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Missing in Campaigns, Media: the Poor

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Poverty Issue “Nearly Invisible” in Election Coverage

Latinos Author Only 1/2 of 1% of Big-Paper Op-Eds

Pundits Mixed on Obama’s Convention Speech

BET’s Lee Says GOP “Pandered” to Blacks, Women

Bill Clinton’s Role Seen as Shoring Up Whites

At Key Points, Spanish Networks Aired Novelas

Jeremy Lin Stars in Impromptu “60 Minutes” Short

Coverage of Native Americans Steeped in Stereotypes

Short Takes

Poverty Issue “Nearly Invisible” in Election Coverage

“ ‘Middle Class First,’ said the placards on display as Bill Clinton addressed the Democratic convention. And indeed, speaker after speaker has invoked the party’s devotion to the lot of middle-class Americans in 2012,” David Crary reported Friday for the Associated Press. “The rich also have featured in the rhetoric, albeit as a punching bag.

“But the poor? Not so much. They’ve been mentioned only fleetingly.

“The discrepancy makes sense for President Barack Obama‘s strategy. A large majority of Americans identify themselves as middle class, while the poor lack political clout for a host of reasons. Yet for a party long known for its role as defender of the downtrodden, the rhetorical patterns are striking. . . .”

As for the Republicans, Thomas B. Edsall wrote recently in the New York Times that rather than ignoring poor people of color, the GOP is casting them as the enemy. “The Republican ticket is flooding the airwaves with commercials that develop two themes designed to turn the presidential contest into a racially freighted resource competition pitting middle class white voters against the minority poor,” Edsall wrote.

These stories coincide with a new report by Mariana Garces and Steve Rendall of Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, “Media Not Concerned About the Very Poor: Study finds poverty not an issue in most election coverage.”

“. . . Poverty as an issue is nearly invisible in U.S. media coverage of the 2012 election, a new FAIR study has found — even though what candidates plan to do about an alarmingly growing poverty rate would seem to be a ripe topic for discussion in campaign coverage,” Garces and Rendall wrote for the September issue of FAIR’s “Extra!”

“Even before the economic downturn made the poverty picture significantly worse in the United States, the Urban Institute reported that half of all Americans (51 percent) experience poverty at some time before age 65 (Urban Institute, 9/10/09).”

“. . . To see how this crisis is addressed in coverage of the 2012 presidential election, Extra! looked at six months of campaign coverage (1/1/12–6/23/12) by eight prominent news outlets: CBS Evening News, ABC World News, NBC Nightly News, PBS NewsHour and NPR’s All Things Considered, and the print editions of the New York Times, Washington Post and Newsweek.

“. . . Despite its widely experienced impact, 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.

“. . . Previous FAIR reports and Extra! articles (7–8/06, 9–10/07) have discussed reasons journalists find the subject of poverty unappealing: ‘For one, journalists like a story to have a resolution, preferably a happy one’ — unlike poverty, which they see as ‘a sad, intractable fact of life, a story that never gets better and generates little interest or news.’ Perhaps more importantly, advertisers aren’t fond of poverty stories, which don’t provide a good media environment for their commercials. . . .”

Latinos Author Only 1/2 of 1% of Big-Paper Op-Eds

“Since 1990, the Latino population in the United States has more than doubled to 16 percent, but English-language U.S. news media outlets are simply not keeping up,” Julie Hollar wrote for the September edition of Extra!, a publication of Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting. “While people of color and women have always been underrepresented in U.S. media, Latinos consistently stand out — in the coverage as well as inside the newsroom — for their exceptionally paltry numbers relative to their population size.

“In Extra!’s recent study of the opinion pages of the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal (4/12), Latinos were granted less than half a percent of the op-ed bylines over the two-month study period — writing two columns in the Times, one in the Wall Street Journal, and none in the Post. None of these papers has a Latino among their staff columnists.

“In more than a year of political book interviews on [C-SPAN’s] After Words and reviews in the New York Times Book Review (Extra!, 8/10), not a single U.S. Latino appeared among the 432 authors, reviewers and interviewers.

“. . . Even when the coverage directly involves and impacts Latinos, their voices are scarce. In a year’s worth of cable coverage of Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio — who was recently sued by the Justice Department for unlawful discrimination against Latinos — those actually targeted by his policies were included in the conversation only two out of 21 times (Extra!, 6/09).”

“. . . As companies like Fox and NBC begin to target Latino audiences with special channels and websites (see ‘Latinos in New Media,’ Extra!, 9/12), will those audiences feel better served, or just ghettoized and exploited? And will that provide just one more excuse for those outlets to continue to marginalize Latino sources and reporters in their other news? . . .”

Pundits Mixed on Obama’s Convention Speech

“Pundits had a mixed reaction to President Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday night,” Katherine Fung reported Friday for the Huffington Post. “Overall, the rapturous reception given to Michelle Obama and Bill Clinton was left at the media doorstep.

“Most agreed that, rhetorically, Obama delivered a solid speech, saying that it was typical of the president’s strong oratorical skills. Not surprisingly, MSNBC was home to some of the most glowing commentary. Chris Matthews remarked that Obama ‘did it again’ and delivered ‘a home run speech.’ Al Sharpton said the address was ‘epic,’ and speculated that ‘Barack Obama won the election tonight.’ Rachel Maddow called it a ‘big, big speech.’

“. . . At CNN, former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer labeled the address a ‘hit and a miss.’ He criticized Obama for giving what he said was the ‘same old… same speech’ that he said contained ‘many of the promises’ from four years ago. . . .”

Meanwhile, the president’s speech “fueled a outpouring of tweets,” Cory Bergman wrote Thursday for lostremote.com. “Twitter called it a ‘record political moment,’ adding that Obama’s next two biggest spikes (43,646 and 39,002) surpassed Romney’s peak at 14,239,” referring to Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate. “In all, 9 million tweets about the DNC this week were sent by the conclusion of the president’s speech.”

BET’s Lee Says GOP “Pandered” to Blacks, Women

“The Republican Party may have featured women like Ann Romney and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in prime slots at its convention in Tampa last week, but that was just ‘pandering’ and ‘disingenuous,’ according to Debra L. Lee, chairwoman and CEO of BET Networks,” Katie Glueck reported from Charlotte, N.C., Thursday for Politico.

” ‘They’re pandering,’ she said on a POLITICO LIVE show filmed here. ‘That’s the word that comes to mind.’

” ‘I thought some of what went on at the RNC was very disingenuous,’ she added. ‘Ann Romney has to [give a] shout-out to women? We’re over 50 percent of the population. We need a shout-out? It was the craziest-looking thing.’

“Lee said it was ‘nice’ that Rice sat next to Mitt Romney at the GOP convention, ‘but does the RNC really embrace African-Americans, really embrace women?’ “

Bill Clinton’s Role Seen as Shoring Up Whites

“Wednesday night, reporter John Frank tweeted that North Carolina delegates to the Democratic National Convention were sharing high-fives after former President Bill Clinton‘s epic 45-minute address,” Chris Kromm wrote Thursday for the Institute for Southern Studies.

“No surprise there: Clinton’s tour-de-force was a huge hit with Democrats of all flavors in Charlotte and nationally.

“But the speech also had a specific goal: to help sell President Obama and the Democratic brand to whites — including Southern whites — who have been an increasingly challenging demographic for the party.

“A pre-convention Gallup poll found Bill Clinton has a 63 percent approval rating among whites, compared to just 43 percent for Barack Obama. And as Richard Harpootlian, a Democrat from South Carolina told the Associated Press, ‘[Clinton] resonates with Southern white folks dramatically . . .’ “

Michael Oreskes wrote Wednesday for the Associated Press: “The numbers tell a story. President Obama was viewed favorably by 43 percent of white men in an AP-GfK poll last month. It is a key reason this race is so close. Overall, [Mitt] Romney beat Obama 54 to 39 percent among white voters in that poll.” As for Clinton, “12 years out of office, he is viewed favorably by 63 percent of white men, according to a Gallup Poll in July.”

At Key Points, Spanish Networks Aired Novelas

A Journal-isms reader messaged Wednesday, “Would love to see you write and ask why the largest Spanish-language networks in the country, time after time, continue to take Spanish-speaking viewers for granted. Tonight the first undocumented immigrant to speak in a political convention took the stage… Last night the first Latino to address a DNC…. but you wouldn’t know if you are watching Univision or Telemundo playing novelas instead… Yet complaining anchors like Jorge Ramos are asking for a Presidential debate and Latino journalist inclusion?

Journal-isms posed the question to Univision and Telemundo on Thursday.

Monica Talan, a Univision spokeswoman replied by email, “We have offered comprehensive coverage, here is a link to the release with our plans, which included airing both acceptance speeches.

Alfredo Richard, a spokesman for Telemundo, said by email, “All I can tell you is we have been covering and reporting from both the RNC and DNC on the ground every day. Jose Diaz Balart and the Telemundo News team, working closely with NBC News, [have] been covering in detail all aspects of the conventions throughout the whole day starting with our morning show Un Nuevo Dia, our news magazine Al Rojo Vivo and broadcasting our Noticiero directly from Tampa and Charlotte. In addition, tonight, just like with [GOP candidate Mitt] Romney, we’re presenting a recap and highlights of the speech at 11:30pm ET and mun2, our young Latinos cable network, carried both acceptance speeches.”

Isabel Bucaram, a spokeswoman for CNN en Español, said her network did broadcast the Republican and Democratic convention speeches with simultaneous translations.

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