Shared Vulnerability as a Virtuous Frame for Poverty Journalism

This chapter proposes a unified account of the ethics of poverty journalism that takes the sheer banality of poverty — its commonplaceness — as its moral starting point. It uses the virtue ethics theory of Alasdair MacIntyre (1999) to argue for a shared vulnerability news frame to cover poverty. The chapter compares a social justice frame for covering poverty with a shared vulnerability frame using two news stories to illustrate. The chapter closes with a discussion of some implications of a shared vulnerability frame for poverty journalism.