters in producing empirical knowledge of the experience of living in poverty from which the media can draw, and against which existing media narratives can be

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compared. It also values the individual lives of people living in poverty whilst providing context around the structural causes and consequences of their situations.

The information needs of people living with poverty

The literature review provides ample evidence that media coverage of poverty has been limited, but also that it further excludes people living with poverty by

communicating about them in dehumanising ways. But less has been said about the extent to which the media works directly for people living in poverty, serving their informational and entertainment needs in ways that could support them to improve their situations in tandem with policies which address structural issues.

The 2018 paper “Poor Information: How Economics Affects the Information Lives of Low-Income Individuals” explores this question. Whilst it is focussed on the United States, it has implications for the UK as a comparable media market. It argues that “information inequality readily translates into information inequality in the United Sates” (Hamilton and Morgan, 2018, p 2832). Because people on low incomes do not have money to spend on subscriptions or internet access and are less likely to vote, media content is not produced with their requirements and preferences in mind: “They are less likely to be a valued consumer, worker, audience member or voter targeted for persuasion”, and their attention is thus less valuable to advertisers (Hamilton and Morgan, 2018, p 2833).

This translates directly into limited ‘accountability journalism’ in the areas in which they live because there is not enough advertising or subscription revenue to support it, along with an increased risk of decision-making which is not fully informed (Hamilton and Morgan, 2018, p 2836). These “news deserts” are comparable with the media dark areas whose existence in the Global South is very well documented. They exist because of inequality and also they exacerbate it, with wealthier areas disproportionately well served by high quality journalism which meets the residents’ civic needs because they can afford it (Hamilton and Morgan, 2018, p 2836). This should be of real concern in light of evidence that people living in areas with a greater flow of high quality

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information between residents benefit from so called “neighbourhood effects” whereby they make decisions which are more beneficial to them (Chetty, Friedman and Saez, 2013, cited in Hamilton and Morgan, 2018, p 2837), and that rational, long-term, self-interested decision-making is already difficult when under the kind of

cognitive pressure that scarcity produces (Shah, Mullainathan and Shafir, 2012, cited in Hamilton and Morgan, 2018, p 2838), even though the financial risks of poor decision-making – taking out a payday loan with high interest rates, for example - may be greater (Hamilton and Morgan, 2018, p 2838).

My own research revealed the existence of a number of Facebook groups in which Universal Credit claimants provide each other with information and emotional support. It is clear that both are otherwise scarce in the participants’ lives, but it is unfortunate that many of those answering each other’s questions appear to have limited

knowledge or access to clear definitive information themselves.

In addition to information scarcity, Hamilton and Morgan’s research notes that people living in low income neighbourhoods may have a different visual environment to those living in wealthy places, citing a 2010 study in which it was demonstrated that tobacco advertising was larger and more likely to be within 1000 feet of a school in a poor setting (Seidenberg, Caughey, Rees and Connolly, 2012, cited in Hamilton and Morgan, 2018, p 2841). If we consider the way that we are targeted by advertisers through social media as well as our physical environments, we might assume the same is true on those platforms.

All this has clear implications for fully informed choice, the potential for people living in poverty to be exploited and the extent to which poor people are served politically. It is also relevant for debates about the extent to which people living in poverty have access to tools and resources which might support them to transcend their

circumstances. A New York Times article written by economist Seema Jayachandran highlights the results of two experiments which demonstrate the potential for entertainment output to inspire people to move themselves out of poverty, arguing

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that these raise the possibility of including positive thinking as part of anti-poverty strategies (Jayachandran, 2018).

In Uganda, students shown the film Queen of Katwe, in which a Ugandan girl becomes an international chess champion, performed better in academic tests than a control group who were shown Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children - a film with no relatable role model (Riley, 2018, cited in Jayachandran, 2018). In Mexico, 326 women eligible for small loans from a bank watched a documentary about women who had used loans to expand their businesses then undertook a four week ‘hope’ curriculum. This succeeded in raising their outlooks and aspirations (Lybbert and Wyddick, 2016, cited in Jayachandran, 2018). And the World Development Report in 2015 highlighted a study in Ethiopia whereby a randomly selected treatment group of villagers were invited to watch inspirational videos. Six months later, a survey revealed that viewers had higher savings and had invested more in their children’s schooling (Bernard et al, 2014, cited in World Bank Group, 2015).

Public opinion and poverty

What, then, is the interplay between negative media coverage, political discourse and public opinion? For Walker and Chase, convincing evidence has been presented by Baumberg and other academics that the media impacts adversely on public attitudes: “People’s opinions are affected by reading negative stories in newspapers and

moreover… once changed, their new opinions become self-sustaining” (Baumberg, 2012, cited in Walker and Chase, 2014, p12). Their own qualitative research appears to bear this out, with affluent respondents citing articles in tabloid newspapers as

justification for their views (Walker and Chase, 2014, p12). It is hard to disentangle and prove conclusively the direction of this relationship: It is possible they were not influenced by those articles but rather recall them because they provided supporting evidence for already-existing beliefs.

Nonetheless, people may express ideas and opinions infused with and reinforced by “cumulative exposure to certain representations and ideas” (McKendrick, Sinclair,

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Irwin, Scott, & Dobbie, 2008, p57). The news media still has influence: a 2017 Harvard study demonstrated a near 20% increase in social media posts about topics covered simultaneously by three small to medium sized media outlets (King, 2017, cited in Netburn, Los Angeles Times). In addition, those with least personal experience of an issue are most likely to be influenced about it by media coverage (Philo, 2001, cited in McKendrick, Sinclair, Irwin, Scott, & Dobbie, 2008, p52).

For Chauhan and Foster, the role of news media in shaping the public perception of social issues is also well documented (Baum & Potter, 2008; Bloch-Elkon, 2007; Bratton & Mattes, 2003; Hodgetts, Bolam, & Stephens, 2005; Nisbet & Myers, 2011 cited in Chauhan and Foster, 2014). However, he also underscores the two-way direction in which media coverage and public attitudes flow. This forces the media to be highly sensitive to the perceived needs and preferences of its consumers (Foster, 2006; Hough, 1988 cited in Chauhan and Foster, 2014, p17), and puts journalists under increased pressure to meet those needs and preferences in reporting.

So the media influences the public and the public influence the media. Who influences policy-makers? There is evidence to suggest that the media impact on what politicians say if not what they do (McKendrick, Sinclair, Irwin, Scott, & Dobbie, 2008, p71), but also that they are more influential on some issues than others (McKendrick, Sinclair, Irwin, Scott, & Dobbie, 2008, p71). Walker and Chase describe these relationships as a “triad”, arguing that policy-makers are also at the mercy of public opinion, monitoring it closely to develop policies which will appeal or finding ways to present existing policies in the frame which is most likely to resonate and find acceptance (Walker and Chase, 2014, p12).

2018 began with Conservative MP Ben Bradley remarking on a “vast sea of

unemployed wasters” and suggesting that welfare claimants should have vasectomies. Framing strategist Nicky Hawkins argues that “it is likely that at some level he was reflecting a swath of public opinion” (Hawkins, 2018). Whilst he was subsequently forced to apologise, his comments were at the extreme end of a spectrum as opposed to wildly beyond the norm.

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O’Grady has analysed political speeches made about welfare between 1980 and 2010, the era during which public opinion began to turn against the benefits system.

According to O’Grady, the system is presented at the beginning of this period as an effective means of mitigating poverty, and welfare claimants are talked about in

positive terms. During the latter half, benefits become increasingly described as a drain on public money. Of primary relevance here is that “the shifts in rhetoric did not

occur after public opinion changed. Politicians were not responding to public opinion; they were leading it…the large reversal in public support for benefits can only be explained as a reaction to the discourse of politicians, filtered through the media” (O’Grady, 2018). According to Slater, this created fertile ground for consensus around austerity, presented as a package of “crisis-management” through which welfare-dependent families would be weaned off benefits – or Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s distinctly uncharacteristic metaphor of the ‘blank cheque’ - and into

employment (Slater, 2014, in Harkins and Lugo-Ocando, p199). Moy concludes that poverty was barely mentioned during campaigning for the 2015 Election: “neither party was particularly using the word ‘poverty’ to talk about a pressing issue going on in the UK now that needed to be tackled – it was something that was going away or that existed elsewhere.” (Moy, 2015).

The British Social Attitudes survey is one means of establishing how public attitudes towards poverty and welfare have changed over time. It has been tracking these for 30 years, including a crucial period since 2010 when austerity and welfare reforms

became a significant aspect of government policy. The most recent 2017 survey finds that attitudes to spending on unemployment benefits are softening, with 20%

supporting an increase to these, the highest rate since 2002, and 56% agreeing that “cutting welfare benefits would damage too many people’s lives” (Harding, R, 2017, p13).

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The changing media landscape in the UK: the discursive practice

Today, anyone wishing to shape public opinion or build a shared reality through the media faces a particular set of challenges. The public are increasingly sceptical, fragmented, polarised and fatigued, with their collective attention span – and willingness to pay for media and information products - whittled away by an ever-abundant array of choice; available on demand, at their fingertips and served up according to their pre-existing preferences. The era of ‘mediatisation’ is said to be waning, as politicians use social media to talk directly to the public and journalists find themselves forced to focus on the publication of opinion, commentary and polarising pieces which hit the metrics and deepens the loyalty of their existing subscriber base, yet distract from well-informed, in-depth, ‘slow’ or investigative journalism which speaks to the media’s fourth estate role and makes sense of the flood of information sources which can easily confuse or mislead (Gaston, Harrison-Evans, Sälhoff,

Niggemeie, 2018). A recent survey of journalists in the UK for example, found that 86 per cent said that the time available for researching stories had decreased, and just over half (52 per cent) felt increased pressure towards sensational news production (Gaston, Harrison-Evans, Sälhoff, Niggemeie, 2018, p16). Nick Davies’ research also highlights the increased practice of ‘churnalism’, “the passive processing of material which overwhelmingly tends to be supplied for them by outsiders” (Davies, 2012, cited in Harkins and Lugo-Ocando, p 141). This is echoed by Dahlgren, who argues that although the media continue to provide information to the public, they are easily manipulated by powerful agents within society (Dahlren, 2000, cited in Harkins and Lugo-Ocando, p 157).

There are examples of where the mainstream media has impacted on politics in recent times. The resignations of Priti Patel and Michael Fallon were arguably driven by the BBC and The Sun respectively, but the media’s ability to lead, control and sustain a national conversation around a key issue of its choosing – whether driven by political actors behind the scenes or not - may be less straightforward:

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“It used to be the case that a lot of journalists and the pushy editors and the editors of the main broadcast bulletins, set the agenda, and that's still largely the case, but that power is being eroded, if you like, which is probably, generally a beneficial thing, because the politicians are able to take a little bit more control through more direct involvements with the general public, so it's probably beneficial for democracy but very challenging for journalism. It's now a lot less top-down, so you know in the, in the good-old, or bad-old days, competitors, correspondents used to say that well this is what we think's important and these are the arguments for and against, [...] and now that's not really a viable model, because people are reacting in the digital world very quickly, contributing to the story, and so, it becomes a more democratic tool than it used to. As a result of a more horizontal power dynamic between politicians, the media, and the public, agenda-setting is therefore seen as more of an emergent phenomenon.” (Gaston, Harrison-Evans, Sälhoff, Niggemeie, 2018, p 26).

For Harkins and Lugo-Ocando the normative notion that the media has ever played the fourth estate or watchdog role with regards to poverty issues has been refuted by a large body of research (Franklin, 1999, Golding and Middleton, 1982, Lugo-Ocando, 2014, Petley 2009 cited in Harkins and Lugo-Ocando, 2018, p 20). Indeed, “there are few clearer examples of how the news media fail to live up to these ideas than in their coverage of poverty and welfare…setting the agenda in ways that obscure critical aspects in the public debates rather than elucidating them” (Harkins and Lugo-Ocando, p20).

There is a strong argument, then, for appealing directly to the public to demand more – not less – reporting about these issues. As one journalist notes “there are some topics that…I think anyone in my organisation is just much less likely to write about, because you know that readers won’t read about it.” (Gaston, Harrison-Evans, Sälhoff, Niggemeie, 2018, p22). If there is increased space in which the public can influence the media’s agenda, this may have some benefits for ideas, narratives or movements currently seeking to move from the margins to the mainstream, “leveraging this

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circular interaction to maximise coverage and impact” (Gaston, Harrison-Evans, Sälhoff, Niggemeie, 2018, p27).

Qualitative research:

The literature formed a robust grounding for formative research involving qualitative interviews with three specialists working on communicating poverty issues, along with a round table with two experts who were living in poverty and volunteering at the charity at which the interview took place. They were joined by their colleague, an experienced anti-poverty campaigner and long-standing employee of the charity.

A key theme across the interviews were questions of empowerment, primarily the extent to which people with lived experience of poverty should be given the space and platform to represent themselves within media coverage and public discussion of poverty issues. This was seen as both the right thing to promote, and the most effective way to build understanding of poverty issues. In addition, there was a sense that real change could only come about when people living in poverty were able to mobilise – and were thus viewed as ‘living with power’ as opposed to passive recipients of the patronage of others.

Various explanations were offered about why the media was not currently facilitating a more constructive, compassionate or inclusive national conversation about poverty. For one respondent, a former journalist, this was a reflection of limited time and resources: “journalists aren’t given the time they need to spend time cultivating the relationships and building the trust that will lead to people wanting to talk more fully and frankly…it’s harder than it should be to get the time to reach people in

communities who are more in the margins” (respondent, Salford). Another respondent also reflected a lack of trust as a barrier to sympathetic and sensitive coverage, though felt mistrust had been earned by the media after successive years of stigmatising reporting designed to highlight extremes, create conflict and win ratings rather than explore solutions. One respondent felt that journalists looked down on her: “..they’re in a paid job, I’m paying taxes, you’re on benefits, I’m paying to keep you…then the

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way they go about interviewing people is a lot more harsh than if they came and interviewed Diana because she gets paid.” (respondent, London).

Both respondents at the round table talked about the empowering experience they had enjoyed when co-designing a photography book intended to counter negative stereotypes of people living with poverty. The subjects of the book would decide how they wanted their image to be captured. For one respondent, “it gave me the

opportunity to have my picture taken when, where and how I wanted it done. Nobody saying to me or us, oh you’ve got to stand in such and such a position”. The idea for the book emerged in reaction to an infamous ‘Beat the Cheat’ Government campaign asking people to report friends and neighbours they suspected of playing the system. Campaign materials could be downloaded from a website for people to display around their neighbourhoods. One respondent gave some insight into the atmosphere such approaches create: “Everywhere you looked there was a poster; if you know someone who’s claiming benefits fraudulently call this number..if the person found out who had done it there would be massive trouble” (respondent, London).

One organisation was supporting people with lived experience of poverty to engage on a sustained, one to one basis through ‘interactions’ with sympathetic journalists to improve the depth, quality and explanatory value of reporting and was also looking beyond traditional news media relations to influence the national conversation, recognising the need to build fertile ground in which pro-poor policies could land by “seeding narratives” across multiple, coordinated communicative events and

dimensions of communicative practice, including cultural output for a mass audience and face to face conversations between service users and service providers. They would no longer seek to ‘myth-bust’ or deploy data to counter prevailing narratives or deeply ingrained patterns of thinking, but create new narratives which met people on an emotional rather than rational level, playing into already-held values and cultural models as identified through framing research rather than seeking to change minds: “Talking about compassion and justice do work when talking about poverty with the public…in getting their interest and support for action…we’re trying to apply that with blog and press releases, which is different for us as an evidence-based

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organisation…we haven’t kind of applied feeling in the way we communicate our research” (respondent, York).

Framing is increasingly popular across the social justice sector, and offers some

optimism given the apparent failure of facts to build momentum for change. However, it is a heavily strategic approach, with significant discipline, a sophisticated set of bespoke communication tools, intensive networking and a high dosage required to reframe at scale. As the respondent put it; “we are not the sole news storytellers about poverty. There are scriptwriters, film makers, the people who make our

ads…that idea of the systems story or telling stories for systems change starts to really embed across the media and cultural landscape.” (respondent, York).

All respondents were broadly agreed on what good media coverage of poverty issues would look like. It would amplify the voice of those with direct experience rather than seeking to speak on their behalf, use individual narrative to build empathy whilst also elucidating the complex systemic and structural causes of - and solutions to - their situation, providing calls to action, preferably developed and led by those with lived experience: “the problem with telling individual stories is that you might present somebody as a victim with no agency…and you might leave the viewer thinking there’s nothing I can do to help this person…we want the conversation to be, we can do something about this, and this is what we can do” (respondent, York). The challenge inherent in depicting the difficult lives people lead whilst according them dignity is significant, though far from impossible.

The Content analysis:

As is already well rehearsed, consumers of media and information in the UK traverse an increasingly complex information landscape in which competing narratives about the world have less opportunity to bump up against one another for debate. In addition, the source of information - which spreads at great speed – can be harder to identify, and there are far fewer moments during which the nation’s eyes are trained on a single news story or cultural event through which they can derive shared values.

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However, stories can have a longer tail because of social media, which offers an opportunity for people to participate and react to those stories across time and space. In one sense, then, it should be much easier to understand which social issues

reporting catches people’s attention, as well as bear witness to the views of those who choose to share their – sometimes carefully cultivated - thoughts. However, it has become far more difficult isolate specific sources of influence on those views. The relationship between exposure to media content and cognitive processes is

increasingly hard to demonstrate when people access media content through multiple platforms and sources, and often through an additional editorial layer of interpretation or commentary provided by other members of a social network.

Developing a methodology to make better sense of these complex flows of

information, narrative and influence is a task beyond this paper, but it was necessary to undertake content analysis over a five-day period between Tuesday 29th _{June and}

Saturday 2nd _{July 2018 to test a number of questions quite fundamental to this work:}

Firstly, I had conducted a significant amount of desk research to answer what I had felt was a set of quite basic questions: what form does poverty take in the UK today, who experiences poverty, are there areas where it is most or least concentrated, what causes poverty, is it rising or decreasing? I had drawn from a range of sources to obtain the most objective account possible, and I wanted to see whether and how the

media’s representation of these issues mirrored what I had come to understand as the reality – if anything could be described as such. In addition, the extent to which people living in poverty and people claiming benefits or living in deprived areas had been stereotyped and demonised by the media was well evidenced. I wanted to see

whether this was visible or prevalent at this exact moment in time, or whether I could see other phenomena emerging. On a personal level, I wanted to break out of my own bubble and see what consumers of media I would normally avoid were exposed to.

I selected popular media brands which reflected the entire political spectrum as described in the continuum below: The Daily Mail (the most popular online brand in the UK), the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Mirror, the BBC News Website, the Evening

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Standard and the Channel 4 News and the BBC News at 10. In addition, I would do a daily Twitter and Facebook round up to see whether anything of relevance had been trending.

The 2008 study “The Media, Poverty and Public Opinion in the UK” included a piece of content analysis which provided important inspiration for my brief assessment

(McKendrick, Sinclair, Irwin, Scott, & Dobbie, 2008, pp 13 - 26). Of particular interest was how the study chose to identify stories about poverty (‘poverty reports’ in their parlance). It was decided that limiting the the analysis to articles which used the

“words ‘poverty’, ‘impoverished’ or ‘poor’ would have underestimated the reporting of poverty in the UK news”, and in fact the study revealed that these words were used in only 41 per cent of poverty reports in the UK (McKendrick, Sinclair, Irwin, Scott, & Dobbie, 2008, pp 13 - 15).

Whilst I understood this rationale, I decided to limit my analysis precisely because I wanted to understand the extent to which the reality of poverty and those living with it was made visible and explicit - acknowledged, recognised, reflected – not

euphemised, or mentioned as an afterthought, addendum or consequence to another story. For this I drew on the definition of poverty described earlier in this paper, but also the Five Giants made famous through the Beverage Report which led to the founding of the British Welfare State: want, squalor, disease, idleness and ignorance (Armstrong, 2018 p2). I focussed first on access to resources by including articles about poverty, low pay, unemployment and benefits; the ability to meet basic needs by including articles on shelter and food, and ready access to public services like

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healthcare free at the point of delivery and regardless of income. I also included stories which looked at the causes and impacts of poverty, as well as social exclusion driven by poverty.

I also restricted my selection to stories which made their association with the subjects above relatively quickly – either in the headline, or opening paragraph. The 2008 study was more expansive in counting incidental references to poverty, or those made further down a story. But my interest was precisely in the extent to which these issues were prioritised, accorded the urgency which the empirical poverty research suggests is needed. The existence of poverty, in my view, was the story.

In addition, I set a time limit of 15 minutes per media brand. There is no end to the content in a digital-first, 24 hour news cycle. I decided the best option would be to set parameters which would enable me to identify all the content a person might stumble across in a single day, rather than guarantee an exhaustive approach. Relatedly, the 2008 study presented the articles or packages about poverty as a percentage of the overall total of articles published in a given day. This would have been an impossible task on digital platforms where content is refreshed regularly and the paper is never read ‘cover to cover’. Instead, the focus would be to identify the stories about poverty and analyse them carefully, but also to enable the process to lead to other content which might sit outside the timeframe of the study but might offer additional insight into how poverty is covered in 2018.

Over the five days during which I was monitoring the media, I identified a total of 31 stories which fit the criteria I had set.

32 3% 7% 21% 12% 6% 9% 13% 4% 0% 12% 7% 6%

Frequency of topics in selected content

Poverty Inequality Jobs

Low pay/poor conditions Benefits Debt

Housing Education Health

Inability to access basic services Social exclusion The narrative

Catalyst for story

Independent research Commissioned research Political announcement Original journalism Legal event Opinion

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Whilst the search for poverty reporting was not exhaustive and the findings are

therefore not directly comparable with the 2008 study, it must be noted that the 2008 content analysis counted 297 against the 31 articles identified here (McKendrick, Sinclair, Irwin, Scott, & Dobbie, 2008, p14). This is likely down to significant methodological differences, but it might also suggest a decrease in the volume of poverty reporting. If this is true and we apply agenda-setting theory, this would create the impression amongst the public that poverty is not a priority issue. Further research with the public would be needed to explore that.

Of significant interest was the complete absence of the demonisation and stereotyping so widely reflected in the literature about media representations of poverty, and so core to this analysis. However, this might be explained thus: there was only one article from the total of 31 published in the newspaper in which that practice has been evident in the past, the Daily Mail. One could surmise that the Daily Mail’s war on welfare recipients is in détente, or that the lack of reporting on this issue in that newspaper simply reflects a wider trend. It was clear in hindsight that it had been a methodological error not to include The Sun in the content analysis. It is the other British newspaper which has historically played a role in the demonisation of welfare

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 Balanced Multiple sources Voice of affected Derogatory Structural factors Useful info for someone affected Call to action for unaffected Policy prescription

Characteristics of content

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recipients, although its inclusion in the next phase of discourse analysis was to yield some interesting results.

23 of the stories selected because they met the criteria for inclusion were published in the Guardian. This may be problematic for anti-poverty advocates because readers of the Guardian tend to identify themselves as already concerned about social justice issues, and are more likely to know and care about poverty already. This offers limited opportunity to engage the ‘undecideds’. The potential lack of impact for these stories is compounded by the fact that only a third include policy solutions which a reader might advocate for. There is a risk these stories elicit some empathy but compound apathy because they offer no means of addressing the situation set out.

One could argue that the media should play a role in imagining a range of policy alternatives to social problems even where they don’t exist within political debate, partly to shift the perception that these problems are inevitable, but also to widen the discourse beyond a pre-existing set of narratives. In addition, only seven of the 31 reports contained information which might be useful for someone affected by the issue highlighted. Whilst this is not unusual, it is worth considering whether the media could go beyond its agenda-setting role to better serve basic information needs and support action.

There were three stories which were covered in more than one news item. These were the increased existence of ‘period poverty’, whereby women and girls cannot buy basic sanitary goods because they lack the money; the publication of a report by the

Financial Conduct Authority recommending greater regulation of rent-to-own companies charging high fees to people unable to buy items outright; and the announcement by President Trump of a 25% tax on steel produced in the EU which had serious implications for employment in parts of the UK. In the first two cases, these were long-standing, ‘slow-onset’ issues which were brought to the media’s attention at this moment through ‘staged’ events; the launch of campaign to combat period poverty, and the publication of the FCA’s report respectively. The BBC’s coverage of the FCA report met some of the principles outlined in the qualitative

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interviews about what good reporting could look like. The centrepiece of the news item was an interview at the home of a woman who had paid high rates of interest to have access to goods which are generally accepted as basic necessities – a washing machine and a TV (Armstrong, 2018, p6). She simply stated the amount of interest she had paid versus the ‘cash’ price for these items in order to illustrate the issues raised by the FCA in clear terms.

It is worth noting the mechanics behind one article in The Guardian in which

Conservative Council Leaders were reportedly critical of the Prime Minister’s financial pledge to address shortages of low-cost housing. In fact, this story was based on the findings of a poll of Conservative Council Leaders conducted by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, perhaps as part of a deliberate effort to engage allies within the governing party and have concerns about the Government’s policies on social justice issues voiced by unexpected sources.

Another point of note during the week under review was a heated Twitter exchange which followed the publication of an article in the New York Times i_{which described in}

bleak terms how a town in the North of England symbolised austerity, painting a scene of deprivation comprising shuttered public buildings and dwindling public services. A number of local publications disputed the depiction, arguing that the reality was more positive than conveyed, and that the town was enjoying a renaissance. One tweet accused the journalist of spreading fake news. The ensuing coverage of this row in the Daily Mail and The Spectator put forth a clear narrative which directly competes with that advanced elsewhere about the damage wrought by austerity. This narrative instead emphasises increased employment, increased public spending and the lowest level of inequality since 2010. ii

These arguments clearly echo the government’s line, however it is also worth noting how reporting which calls attention to the existence of poverty can discredit itself by neglecting both sides of the story or alienating the people whose situations it seeks to report on. I recall as a young radio producer working at a community radio station on a housing estate in Harlesden. The Evening Standard ran a series of articles written by a