The Importance of Avoiding Stereotypes in Representations of the Working Class
In a previous post, I noted that the Half in Ten Campaign's website was, well, not so hot—particularly its use of images that seem likely to reinforce popular stereotypes and misconceptions about poverty (no white men, mostly African-Americans, etc). They've recently added some new images, including a white male construction worker, but I still end up being decidedly non-enthusiastic about the site.
The fact that the newly added white dude is the only person clearly presented as a worker is part of the problem—why not a white guy protesting in favor of increasing the minimum wage and a black guy in a hard hard? they do exist, after all—but even if the images accurately represented poverty in the United States, they might not help Half in Ten's case.
To see why, compare Half in Ten's site with the site for ONE: The Campaign to Make Poverty History. ONE avoids using any of the standard images used to depict global poverty in developing countries. My guess is that they made a very conscious choice to avoid using images that evoke a sympathy/charity frame, or what's been called an "individual victim" frame. Instead what you get are images (and text) that position ONE as a public campaign, one that calls on public leaders to do more to fight the social phenomenon of global poverty. Most of the photographs on the ONE site are of people in the United States campaigning to end global poverty. (I think the photos are mostly submitted by visitors—the site makes great use of flickr, facebook and other social networking sites). By contrast, the bulk of images used on the Half in Ten site seem likely to evoke sympathy, charity, and the individual frame, rather than public action.
This discussion of Shanto Iyengar's research on media depictions of poverty, from a Frameworks brief, suggests that framing and images that reinforce an "individual victim" understanding of poverty will likely be counterproductive:
"To identify the frames in which television news embeds the issue of poverty," Shanto Iyengar reprised an earlier analysis of 191 poverty-related news reports. Using an experimental method that allows scholars to empirically compare the impact of specific news reports on political attitudes, Iyengar and his colleagues exposed viewers to poverty reporting that featured either societal frames or individual victim frames. After exposure to a newscast in which only one story addressed poverty, the informants were asked "In your opinion, what are the most important causes of poverty?" and "If you were asked to prescribe ways to reduce poverty, what would you suggest?"
The societal frames - which Iyengar also calls "thematic" - featured "information bearing on national trends (e.g., the poverty rate, the number of states experiencing significant increases in hunger, changes in the government's definition of poverty, etc.) or matters of public policy (the Reagan administration's proposals to curtail various social welfare programs, allegations of fraud in welfare programs, etc.) These are essentially...stories in which the object of the coverage is abstract and impersonal."
"In the individual-victim frame, by contrast, poverty is covered in terms of personal experience; the viewer is provided a particular instance of an individual or family living under economic duress." This type of coverage, which Iyengar has termed "episodic" is the dominant form of news coverage for most social issues. In fact, in a recent review of more than 10,000 stories of foreign affairs on five local television stations, a report for the FrameWorks Institute found episodic stories were 97% of the coverage. As Iyengar concludes, "poverty is clearly an individual-level rather than a societal phenomenon."
The problem with the over-representation of this kind of coverage is that episodic coverage tends to reinforce notions of individual responsibility. "When poverty was described in societal terms, individuals assigned responsibility to societal factors - failed government programs, the political climate, economic conditions, and so on. Conversely, when news coverage of poverty dwelled on particular instances of poor people, individuals were more apt to hold the poor causally responsible."
Iyengar also found that "race appears to be a meaningful contextual cue when Americans think about poverty....When the poor person was white, causal and treatment responsibility for poverty were predominantly societal; when the poor person was black, causal and treatment responsibility were more individual." Iyengar discounts the easy explanation that the informants were "anti-black"; rather, he suggests, "the observed racial differences fluctuated with the particular victim (suggesting) that race more effectively evoked stored knowledge concerning responsibility for poverty..."
Iyengar concludes that "the national debate over social welfare policy has traditionally been formulated in terms of specific beneficiary groups such as children, women, minorities, or the disabled. The results reported here suggest that framing welfare programs in terms of particular beneficiary groups will weaken rather than strengthen public support for welfare."
What Iyengar cautions against—formulating the national debate in terms of "specific beneficiary groups such as children, women, minorities, or the disabled"—isn't what CAP and Half in Ten intend, but the design of their website will leave many viewers with the impression that the debate is being formulating in that way.