Media Coverage Of Poverty Almost Non-Existent During Election: FAIR Study

Media Coverage Of Poverty Almost Non-Existent, New Study Finds
UTICA, NY - MAY 14: A man walks down a street on May 14, 2012 in Utica, New York. Like many upstate New York communities, Utica is struggling to make the transition from a former manufacturing hub. The city's individual poverty rate is twice the national average with an unemployment rate of 9.8% as of February 2012. Citing Utica's weakening financial margins over the past two years, Fitch Ratings downgraded its credit rating on Utica by two notches to a triple-B, two rungs above junk territory. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
UTICA, NY - MAY 14: A man walks down a street on May 14, 2012 in Utica, New York. Like many upstate New York communities, Utica is struggling to make the transition from a former manufacturing hub. The city's individual poverty rate is twice the national average with an unemployment rate of 9.8% as of February 2012. Citing Utica's weakening financial margins over the past two years, Fitch Ratings downgraded its credit rating on Utica by two notches to a triple-B, two rungs above junk territory. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

A new study released Thursday found that, though more and more people are falling into poverty, the issue has barely registered in some of the top media outlets in America.

Left-wing media watchdog FAIR examined the main three evening newscasts, as well as the "PBS Newshour," NPR's "All Things Considered," the New York Times, Washington Post and Newsweek, to see how much coverage they devoted to the issue between January and June of 2012. It avoided counting stories that mentioned poverty during a discussion of the political horse race, meaning that the acres of coverage that trailed Mitt Romney's gaffe about not being "concerned about the very poor" couldn't be added to the toll.

The study was released a day after the Census Bureau's latest figures showed that the number of people in poverty in America remains, to quote the Associated Press, "the highest in the more than half a century that records have been kept."

The results of the study were not good:

FAIR’s study found poverty barely registers as a campaign issue. Just 17 of the 10,489 campaign stories studied (0.2 percent) addressed poverty in a substantive way. Moreover, none of the eight outlets included a substantive discussion of poverty in as much as 1 percent of its campaign stories.

Discussions of poverty in campaign coverage were so rare that PBS NewsHour had the highest percentage of its campaign stories addressing poverty—with a single story, 0.8 percent of its total. ABC World News, NBC Nightly News, NPR’s All Things Considered, and Newsweek ran no campaign stories substantively discussing poverty.

The findings of the study are not very surprising — after all, the media receives persistent criticism for its coverage of poverty. And a press so focused on what political candidates say can avoid ever thinking about the issue, since the candidates almost never address it.

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