Critical Explorations of Media and Inequality

Majka Ryan, Martin J. Power, Eoin Devereux

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9798216253334
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Media discourses play a powerful role in shaping public understanding of inequality-yet they often obscure, distort, or individualize its causes.
Critical Explorations of Media and Inequality examines how mainstream media systems reproduce and legitimize unequal social structures by marginalizing, sensationalizing, or blaming those most affected. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars, this edited collection explores the persistent gaps, tensions, and ideological forces at work in media representations of class, poverty, homelessness, welfare, and immigration across diverse global contexts. Organized around the themes of changing media work practices, authoritative voices, representations, and implications, the chapters interrogate how neoliberalism and shifting journalistic norms continue to shape-and limit-the public conversation on inequality. Through rich empirical analysis and interdisciplinary insight, this volume offers a timely intervention into the politics of media framing and the structural silences that sustain social injustice.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Introduction: Through the Looking Glass: Critical Perspectives on Media and Inequality
• Chapter 1: Inequality in the Newsroom: Understanding Journalism Work through a Labour Lens
• Chapter 2: Who Is Entitled to Interesting Work?: Inequality and the Cultural Lives of the British Working Class
• Chapter 3: Representations of Poverty and Inequality in Hindi Cinema
• Chapter 4: Interrogating Absence/Presence in the Representations of Poverty and the Poor in South African Soap Opera Dramas
• Chapter 5: A System of Negative Effects: Insights from Interviews with U.S. News Consumers below the Poverty Line
• Chapter 6: Sensationalism of Suffering: The ‘Kerala Model’ Media Discourse of Poverty Porn
• Chapter 7: Continuity of Poverty: Religion, Populism and Hegemony
• Chapter 8: Poverty Where?: Reframing Deprivation and Reportage of the Boko Haram Insurgency in Nigeria
• Chapter 9: Culinary Skills or Income Inequality?: Mediating Food Poverty in Limerick, Ireland
• Chapter 10: ‘If It’s Travellers, Its News Value Is Less’: Media Constructions of Fratricide-Suicide in an Ethnic Minority Community
• Chapter 11: Media Representations of Irish Travellers: Implications for Their Day-to-Day Lives
• Chapter 12: Framing Syrian Migration in Irish Print Media: A Critical Analysis of Evolving Narratives
• Chapter 13: What Do the Unhoused Tell?: A Critical Discourse Analysis of News Stories Written by Unhoused People
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Contributors