The Barriers to Covering Poverty
Since the 1990s, American’s trust in the mass media has dropped almost 40%. Additionally, an overwhelming majority of Americans have consistent and reliable access to the internet, allowing them to be the shepherds of their own media consumption. Being able to control what, when and how one engages with political and social information is increasingly in one’s own hands; this, in conjunction with the biological drive to seek pleasure and avoid pain, is changing how we as both individuals and communities conduct dialog. We can filter out stories that don’t interest or concern us and block out others with whom we disagree, ultimately limiting our personal and shared growth.
What does this mean in terms of discussing inherently depressing but necessary topics such as poverty, class warfare, and the increasing instability of late capitalism? Earning back the trust of the readership is dependent on community building: who do these stories effect, and how can dialog be started and managed? When it comes to reporting on economic inequality, the target audience is everyone. Although not everyone directly suffers from poverty, everyone is affected by it. Being in a society means that we are all part of a complex, nearly unintelligible network of human interaction and dependence.
Solutions journalism can provide an alternative means of representation of a community’s struggles and what the community can do or is doing about it. Showing the community as it sees itself and what it would like to do about its problems is just one step in the process of redistributing media representation and ownership.
Social ownership over dialog and its presentation in media is not cut-and-dry. Corporate influence dominates the industry, and the traditional newsroom deciding what the audience wants and needs has historically been the manifestation of that corporate ownership. Similar to any other form of market-based consumption, the readership has control over which of the existing options they want, but not necessarily control over the production of the options themselves.
In Jennifer Brandel’s article “Give the audience what they want or what they need? There’s an even better question,” she writes, “[Audiences are] already making decisions about which news sites to read, which reporters to follow, and which links to click. They don’t require newsrooms to guess at their needs and make decisions for them, no matter how good those intentions. They need newsrooms to cut through the noise, listen to their actual needs, and respond accordingly with relevant stories.”
This level of engagement with readership is not technically necessary in solutions journalism, but does serve to strengthen the bonds of the community-media relationship and the feeling of involvement in the community’s representation.
In short, alternative means of news production such as solutions journalism are in all likelihood more well-equipped to handle serious societal ills than the corporate power structure that, since the dotcom boom, continues to be slowly disrupted. However, there are serious concerns to approaching the community-media relationship in an insincere or misleading way. Building digital representation (not replacement) of communities, their problems and their solutions is intensive work, but necessary to give the readership a sense of ownership and belonging in this dialog.
