News for the Poor: How Poverty and Political Alienation Shape U.S. Citizen Identity and What Journalists Can Do About It

According to the US Census Bureau, 36.8 million people are living in poverty in the United States. Yet, political communication scholars in the U.S. have conducted very little research focused specifically on impoverished populations. Based on a four-year ethnographic study of two impoverished communities in the United States-one rural and one urban, this project uses semi-structured interviews and field notes from long-term immersive participant observation to examine how lived experiences shape political beliefs and influence news trust and political engagement. This study takes an applied approach by providing data-informed suggestions for increasing the effectiveness of political reporting. Results indicate that negative experiences with social institutions exacerbate news distrust and decrease the likelihood of news consumption. For example, negative experiences accessing welfare benefits and interacting with police shape these communities’ perception of government and democracy. As a result, a dissonance exists between news content that these populations encounter and their lived experiences. Specifically, framing, issue relevance, and a lack of representation in news exacerbate news distrust and political disengagement. Because news stories are typically framed with a top-down focus, poor audiences feel disconnected from their relevance. For example, U.S. coverage of the opioid epidemic usually consists of information about death and incarceration rates. In terms of issue relevance, top-down reporting causes critical information needs of the most vulnerable citizens go unmet. Participants reported that they need news coverage on topics like clinics for those without health insurance and access to drug intervention and rehabilitation. They also made it clear that not reporting that drug rehabilitation is unavailable where they lived made them feel blamed and vilified for problems that were bigger than them as individuals. Representation of these people’s critical needs not only stands to bring them in as audiences, it can also increase public awareness of the root of many of the community’s social problems. By not covering systemic issues like a lack of access to mental health care and drug treatment, but instead merely reporting crime rates, voting citizens may be misled by news reports as to how the problem should be dealt with. For example, one community in the study was funding a second jail instead of funding rehabilitation services that could keep people out of cycles of incarceration. It has been established that when poverty is reported upon topically and not in relation to structural conditions, it decreases feelings of obligation from other society members. This study builds on that and suggests that when impoverished people do not perceive their concerns as being relevant to media outlets or policymakers, and do not sense that society has a sense of obligation to them as fellow citizens, it reinforces their social and political alienation. In this way, impoverished groups’ perception of news as being irrelevant to their problems, combined with societal perceptions of the impoverished as a problematic “other” demonstrate how political reporting is contributing to a sense of political inefficacy among the poor and failing to cultivate solidarity at the societal level in the context of alleviating poverty.