The News Media and the Racialization of American Poverty

Poverty in America today is widely viewed through a racial lens. But that was not always the case. Throughout most of the nation’s history, public discussion of poverty ignored African Americans. In this chapter, the authors examine the racialization of poverty in the US news media. Building on previous research, they focus on the 1960s as the critical time in which the American media began to focus on Black poverty. Based on a collection of over twelve thousand news stories on poverty from four major daily newspapers, they find that both coverage of poverty and attention to Black poverty in local news largely paralleled the trends revealed in earlier studies of national newsmagazines. Specifically, they find that attention to poverty (irrespective of race) increased dramatically in the mid-1960s (a time when actual poverty rates were in decline); that poverty coverage became racialized during this same period, with a substantial increase in references to African Americans between the mid- and late 1960s; and that, for the most part, the racialization of poverty coverage followed similar patterns in newspapers with lower and higher proportions of African Americans in their metropolitan areas.