CHAPTER 7 – A Matter of Personal Responsibility Oprah’s rise to stardom is a tale for all to admire. Born to unwed teen parents in Mississippi, she lived her early years in poverty with her grandmother. Then she moved to Nashville to be with her father and subsequently to Milwaukee to live with her mother. There, she was sexually assaulted several times by family members and ultimately landed up back with her father, who set her on a disciplined course during her adolescent years. Her grandmother had cultivated in her a passion for reading and she was a naturally gifted public speaker. At 19, upon being named Miss Black America, she began her broadcasting career at a TV station in Nashville. After a stint as a news anchor in Baltimore, she moved to Chicago to host a morning talk show. Two years later at the age of 32 she became host of the Oprah Winfrey Show, and the rest is history. Today, Oprah is one of the most recognized and beloved personalities on television as well as a multimillionaire. Her story is testimony that in America anything is possible. 1 We all know the script: if one is determined and hard working, there are no limits to what she can do with her life. You are undoubtedly familiar with stories of others like Oprah. They also may be media moguls – celebrities such as the late Steve Jobs, Jim Carrey, and Hilary Swank. Or they may be people you know who are not in the public eye yet whose lives have taken a similar path: they were born into families with modest means yet grew up to attain considerable financial success. These people are all embodiments of the great rags-to-riches tale that is so definitive of our history and culture. Self-made Americans are often profiled in magazines like Forbes or People, and they are the subject of countless popular films such as The Pursuit of Happiness, Page | 1 Pretty Woman, and Trading Places. Their stories reinforce the widespread belief that personal ambition is what matters most in getting ahead. One of my favorite cartoons, which appeared some years ago in the New Yorker, depicts five business executives standing huddled together having an informal backroom meeting. The caption says, “O.k., guys, now let’s go out and earn that four hundred times our workers’ salaries.” The dark humor here is that CEOs do not simply “earn” the inordinately greater compensation they receive relative to most workers. The vast income disparity between executives and ordinary workers largely stems from people in the U.S. having unequal access to economic opportunity. Despite this sociological reality most Americans believe otherwise. Due to a variety of powerful social influences, most notably the news media, we tend to see ours as a society where people have equal access to opportunity and where economic inequalities stem from some individuals making more of this opportunity than others. What we believe to be true about opportunities for getting ahead in the U.S. largely stems not from empirical evidence but from mental images we carry in our heads. These images suggest that low-income Americans who are not upwardly mobile have only themselves to blame. Even though most of us know that people are born into families with vastly different amounts of education and wealth, the belief prevails that anyone, irrespective of background, can achieve upward mobility. 2 Seeing low-income people as largely responsible for their economic failures significantly impacts our motivation to help them. It has long been the case that our steadfast belief in the American Dream as equally available to all has fueled public opposition to social welfare spending. Welfare is often seen as a handout that destroys Page | 2 a person’s incentive to get ahead through hard work. This line of thinking also poses a barrier to our willingness to tap the potential of charity to mitigate economic inequality. 3 On rare occasions amidst extraordinary bouts of deprivation, Americans have temporarily called into question the view that low-income people are personally responsible for their lot in life. During the Great Depression as tough times grew amidst years of rising unemployment, people increasingly started attributing their difficulties to the dearth of jobs rather than to a failure to land what little work there was. Similarly, news reporting about Hurricane Katrina, which depicted New Orleans residents stranded on their rooftops fighting for their lives as the floodwaters kept rising, highlighted that so many people could not evacuate the city in advance of the storm because they did not have cars, they could not afford bus tickets, and they had no place to go. Yet, just as the end of the Depression restored Americans’ faith in self-reliance as the central pathway to mobility, this belief also soon returned following Katrina. 4 Thirteen days after the storm devastated the Gulf Coast, New York Times Public Editor Byron Calame wrote that he had just taken a look back at the paper’s coverage of New Orleans during the 10 years prior to the storm. His startling discovery: in contrast to the concentrated post-Katrina reporting about how the storm had particularly affected low-income people, over that 10-year period there had not been a single article focusing on the daily hardships experienced by New Orleans’ poor. In November 2000, there was a feature story that included vivid descriptions of poverty and its devastating effects, but this discussion did not appear until the article’s 16th paragraph. Reading Page | 3 that deeply into a news story is beyond the attention span of most media audiences these days. 5 When there is news coverage about the poor, their struggles typically appear to be of their own making. Stories focus on the deviant behavior of particular individuals, depicting them as an affront to mainstream middle-class values. Such stories may include portrayals of adults abusing the welfare system, teenage girls getting pregnant and dropping out of school, parents high on drugs and neglecting their children, and youth committing violent crime. The message in these stories is unambiguous: not only is such deviant behavior the primary reason people are poor but also why they stay poor. Rather than explore how crime and delinquency are consequences of the poverty brought about by unequal access to opportunity, media accounts reinforce the belief that the poor have only themselves to blame for failing to elevate their status. 6 Reporting about teen pregnancy is a case in point. This issue strikes a chord with millions of parents, feeding anxieties that their daughter’s ill-timed pregnancy will spiral her on a downward path: in raising a child on her own, she will drop out of school, work dead-end jobs, and become dependent on welfare. Giving birth at such a young age often does lead a girl down this path, yet these problems are often not merely the result of her irresponsible behavior. The weight of evidence indicates that girls who get pregnant as teens are overwhelmingly likely to start out life poor; thus, even if they stay in school and delay childbearing, the reality is they still face dim prospects of getting ahead. Yet, news reporting rarely highlights this reality. 7 Similar misconceptions prevail in coverage of violent crime, which is often portrayed as something that can occur at any time, be perpetrated by anyone, and just Page | 4 as easily happen to you or me as to anybody else. Yet, these images obscure the truth. Media reports tend to feature the exceptional story, such as when a “good” kid tragically crosses paths with a stray bullet in a drive-by shooting. The fact is that most violence occurs in low-income neighborhoods. The poor are not only disproportionately likelier to be perpetrators of violent crime but victims too. 8 Media stories highlighting poor people’s deviant behavior were especially prominent in the years leading up to the passage of welfare reform in 1996. Disparaging images of welfare abuse appeared in a variety of media outlets that spanned both the liberal and conservative press. For example, in 1994 the Boston Globe ran a series of stories about Clarabel Ventura, a single mother of five who was pregnant with her sixth child. The series highlighted a number of abhorrent behaviors: Ventura had been selling her food stamps to buy drugs; she had let her children play in the streets after midnight; and she had recently been arrested for abusing her four yearold son by putting his hands in scalding water and then locking him in his room. 9 By depicting Clarabel Ventura’s behavior as typical of welfare recipients, this sort of news story fed public antipathy toward low-income people. In truth, those on receive welfare are mostly people like you and me. In order to fathom how this could possibly be true, we must recognize that most Americans receive public assistance at some point in their lives. Washington University Professor Mark Rank has documented that by age 65 nearly two-thirds of all Americans have received at least a year of cash assistance or in-kind benefits, such as food stamps, housing subsidies, or Medicaid. Over 40 percent have been on welfare for five or more years. 10 Page | 5 However, mainstream news typically masks this truth, and instead presents stories of welfare abuse as if they were indicative of poor people’s behavior more generally. These powerful images come across to the average media consumer simply as facts. Such images reflect the longstanding stigma attached to welfare. Beginning in the 1960s and continuing steadily over the next few decades, Americans increasingly opposed government entitlements to the poor. This antagonism was pivotal in the passage of welfare reform with bipartisan support in 1996. The main belief fueling the legislation was that entitlements fostered dependency, making people unmotivated to work their way out of poverty. This belief rested on the assumption that those receiving welfare are a small fraction of Americans who deviate from middle-class values. Such “facts” seemingly provide justification for the government downsizing the welfare system and for the public becoming dissuaded from making charitable investments that might enable poor people to escape poverty. 11 We can more concretely see how media coverage contributes to public hostility toward the poor by considering a study done by Princeton political scientist Martin Gilens. Gilens looked at reporting about the poor in magazines and network TV news over a 5-year period. Although at the time about 11 percent of America’s poor were over 64, the elderly appeared in only 2 percent of the coverage. Whereas 51 percent of working-age, low-income people were employed during the years of the study, only 21 percent of those depicted in news coverage were either working or looking for a job. Reporting, therefore, underrepresented the deserving poor and overrepresented the undeserving poor. Moreover, these skewed images of the poor’s deservedness went hand in hand with racial misconceptions. African Americans comprised over 60 percent Page | 6 of the people depicted in Gilens’ data, yet in truth the majority of poor people in the United States – about 55 percent – are white. 12 These data help explain what I have repeatedly seen when I teach college students about poverty in America. I point out that there are different types of poor people and that we need to recognize the importance of those differences. I list some of these types on the blackboard and ask my students to discuss how worthy they think each is of government aid and private charity. In line with public opinion, students strongly view children, the elderly, and the disabled as deserving and able-bodied unemployed adults as undeserving. To most students, the latter are people who could be working but aren’t because they are lazy. These “undeserving poor,“ whom Gilens’ study found are prevalent in media discourse, are the people who typically come to mind when we think of America’s poor. These images, consequently, can easily motivate us not to want to lend a helping hand when contemplating how to express our generosity to people in need. 13 Thousands didn't leave New Orleans because they couldn't leave. They didn't have the money. They didn't have the vehicles. They didn't have any place to go. They are the poor, black and white, who dwell in any city in great numbers; and they did what they felt they could do -- they huddled together in the strongest houses they could find. There was no way to up and leave and check into the nearest Ramada Inn. (New York Times, September 4, 2005) The immediate dangers are greatest for 100,000 or more low-income residents who don't own a car or were otherwise unable to evacuate. (Wall Street Journal, August 30, 2005). These words offer an account of why, in the days preceding Hurricane Katrina, so many New Orleans residents did not heed official orders to evacuate the city. These articles provide a very different media image of the poor than is the norm. Here they Page | 7 are not deviant and despicable but deserving of help because they experience systematic disadvantage. In contrast, people of means could easily get out of town since they had transportation and either friends to stay with or money to pay for a hotel. But, many others had no car, knew nobody outside the city, and had little disposable cash. They either huddled on the rooftops of their flooded homes desperately waiting for help or, like the Jackson-Brown family chronicled in the introduction to this book, found refuge in crowded and sweltering city shelters. An investigation I did of the New York Times’ and Wall Street Journal’s coverage during the month following Katrina indicates repeated mention of how the disadvantages low-income people routinely face intensified the storm’s impact upon them. Fifty-six articles in the Times and 36 in the Journal presented this view – a stark departure from conventional reporting where, as we have seen, the poor are either invisible or presented as undeserving of help. In the aftermath of Katrina, however, the reality that these people experience unequal access to opportunity temporarily became unmasked. 14 In addition to articles highlighting the constraints low-income Katrina victims faced in evacuating their homes, other articles exposed why the storm exacted particularly severe damage on poor neighborhoods. The Times reported on September 2nd that victims “were largely black and poor, those who toiled in the background of the tourist havens, living in tumbledown neighborhoods that were long known to be vulnerable to disaster if the levees failed. Without so much as a car or bus fare to escape ahead of time, they found themselves left behind by a failure to plan for their rescue should the dreaded day ever arrive.” Among the factors that contributed to this Page | 8 heightened vulnerability were that lower-income neighborhoods were more likely to be below sea level – therefore acting as flood plains – and the homes in these neighborhoods were less likely to be built with materials capable of weathering a severe storm. A September 7th Journal article indicated that another factor may also have contributed to low-income people’s greater vulnerability to hurricanes. The article pointed to the “longstanding suspicions among some poorer residents that the levee system provides more protection for well-to-do areas than lower-income ones.” This news story that Hurricane Katrina particularly victimized low-income people due to preexisting social inequalities coheres with what we saw in Chapter 2: there is no such thing as a wholly natural disaster. However, media coverage often does not highlight these economic inequalities. Consider the 1995 Chicago heat wave, where more than 700 people died of heat-related causes over the span of 5 days in July. Although most of the victims were low-income senior citizens living alone, a study by New York University sociologist Eric Klinenberg reveals that media coverage did not draw attention to how this fact explained why the death toll was so astronomical. The heat wave, Klinenberg argues, was not just an abnormal weather pattern; it also exposed a social disaster that plagues Chicago and many other U.S. cities 15 Nonetheless, coverage of the heat wave still depicted a sympathetic portrait of those afflicted by depicting them as innocent victims of a natural disaster. Indeed, people who experience heat waves, hurricanes, earthquakes, tornados, droughts, famines, cyclones, tsunamis, landslides, and volcanoes have long been regarded as blameless victims of forces beyond their control; a view played up in news coverage of Page | 9 these events. Such coverage is noteworthy for how it contrasts with unsympathetic media images of Americans chronically in need of help. 16 With an eye on this contrast, I did a second investigation of Katrina reporting to see how it characterized the event as a natural disaster. This time I focused on the New York Times’ and Wall Street Journal’s coverage during just the first 10 days after the storm made landfall on August 29, 2005. This period immediately following the hurricane was when reporting was most likely to fuel charitable giving. Seventy-one percent (222) of the 311 Times articles and 74 percent (201) of the 272 Journal articles about Katrina over this 10-day span characterized the storm as a natural disaster. There were 91 instances where articles used this phrase explicitly. More frequently, they implicitly conveyed this idea in a variety of ways, as the following table illustrates. Message New York Times Wall Street Journal Total frequency Explicit use of phrase “natural disaster” 50 41 91 Storm Personification 174 224 398 Storm Power 34 25 59 Sensory Images Divine Event 114 20 66 6 180 26 The most common portrayal was storm personification; there were 174 references in the Times and 224 in the Journal. These articles indicated that the storm alone was responsible for Katrina’s destructiveness. The Times reported on August 31st: “The people of New Orleans and southeastern Louisiana, as well as of other devastated areas along the Gulf Coast, are suffering terribly as a result of Hurricane Katrina.” The tone was again very matter-of-fact in the Times the following day: Page | 10 “Hurricane Katrina has left a portion of this country homeless, jobless and in shambles.” Notice that there is no mention of the possibility that other factors besides the storm’s sheer force also may have contributed to the damage. A closely related theme is storm power, which refers to instances when articles dramatized Katrina’s naturally destructive force. There were 34 illustrations in the Times and 25 in the Journal. An August 31st Journal article described the scene as follows: “The storm's intensity, even hours after barreling ashore with 145-mph winds yesterday morning in the marshes of southeastern Louisiana, left no doubt that Katrina spread misery and destruction from the Louisiana bayou to the Florida Panhandle.” A September 1st Times article similarly reported that “Hurricane Katrina's storm surge – the wall of water it pushed ashore when it struck the Gulf Coast on Monday – was the highest ever measured in the United States.” Sensory images provided another way of dramatizing nature’s power to wreak havoc on innocent victims. In the Times there were 114, and in the Journal 66 such references. These images highlighted the haunting ways Katrina’s floodwaters destroyed property and threatened human life. On September 1st, the Times reported: “The water that now covers much of New Orleans is a fetid broth of sewage, with gasoline from gas stations, solvents from dry cleaners and chemicals from household cleaners mixed in.” And then on September 4th the Times described “corpses still floating in the waterways of New Orleans five days after the disaster that caused them.” Since water is such a pure symbol of nature, these images reinforced the overall theme in the news reporting: that Mother Nature alone produced this disaster. Page | 11 The final media image underscoring that Katrina’s destructive force was beyond human control was divine event. There were 20 references in the Times and 6 in the Journal. On September 5th the Times reported: “Seven days after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, the New Orleans known as America's vibrant capital of jazz and gala Mardi Gras celebrations was gone. In its place was a partly submerged city of abandoned homes and ruined businesses, of bodies in attics or floating in deserted streets, of misery that had driven most of its nearly 500,000 residents into a diaspora of Biblical proportions.” A few days earlier, the Journal had similarly characterized Katrina as producing an “almost-Biblical level of flooding in New Orleans” and a Times article had claimed, “Some may talk of a divine hand behind all of this.” These examples painted Katrina as an “Act of God,” one of the clearest ways of characterizing those afflicted as innocent victims. Historian Ted Steinberg has studied how people have responded to natural disasters over the past couple hundred years. He documents that seeing them as divine events was a central current of American religious thought well into the 19th century and remains a prominent view to this day. 17 What is noteworthy about the sympathy that media coverage bestows upon victims of natural disasters is how this reporting contributes to a distorted, black-andwhite picture of which victims in our society do and do not deserve help. Whereas victims of hurricanes or heat waves seem worthy of assistance due to forces beyond their control, in a society where people are seen as personally responsible for their lot in life the poor do not garner such sympathy. Page | 12 Meet Joe and Kate. They live in a picturesque California suburb and asked us to conceal their identity because what their neighbors don't know is that they are on the verge of losing it all. Joe was laid off eight weeks ago. Kate still has her job but $11 an hour doesn’t feed a family of four. They use their savings to pay down their credit card and have little cushion. Kate once volunteered at a soup kitchen. On this day, she was the one asking for help for the first time. Reporter Sharyn Alfonsi offered these words in a March 16, 2010 segment on ABC World News with Diana Sawyer. As Alfonsi spoke, the camera zoomed in on the family’s beautiful home located in a pristine suburban neighborhood. Alfonsi’s report was part of the series “The Fight for the Middle Class” that ABC broadcast in 2010 as the unemployment rate was hovering around 10 percent. The New York Times ran a similar series called “The New Poor” and many other news sources also provided extensive reporting about how the recession was causing solidly middle class families to tailspin into poverty. Stories like Joe and Kate’s story painfully highlighted that in hard times poverty can touch even decent hard-working people – people just like you and me. 18 A study by the media-watchdog organization Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting found that whereas there was network TV reporting about poverty roughly every three weeks prior to the beginning of the Great Recession in 2007, between October and December 2008 the frequency this type of story aired increased to every 4-5 days. Yet, how the recession was affecting those who had been poor long beforehand did not become a subject of elevated coverage. The spike in reporting largely consisted of stories about the precarious fate of middle and upper-income workers after losing their jobs. These people, like Joe and Kate, unexpectedly found themselves in dire financial need and in many cases faced the possibility of a home foreclosure. Impassioned writer Barbara Ehrenreich, who has devoted her career to chronicling the struggles of lowPage | 13 income Americans, cynically characterized the heightened media attention being given to the new poor: “The super-rich give up their personal jets; the upper middle class cut back on private Pilates classes; the merely middle class forgo vacations and evenings at Applebee’s.“ 19 News audiences can easily relate to recession-related reports about the newly poor since such coverage taps people’s fears that they too might find their financially secure lives suddenly upended. These stories are like disaster coverage in that they profile decent people who, through no fault of their own, suddenly fall on hard times and therefore deserve help. The backdrop of these stories about the new poor – and what these stories obscure – is that so many people who were poor before the onset of hard economic times also need and deserve help. There is one time during the year when the chronically poor become a subject of journalists’ and public compassion: the period between Thanksgiving and the New Year. Since for lots of people being in the holiday spirit involves giving to those less fortunate, many news sources make special charitable appeals to help the needy. Reporters chronicle stories of adversity – such as a parent being layed off or an illness sapping family savings – and showcase examples of charity making a difference in these people’s lives. For example, a piece published on Christmas Day, 2009 featured Theone Ferron, a woman recently helped by the New York Times Neediest Cases Fund after losing her $17,500 a year job and not getting severance pay. Ferron lived in a twobedroom apartment in the Bronx and was eight months pregnant with her second child. Family members provided emotional support but could not afford to help her financially. Page | 14 After being unable to find work, she aspired to return to school to fulfill an ambition to become a special education teacher. But, she could not get a student loan because she had longstanding debt. She was not only unable to pay off this debt but was falling behind on her rent and utility bills. After meeting with a social worker from Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New York, the New York Times Neediest Cases Fund paid her bills and bought her a computer for school. 20 The upshot of heart-wrenching yet ultimately heart-warming stories like Theone Ferron’s is that low-income people deserve a helping hand and that even a little bit of assistance can go a long way. Unlike the images news audiences are apt to see the rest of the year holiday coverage paints the poor as people worthy of charity because their hardships stem from forces beyond their control. Holiday appeals, therefore, are a temporary departure from typical depictions of the poor’s troubles as largely of their own making. At the end of each calendar year, some of the neediest people – or at least those whom reporters characterize as the neediest – get help and their lives become all the better for it. Still, these appeals are about assisting particular individuals, not about helping the poor more generally. This distinction matters given that reporting about a person or family in acute financial need seldom widens the lens to expose the obstacles that limit access to opportunity for low-income people as a whole. Moreover, holiday giving campaigns are a Pyrrhic victory for America’s poor. Although their struggles get exposure for a concentrated period of time, the charitable public is let off the hook from demonstrating concern the rest of the year. The poor disappear in early January, not to reappear until we are eating our Thanksgiving dinners. 21 Page | 15 It could be this disparity of concern reflects compassion fatigue – the idea that in time people stop caring about problems that get repeated media exposure. Perhaps for just 6 weeks out of the year are we able to muster up concerns for fellow Americans who are chronically in need. Maybe we simply cannot do more than that. This sort of reasoning certainly helps to keep hearts warm during cold, dark December days. But it is ultimately a smokescreen for the ways the news media aid and abet our muted generosity toward the poor. We must not sugarcoat the fact that for most of the year the elephant in the room is the everyday struggles faced by low-income people living in a society that casts aspersions on them for experiencing these struggles. Page | 16 Notes Oprah’s story is chronicled on many websites including her own. This synopsis is from http://www.icmrindia.org/free%20resources/casestudies/Oprah%20Winfrey2.htm and http://sun.menloschool.org/~sportman/ethnic/individual/winfrey/index.html. 1 2 This cartoon appeared in the April 24, 2000 New Yorker. 3 Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare (1999), 8. Hunt, “The Individual, Society, or Both?” (1996), 295; Pew Charitable Trusts, “Katrina Has Only Modest Impact on Basic Public Values” (2005), retrieved from http://peoplepress.org/commentary/?analysisid=117. 4 5 Calame, “Covering New Orleans: The Decade before the Storm” (2005). 6 Iyengar, ““Framing Responsibility for Political Issues” (1990), 23. 7 Luker, Dubious Conceptions (1996), 107; Males, “Behaving Like Children” (2011). 8 Best, Random Violence (1999). 9 Williams, “Race, Rat Bites, and Unfit Mothers” (1995), 1159. 10 Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare (1999), 3; Rank, 105-06. 11 de Goode, “Ideology in the US Welfare Debate” (1996). 12 Gilens, “Race and Poverty in America” (1996), 522-24. 13 Katz, The Undeserving Poor (1989). 14 Since the Katrina charitable campaign spanned the entire United States, I sought out news sources that had a national reach. Although television is a prominent medium of disaster reporting, I opted to look at newspapers because their content is more accessible and easier to track. Comparing coverage in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal offered a rich comparison since the two papers have different political leanings (the Times more liberal, the Journal more conservative) and different orientations (comprehensive coverage v. mostly financial news). I identified all articles during the ten-day period that matched a keyword search for “Hurricane Katrina.” They spanned national coverage, business, sports, editorials, op-eds, and letters to the editor. 15 Klinenberg, Heat Wave (2002). Page | 17 Steinberg, Acts of God (2000); Ploughman, “The American Print News Media ‘Construction’ of Five Natural Disasters” (1995). 16 17 Ibid. ABC World News with Diane Sawyer, “Economic Troubles Push Some Middle-Class Americans to the Edge of Poverty, “ Aired March 16, 2010. http://abcnews.go.com/WN/americas-middle-class-families-edge/story?id=10116754. 18 DeMause, “The Recession and the Deserving Poor” (2009); Ehrenreich, “Too Poor to Make the News” (2009). 19 20 Haskell, “No Work, Two Children and a Mounting Pile of Bills” (2009). Edelman, “Forgotten Stories about Forgotten People” (2001); Kendall, Framing Class (2005), 94-95, 124-28; Loseke, “The Whole Spirit of Modern Philanthropy” (1997), 42930. 21 Page | 18