Homeless Culture and the Media: How the Media Educate Audiences ...

Background and Significance of the Study

Introduction

This qualitative study offers multiple perspectives regarding the news media’s coverage of homeless people. Throughout, I hope to better inform you about the cultural phenomenon known as “homelessness.”

I look at a sample of homeless people; their characterization and description of themselves in the news media; journalists’ responses to those observations, and a sample of stories from the print and television news media that provide the dominant culture with accounts of the homeless and homelessness. The role of the media in depicting the homeless is a key issue here.

As cognitive psychologist Richard Jackson Harris asserts, the mass media are “a ‘magic window’ through which we view the world, but also the ‘door’ through which ideas enter our minds” (2004, p. 3). The metaphor of the window is especially useful in understanding how ordinary citizens learn about homeless people and the state of being homeless. Most Americans have no personal familiarity with homeless people; therefore they depend heavily on depictions of the homeless in the news media. Thus ordinary citizens learn about the homeless and homelessness from the media, just as they learn about political candidates, the functioning of government and most other aspects of society beyond the range of the individual citizen’s senses.

Media researchers Rivers, Schramm and Christians noted: “Undoubtedly, the most important role of the media is to feed the ground – to deposit layers of information, day by day, hour by hour, so that a base is laid for the knowledge on which we walk. Compared with the occasional great and dramatic changes we can attribute to the media, this slow, continuing, never-ending effect is immensely more powerful and significant” (1980, p. 28–9).

I deal with three key areas of focus: (1) an analysis of how the mass media informally educate their audiences about the culture of homelessness in the United States through their descriptions and presentations of homeless people; (2) the results of a series of interviews with a theoretical sample of homeless people that explores how they describe themselves and how they perceive their portrayal by the mass media; and (3) the results of a series of interviews with a theoretical sample of Albuquerque, New Mexico-based print and broadcast journalists in which the journalists were asked to respond to the major concerns raised by the homeless interviewed for this project about the media’s portrayal of homelessness.