For a Brief Moment, The Media Rediscover Poverty

By Peter Dreier, TomPaine.com. Posted July 26, 2007.

For at least a few days in July, the nation's media paid attention to the plight of the 37 million Americans living in poverty. That's because presidential candidate John Edwards brought them to New Orleans, rural Kentucky and Mississippi, inner city Cleveland and other places on his three-day, eight-state 1800 mile poverty tour.

As a quick look at the Lexis/Nexis media database reveals, during and immediately after Edwards' poverty tour, every major U.S. daily newspaper, as well as the three leading news magazines, published at least one article on poverty. Many columnists and editorial writers, liberals and conservatives alike, used Edwards' tour as a take-off point to write about the issue.

Most reporters couldn't resist mentioning that despite his background as the son of a millworker, Edwards is now a millionaire who lives in a 28,000 square foot house in North Carolina. Nor can they seem to avoid poking fun at Edwards' biggest mistake during the campaign so far—the $400 haircut. Edwards is certainly correct that these topics are of more interest to reporters than to ordinary voters.

Few of the news stories mentioned that Edwards made his millions as a trial lawyer representing ordinary people against large corporations. And only a handful of stories pointed out that the two 20th century politicians most identified with helping the poor—Franklin Roosevelt and Bobby Kennedy—were born to great wealth. It isn't clear why Edwards' current wealth is important unless reporters think he's a politically-calculating hypocrite. Some conservative columnists make that claim, but most journalists seem to accept Edwards' sincerity. But few of the stories mentioned that none of the eight states on Edwards' poverty tour were among the key early primary states that will make or break his bid for the White House.

Many of the stories—including Eric Pooley's report in the July 18 issue of Time magazine—focused on the human side of poverty, and on the candidate's policy ideas. Although raising questions about Edwards' political chances, Pooley took seriously Edwards' commitment, his policy prescriptions, and his influence on his rivals' stances on the issues. Pooley even interviewed and profiled some of the low-income Americans that Edwards brought reporters to meet.

Other stories reflected journalistic cynicism, but none more so than Newsweek's misleading story ("The Down and Out Tour") in its July 30 issue. In the two-page, 12-paragraph, 1214-word spread, Newsweek did not include one word about what Edwards proposed to do about addressing the plight the poor, nor did the story quote or profile one poor person.

Newsweek reporter Jonathan Darman spent literally half the article (six paragraphs) comparing Edwards (unfavorably) to Bobby Kennedy, whose 1968 poverty tour, in the midst of his own presidential campaign, helped draw national attention to the issue. But the comparison had less to do with Kennedy's and Edwards' ideas for combatting poverty and more to do with their backgrounds, personalities and even their clothing. Darman thought that readers needed to know that Kennedy's "hair was wild and unkempt, his tie was eternally askew, his eyes were lined with crow's-feet from too many hours in the sun" while Edwards' "face is tan but unaged. his famous hair is not just well coiffed, it is nearly immobilie and lacks even a touch of gray." Darman meant this comparison to show that Kennedy could connect with the poor, while Edwards does not, although he offered no evidence.

Mostly, however, Darman sought to show that Edwards' focus on poverty in his presidential campaign won't succeed because American voters don't care about the poor, because the media aren't paying attention to the issue, and because poverty isn't as serious a problem as it was in 1968.

Darman wrote that "by the time the tour reached its halfway point, Edwards was barely making the national papers." According to Darman, Edwards' failure to ignite national outrage about poverty "speaks to the nation's inability to be moved." That's because, Darman speculated, "there are fewer distended bellies [of poor children facing starvation] in Edwards' America" than in Kennedy's and because "Today's middle class is driven by its own economic insecurity" and thus can't spare any sympathy for the poor. Edwards' call to eliminate poverty within a generation, Darman wrote, "sound like more empty promises from a politician."

Darman is wrong on all counts. Perhaps he didn't read a new report, "Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987-2007," from the reputable Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Had he done so, he would have learned that 69 percent of Americans—including 58 percent of Republicans—now believe that "government should care for those who can't care for themselves". Also, 69 percent of Americans—including 83 percent of Democrats, 71 percent of independents, and 47 percent of Republicans—believe that the government "should provide food and shelter for all." According to the Pew report, more than half of Americans—including 68 percent of Democrats, 57 percent of independents, and 34 percent of Republicans—believe that "government should help the needy even if it means greater debt". These are all significantly higher figures than during the mid-1990s.

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Peter Dreier, professor of politics and director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Program at Occidental College, is coauthor of "The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City" and "Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century."