The Daily Tar Heel

In a wide-ranging and often contentious discussion Thursday night, a panel of prominent journalists took on the issue of poverty and the media.

Moderated by John Edwards, director of UNC's Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, the group touched on everything from social mobility to declining newspaper sales.

Much of the conversation centered on how well the media fulfills the responsibility to take on difficult issues and to what extent that mandate might conflict with the need to promote sales and circulation.

"We all here represent a part of the news media that is struggling to continue having an audience," said David Wessel, the deputy Washington, D.C., bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal.

Trying to maintain reader interest can create tension with the need to bring forward issues like poverty, he said.

"People don't clamor for stories about poor people."

Sam Fulwood, a columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, said journalists ought to focus more on editorial judgment instead of simply catering to reader interest.

"People think the responsibility of the media is to give them what they want, on demand," he said.

The press also tends to rely on simplified caricatures of poverty, Fulwood said.

"Either the poor are noble, long and hard-suffering people, or they're scary," he said. "Once you've got the characters, the story falls into place. And we do that."

Katherine Boo, a staff writer for The New Yorker and former investigative reporter for The Washington Post, said it is difficult to bring across a true understanding of the real lives of the poor in America.

"It's not just a question of journalism ethics," she said. "It's also, I think, that people who are not poor in this country really have a hard time figuring out what poverty is like in this country."

Much of the media coverage, she said, paints the poor as a "great and dangerous 'other,'" and that stereotype becomes difficult to puncture. Journalists often rely on personal narratives to move beyond the misconceptions, she said.

Just capturing public interest in issues of poverty can be a daunting challenge, many panelists said.

When Edwards suggested that the response to Hurricane Katrina revealed a broad, underlying desire to confront the issue of poverty, Fulwood countered that it should not take a calamity to attract concern.

"Poverty is all over this country," he said. "It was in New Orleans before Katrina, but we weren't paying attention to it."

Edwards said that the issue demanded more focus from policymakers and that people would respond to good leadership, but Fulwood remained unconvinced.

Speaking to an audience member after the panel, Fulwood said of Edwards, "If what he said was true, he'd be president."

Contact the State & National Editor at stntdesk@unc.edu.

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