Poverty News

This story from the San Francisco Chronicle reports on the coverage of poverty issues.

An excerpt.

“Considering the unparalleled wealth of this nation, we live in awful times for far too many people, and they show little sign of getting better soon. As a journalist, I feel there has never been a more critical time for reporting on poverty and its byproducts of homelessness and despair.

“Middle-class people are getting crushed into the working class, and the working class is getting crushed into the working poor. They’re all putting in more hours for diminishing pay, and the outlook for the future is for more of the same.

“Unless, of course, you are rich. For multi-millionaires, these are boom times—the culmination of 30-plus years of Reaganomics and its descendants pushing income to top earners while raising taxes and fees on the lower end of the economic scale.

“The average CEO made about 40 times more than the average worker when I became a professional reporter three decades ago. Today that ratio is about 350 to one. Today, the wealthiest one percent of Americans gets a quarter of the nation’s income. When I became a reporter, they got a tenth.

“That kind of split between the wealthy and the middle and poor hasn’t been seen in America since the late 1920s—just before the Great Depression.

“Other times have critically needed poverty reporting of course, such as the 1950s and ’60s when the War on Poverty and civil rights movement were being crafted. But none more so than now. Between America’s growing have-and-have-not split and our rapidly declining international economic prowess eroding the ability to bounce back, we face a turning point that demands intensive and immediate ground-level attention to the struggling middle and under classes.

“But that is more easily hoped for than done. The trouble with reporting about poverty for most news outlets is that it is messy. It always has been.

“Poverty reporting comes automatically freighted with left-and-right wing arguments that paint the economic landscape in black and white terms and sling contrasting statistics and anecdote-driven contentions to prove their points. You have to give them all attention, sorting through the mountains of official and unofficial accounts to get to some bedrock facts.”