ABSTRACT
The poorer and more unequal a society is, the more tensions, conflicts, violence and problems it will face as a whole. This chapter discusses the way the news media and journalists report poverty and inequality, while exploring the nature and characteristics of that coverage. Researchers in media studies have shown that most mainstream news organizations have for some time exhibited a poor record when addressing issues associated with poverty. In countries in the Global South, there are other reasons for the scarce news coverage of poverty. News stories on poverty tend to just be provided by the ‘facts’, even though many of these are selectively included or discarded in the narratives. Overall, the professional ideologies of reporters are underpinned by individual circumstances, organizational cultures, institutional dynamics and wider societal cultures that underscore the way the news content about poverty is gathered, produced and, ultimately disseminated by means of the mainstream media and, therefore, consumed by the audiences.
