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Image vs. Reality
BNH spoke with Yale political science professor Martin Gilens about his new book, Why Americans Hate Welfare, published in May by XXXXXXXX
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Business New Haven
8/9/1999
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Give us a general overview of your new book.
The full title is Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media and the Politics of Anti-Poverty Policy. It looks at two things primarily: one is survey data, to try to understand what it is that shapes Americans' welfare views, and then as sort of the next step in understanding why Americans hate welfare the way they do, I looked at news media and how poverty and welfare are portrayed in the news. One of the themes that runs through both parts of the book is the importance of race, and in particular stereotypes of blacks, in explaining both public perceptions and misperceptions and also in looking at the media's portrayal and misportrayals of the poor.
It's an oft-repeated observation that blacks are more often portrayed in stories about poverty than are whites. But you go on to say that blacks are more likely to be portrayed in less attractive sub-groups of the poor. What do you mean by that?
In overall representation of poverty, the point is that while it's true that blacks are more likely than non-blacks to be poor, the portrayals in the news are disproportionate to that. You're more likely to find black faces in stories about poverty, much more likely than if you look at the reality of American poverty. So, for example, in the most recent five years I looked at, the reality is that 29 percent of poor Americans are black, but in television and news magazines about two out of three poor people in the news were black. So there's a pretty dramatic distortion in terms of the general portrayal of the poor. In terms of the sub-groups of the poor, what I found is that the most sympathetic groups - like the elderly or the working poor - are where you find the lowest proportion of black faces. And the most unsympathetic groups, like the underclass, was portrayed as exclusively black in the newsmagazines that I looked at. Again, there are in reality differences across sub-groups of the poor, but the differences in the media are far greater than any differences in reality.
Looking at 40 years of news coverage, did you see differences over time?
I looked at 1950-1992, and I saw pretty dramatic changes over this period. From 1950-64 the poor were portrayed as predominately white. But starting in 1965, the poor were portrayed as predominately black. And since that period in the mid-'60s, the portrayal of blacks in poverty stories has fluctuated so that, in periods when the media discourse on poverty is the most sympathetic, such as during the recession of the early '80s, you find the fewest black faces. In periods when the media discourse is most unsympathetic, such as the early '70s when across the political spectrum people were looking at the problems of welfare and the need to reform the system, you find the greatest number of black faces. So there is a similar pattern when looking across time as there is when looking across the sub-groups of the poor.
How would you characterize the present period?
I haven't done any analysis myself since the end of 1992, but I have seen analyses that other people have done that suggest that the portrayals of the poor have been less dominated by black faces in the end of the '90s. And while I don't know why that is, I would speculate that along with the welfare reform that was passed in 1996 came a kind of poverty story that looked at the efforts and the obstacles of the welfare recipients who were leaving welfare, either on their own or because of the new time limits that were imposed. For the most part, those stories tended to be mostly sympathetic. And if it is consistent with past patterns, those more sympathetic stories would be where you would see more poor whites.
How do you believe this distortion arises: Is it prejudice on the part of people in the media or something more structural?
I think the major factor is the prejudice or stereotypes held by the people who are creating these images. And I think that the reason you see these stereotypes taking shape in the news is that there isn't the same attention to the accuracy of the images in the news as there is to accuracy of the text in the story. So you mainly see it in the images. In fact, there are many stories I've looked at that have contained accurate information in the text, that may say something like only a quarter of poor Americans are black. And yet the pictures that are used to illustrate that story give a very different impression.
What do you suggest people in the media industries can do to correct the economic and racial distortions? Is simply being aware of it enough?
I think that is what's needed. The people who are responsible for producing the news need to make the production of images a more conscious and explicit process. The Seattle Times a number of years ago was concerned about the portrayal of minorities within its news pages and started to examine its own coverage. What they found was that the portrayal of minorities was much more negative then the portrayal of whites. They brought this to the attention of the news staff, and they made a conscious effort to monitor their coverage and to portray the minority community in Seattle in a more balanced way. They tracked their coverage of minorities in the news over a period of years and saw that it changed quite dramatically, to the point that a couple of years later, the portrayals of minorities were quite similar to the portrayals of whites. So the news agency took something that had been largely an unconscious process, they examined it, and then they made a conscious effort to change it. In a fairly short time it did change quite a lot. I think that's the sort of process that news organizations need to go through to more accurately portray the various groups that make up American society.
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