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PART I
Principles
Ethical Frameworks for Covering Poverty
Reporting on poverty involves some classic journalism ethics problems, including the use of deception in undercover reporting (e.g., in cases of “class passing”), the exploitation of vulnerable story subjects and the degree to which journalists should become part of the story. However, the decision to cover poverty at all is itself an ethical one that precedes decisions about how to cover it.
The existence of this volume presupposes that there is a moral obligation for journalists to highlight the plight of those struggling economically and to explain, if not advocate for, possible ways to alleviate their insecurity and exclusion. But what are the grounds for this moral obligation? And how, on those grounds, does one cover poverty responsibly? Given these fundamental questions, the first section, “Principles: Ethical Frameworks for Covering Poverty,” deals squarely with ethical concerns related to poverty’s moral, ideological, aesthetic and linguistic dimensions.
In “Communitarian Ethics and Poverty Coverage,” media ethicist Clifford G. Christians proposes communitarian ethics to elevate the way journalists cover poverty and the way academics study poverty coverage. Centered on dignity as an ethical value, Christians’ framework takes inspiration from the Latin American tradition of communalism as embodied in the work of Brazilian Paulo Freire and Peruvian Gustavo Gutiérrez. Christians proposes a fundamental reorientation away from emphasizing the news media’s monitorial role to emphasize instead its facilitative role.
In “The Capability Approach and Media Coverage of People in Poverty,” philosopher Gottfried Schweiger focuses on justice in poverty coverage using the Capability Approach as conceived and developed in the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Capabilities are freedoms and opportunities; poverty consists of capability deprivation including, but going well beyond, the lack of money. On this account, poverty is fundamentally unfair. Journalists can help by representing poverty as lack of freedom to pursue opportunities and by representing those experiencing it as having voice and agency in strengthening their capabilities.
Political scientist Vincent Fang likewise focuses on justice in “Extreme Poverty as Human Rights Violation: Moral Duties and Public Engagement in the Global North.” Fang notes that many in the Global North continue to look at extreme poverty in the Global South as a matter of mere charity, which suggests that ameliorating poverty is a voluntary and somewhat arbitrary decision. Fang presents an argument for shifting from a charity paradigm to a justice paradigm using human rights as a framework. The media can help those who live in the Global North to understand their remedial duties by providing relevant historical and political context for the suffering of those who live in the Global South.
Cultural studies scholar Sieglinde Lemke studies two iconic photographs of forced migration to illuminate the possible contributions of photojournalism to ethical poverty coverage. Using Judith Butler’s notion of precariousness, Lemke focuses on the moral implications of the fraught relationship existing between these photos’ precarious subjects and between the non-precarious viewers who are moved by them. Readers familiar with the two photos, Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother (1936) and Nilüfer Demir’s Syrian Boy on the Beach (2015), will look at them hereafter with new appreciation after reading Lemke’s chapter, “Precarious Photojournalism: The Ethics and Aesthetics of the Unrepresentable.”
In the Eisenhower Foundation’s 50-year follow-up to the Kerner Commission report, the editors noted that the U.S. media’s coverage of poverty and racial injustice has not improved significantly since 1968, when destructive disturbances killed dozens in majority-Black neighborhoods in Detroit and other U.S. cities. The media, according to Healing our Divided Society (Younge, 2018), have been especially bad at covering the everyday-ness of these problems because of its man-bites-dog definition of news. In “Shared Vulnerability as a Virtuous Framework for Poverty Journalism,” I argue that the everyday-ness of poverty is both newsworthy and morally significant because it shows how vulnerable we all are. Using Alasdair MacIntyre’s virtues of acknowledged dependence, I argue for a new way of covering poverty grounded in shared vulnerability to get away from treating poverty as an “us vs. them” problem.
Anita Varma, a media ethicist, uses a collaborative campaign against homelessness by dozens of news outlets in San Francisco to illustrate how applying the logic of solidarity can improve poverty coverage. In “Solidarity in U.S. Journalism: Social Justice Implications of How Journalists Humanize People Experiencing Homelessness,” Varma argues that solidarity goes beyond intragroup cohesion and individual sympathy to humanize people experiencing homelessness in a way that focuses on shared conditions and opens up prospects for social justice.
Varma suggests that empathy leads journalists reporting on poverty to focus on characters, rather than shared conditions, in order to make them relatable to privileged audiences. Ryan J. Thomas, another media ethicist, argues in “Social Empathy + Compassion: Building Blocks for Poverty Coverage” that empathy of the right kind — social empathy — can correct for U.S. journalism’s commitment to a thin objectivity that leads journalists to become disinterested observers. Empathy in journalism may be able to reduce the moral distance between privileged audiences and the subjects of poverty coverage by cultivating compassion in citizens. The hope is that compassionate citizens will be motivated to improve the life circumstances of their fellows out of concern for their suffering, but also out of concern for their opportunity to participate in democratic life.
The journalist Q&A that closes this part of the book, “Reporting on the Margins But Not Marginalizing with Dustin Dwyer,” presents my conversation with a reporter for Michigan Radio, a statewide NPR station. Dwyer was one of the reporters who led the station’s multiyear “State of Opportunity: Can Kids in Michigan Get Ahead?” project about issues facing economically insecure kids in Michigan. Here, Dwyer talks about the project and how reporting about the marginalized led him to change his ideas about media accountability.
Reference
Younge, G. (2018). Sometimes, “Dog bites man” really is the story. In F. Harris, & A. Curtis, Healing our divided society: Investing in America fifty years after the Kerner Report. Temple University Press.
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1
COMMUNITARIAN ETHICS AND POVERTY COVERAGE
Clifford G. Christians
Communitarian ethics offers a distinctive moral foundation for giving poverty coverage priority in the news media. Based on its grounds for journalism’s moral obligation, communitarianism indicates how poverty and those living in poverty ought to be covered without exploiting vulnerable publics. For news coverage of poverty, communitarianism is an ethical framework for both journalism as a profession and for academic research.
The Communitarian Alternative
The legitimacy of communitarian ethics for the news and poverty relationship depends on its uniqueness as a moral theory. And communitarian ethics is best understood by contrasting it with classical Western approaches. Rather than uncritically assume the formalism or individualism of the mainstream view and be limited by its misdirections, communitarianism gives poverty coverage a different philosophical foundation.
Though they differ conceptually, given the circumstances of their intellectual history, classical Western philosophers made individual responsibility their centerpiece. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics promoted self-determination, with self-realization its moral goal. Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals was an argument for individual rationality, and the British philosopher John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism centered on personal autonomy. The axis of traditional media ethics is autonomous subjectivity, a theory of human nature presumed to be unproblematic. Aristotle hints at community in his political association, but the idea is undeveloped or, since Locke, cast into a dualism of individual and society.
Communitarian ethics insists that we start over intellectually. Rather than individuals as the integrating norm, our communal obligations to sustain one another define our existence.1 Moral values develop through community formation, not in isolation. In the shared human experience of poverty, the moral issues are intelligible. Humans are dialogic agents within a language community. Communicative bonds are moral bonds; they are ordering statements in that they convey value judgments. Therefore, morality must be seen in communal terms.
Modern-day communitarianism began as a critical reaction to John Rawls’ history-making book, A Theory of Justice (1971). Political philosophers, such as Carole Pateman (1976), Michael Sandel (1995) and Charles Taylor (1989), disputed Rawls’ procedural liberalism. They contended against Rawls that a democratic politics of individual rights rests on unsupportable foundations and should be given up for “a politics of the common good.” Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (2007) offered a similar critique in historical perspective. One of the Enlightenment project’s serious mistakes, he said, was “the tendency to think atomistically about human action and to analyze complex actions and transactions in terms of simple components” (p. 204).
These scholars (plus Michael Walzer, 1970) understand the fundamental issues as revolving around the nature of political systems, the relationship between persons and community and the legitimacy of ethical principles that are explicitly Western. Although Taylor, Pateman, Sandel, MacIntyre and Walzer did not use the term themselves, communitarian democracy has become the primary label for their attacks on atomistic liberalism. “Communitarianism” connected their work with the counter-Enlightenment tradition in which humans as relational beings contradicted the concept of individual rationality. Martin Buber’s relational paradigm, Emmanuel Levinas’ Otherness as the starting point of human interaction and Paulo Freire’s conscientization illustrate counter-Enlightenment communalism. Symbolic interactionism characterized Buber’s I-Thouness, Levinas made communicative relationships primordial and, for Freire, naming the world was non-negotiable.
And the communitarian alternative reaches even deeper, into the Latin word-family communis that across cultures relocates the human center from self to community. Social philosophies worldwide that see community as a distinctive idea — such as Confucianism’s ren, Taoism’s holistic humans (Zhang, 2016) and ubuntu’s freedom-in-dependence — are influential non-Western communal systems. The various concepts, histories and problematics of communitarianism are dialects of the same language, held together by a body of similar ideas contra utilitarianism (Christians, 2014).
In the communitarian ethics developed from this far-ranging genealogy, the concept of community is a normative ideal (Bell, 2010). People’s lives are bound up with the good of the community in which their identity is established (Christians et al., 2012). Therefore, when the intrinsic worthiness of the community’s members is recognized, the ethical principle of human dignity becomes the axis around which communis revolves. Intrinsic worth as a property of the human species, and ipso facto the core of the common good, is ontologically prior to mechanisms of conferral. Receiving one’s due is not a privilege for which one has gratitude. In communitarian ethics, human worthiness is non-negotiable, and where it has been violated or lost, the community’s members are under moral obligation to restore it (Christians, 2019, ch. 4).
With the human dignity principle, there is a frame of reference for interpreting and measuring communities. Communal discourse points us in the right direction, but in the end is coopted by the status quo. Upon providing a thick reading of those in poverty in their natural settings, communal narrative cannot in itself yield normative guidelines. Communities turn in on themselves. Not all communities are legitimate. Conflicts between and within people groups need principles for their resolution. Without norms, both human lifeworlds and professional communities are trapped in the distributive fallacy, tribalisms and ideological blocs presuming to speak for the whole. For communitarian ethics, the question is whether communities, in their values and practices, affirm the principle that fits organically; that is, human dignity. The cultures of poverty are complex and multilayered; whether life is meaningful in ...
