While more than two-thirds of the nation's poor are white, the U.S. news media generally use images of African Americans to illustrate stories about poverty, according to research by a Yale political scientist.
"This distorted portrait of the American poor cannot help but reinforce negative stereotypes of blacks as mired in poverty and contribute to the belief that poverty is primarily a 'black problem,'" writes Martin Gilens, assistant professor of political science, in the study, which was published in the December 1996 issue of the Public Opinion Quarterly and which he discussed at the National Association of Black Journalists conference held July in Chicago.
In his study, Professor Gilens examined 182 newsmagazine stories and 534 television stories that appeared between 1988 and 1992 and that focused on "some aspect of poverty or poor relief."
He discovered that, while African Americans comprise only 29 percent of the nation's poor, national news magazines -- including Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report -- use images of black people to illustrate stories about the poor 62 percent of the time. Furthermore, when the ABC, NBC and CBS television networks do stories on the poor, 65 percent of the people shown are African American.
Professor Gilens also found that "the most sympathetic subgroups of the poor, such as the elderly and the working poor, are underrepresented (in such stories), while the least sympathetic group -- unemployed working-age adults -- is overrepresented." These discrepancies "are greater for African Americans than for others," he says. "Thus the unflattering (and distorted) portrait of the poor ... is even more unflattering (and more distorted) for poor African Americans."
Surveys show that Americans "substantially exaggerate the degree to which blacks compose the poor," he notes. This is true, albeit to a lesser degree, among surveyed members of the news media as well, says Professor Gilens, a fellow of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies.
The relationship between "public misunderstandings and media misrepresentations of poverty reflects the influence of each upon the other," says the political scientist. "On the one hand, the media are subjected to many of the same biases and misperceptions that afflict American society at large and therefore reproduce those biases in their portrayals of American social conditions. On the other hand, Americans rely heavily on the mass media for information about the society in which they live, and the media shape Americans' social perceptions and political attitudes in important ways. Media distortions of social conditions are therefore likely to result in public misperceptions that reinforce existing biases and stereotypes."
Whatever the factors that contribute to this skewed portrayal of the poor, "the political consequences of these misrepresentations are clear," says Professor Gilens, noting, "The public's exaggerated association of race and poverty ... increases white Americans' opposition to welfare." In fact, one survey revealed that "white Americans with the most exaggerated misunderstanding of the racial composition of the poor are the most likely to oppose welfare," he adds.
"Perhaps the most disheartening aspect of the situation," writes Professor Gilens, "is that apparently well-meaning, racially liberal news professionals generate images of the social world that consistently misrepresent both black Americans and poor people in destructive ways."
He concludes, "By implicitly identifying poverty with race, the news media perpetuate stereotypes that work against the interests of both poor people and African Americans."