ABSTRACT
The Capability Approach, founded and further developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, provides an alternative measure of poverty and justice. It assumes that poverty is best understood as capability deprivation, where capabilities are understood as freedoms and opportunities. Justice, on the other hand, is achieved when all people can develop a minimum of capabilities to lead a life they can value for good reasons. For media reporting of poverty, three points can be highlighted from the perspective of the capabilities approach. First, it has implications for the representation of what makes the life of people experiencing poverty worse; namely, that they are unfree and strongly limited in their possibilities. This goes beyond the conventional description of poverty as a lack of money. Second, the capabilities approach shows that poverty is not just any lack, but a fundamental one and that this is unfair. Poverty in the sense of the capabilities approach always implies a moral and normative stance. Third, the Capability Approach attaches great importance to the fact that people living in poverty are also agents and independent subjects and not merely passive victims of their situation. The point is, therefore, that the media should not only show the problems, but also should show how to fight poverty by strengthening the capabilities of people experiencing poverty and giving them a voice and visibility.
