ABSTRACT
President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in the 1960s represented the United States’ most sustained attempt at addressing entrenched poverty and the news media’s most consistent coverage of the issue. News coverage of poverty subsided drastically in the 1970s as government priorities shifted. Thereafter, media attention was limited to occasional special reports by metropolitan newspapers owing to some anniversary, milestone or catastrophic event like Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which illuminated the depth of poverty in New Orleans. In Katrina’s aftermath, news treatment of poverty issues was similar to coverage in Appalachia decades before. Though racially dissimilar, both regions had socioeconomic parallels. Great Society programs attracted scrutiny in Appalachia in the 1960s, and those who survived Katrina’s wrath in 2005 also received much news media attention. In both instances, how the news media covered poverty contributed to the negative stereotypes that have endured for both Kentucky’s Appalachia and Louisiana’s New Orleans. This chapter explores news coverage of the two events and discusses the characteristics that would later be determined problematic. It concludes by noting the need to provide consistent coverage of people experiencing poverty and the issues affecting them.
