Poverty and the media: Poverty myths and exclusion in the information society

This chapter charts the long history and dispiriting continuity of such refrains. It argues that lower-income groups not only are rendered culpable and marginal by such rhetoric and imagery but are also, by denial of access to the resources increasingly necessary for full, informed, and active citizenship, obstructed from the means to enter the alluring world of civic participation, that is to say, they are rendered relatively powerless. The chapter explores the double jeopardy this entails, examining both the variety of ways in which the media have insistently delivered hostile and ideologically loaded imagery of poverty and welfare but also how income inequality has profound implications for the curtailment of citizenship among lower-income groups. Since the turn of the century, shifts in government policy and the severe economic crisis provided a backdrop of growing turmoil that affected the formation of attitudes.