ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes representations of the working poor, who comprise more than 40% of the workforce in the United States, but are mostly overlooked by the news media. In 2019, the nation’s unemployment rate hit its lowest point in 50 years, just as income inequality in the United States found it highest level in 50 years. An analysis of the news media’s stories on the national jobs report before the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates journalism’s foremost emphasis on economic growth (and its effects on political power and the stock market) and lack of reporting on human outcomes, such as the quality and pay of jobs and the persistence of high poverty rates. The contradiction — how can one be so poor, yet have a job and not be counted as “in poverty” — is considered in the context of a country’s political and media discourse so obsessed with jobs that it overlooks the effects of them.
