Gary Fields of the Associated Press, right, interviews Evan Milligan, left, on Sept. 19, 2022, in Montgomery, Ala. Milligan was among voters and advocacy groups who filed a lawsuit challenging the redistricting that split Montgomery between two congressional districts. (Vasha Hunt/AP Photo)
Subramaniam "Subbu" Vincent is the director of Journalism & Media Ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, and a monthly contributor at Forbes. He tweets from @subbuvincent and @jmethics. Views are his own.
This article, "Elections: Covering Low-Income Voters As Multifaceted, Whole People" originally appeared on Forbes.com and is reprinted with permission.
In my earlier article after the September Harris-Trump presidential debate, I pointed out a gap in national political coverage on elections. It largely excludes low-income and poor Americans as swing voters. In this article, several leading journalists, ethicists, and changemakers offer both lessons and moral framing to address the gap.
"The United States isn’t divided into Democrats, Republicans, and undecideds. We also aren’t divided into ‘likely' and 'unlikely voters,’ 'swing voters,' and 'the base,' or any of the other categories that pollsters use and (most) news coverage adopts in an election year,” says Anita Varma, an assistant professor at the School of Journalism, University of Texas at Austin.
Varma leads the Solidarity Journalism Initiative, a research-based effort that helps journalists improve their coverage of marginalized communities. “The axis that matters most – yet gets the least amount of media attention – separates people who struggle for basic survival from people who don’t,” she says. This is a call to journalists to untie themselves from the vocabulary of the political polling industry.
The easier part
Gary Fields, the Associated Press’ democracy reporter who has covered poverty and systemic issues for decades, advocates a two-pronged approach for journalists to find low-income and poor Americans as sources. One, going to food pantries, aid organizations, advocacy groups for homeless people, public welfare entities, and faith communities.
The second, he notes, is going straight to the people. “I do a data search to determine income levels, food deserts, those kinds of things, and then visit those areas. Wherever people can be found, so can sourcing opportunities,” says Fields. You can’t source from people in poverty by “texting or going on web pages,” he adds.
Candice Fortman, currently John S. Knight journalism fellow at Stanford University, was until recently executive director at Detroit's pioneering local media organization, Outlier Media. She says that junior colleges and job training programs are places where journalists can meet and talk to people experiencing poverty. “Teaming up with organizations that offer job training programs would be a great place, where people are trying quite honestly to lift themselves out of poverty,” she notes. Fortman adds bus stops and small community churches to the list.
Shailly Barnes, policy director at the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, authored the Poor Peoples’ Campaign’s 2020 report on low-income voters and the U.S. elections. Barnes refers to sheer numbers: low-income and impoverished people account for 40% of the country or 140 million, estimated by the Kairos Center in 2019 using both the US Supplemental Poverty Measure and going up to 200% of the official poverty threshold.
“We know where they are. They're at the free clinics. They're at the grocery stores and warehouses. They are at the libraries accessing free WiFi. They're at public schools, in public housing, and on public transportation. They're in the parks and playgrounds with their kids. They're in church. They are everywhere," says Barnes.
Shifting our mindsets
Academics and practitioners encourage reporters to reconstruct the picture in their minds about poverty, people, their agency, and voting.
“Voting is an outcome of political commitments, not a cause itself,” says Varma. She encourages journalists to “move away from amplifying accusations, speculation, and drama by doing what ethical journalism is supposed to do: Report from the ground-up. This means starting with people who struggle for basic survival, finding out why they struggle, and investigating what could help.”
”The question is, whether you are interested in doing that, and whether you think they have something to offer to the conversation,” says Barnes, striking at the heart of the issue.
Heather Bryant, co-founder of the Tiny News Collective, co-authored the Journalists’ Resource’s guide on covering poverty. “People aren't just ‘the poor,’" Bryant points out. “They are parents who care about what happens with education. They are women who care about their access to reproductive healthcare. They are rural people who care about not being left behind. They are inner city people who care about climate change. They are students who care about the cost of higher education.”
Poverty isn't an aspect of a person's experience that can be neatly separated from any other concern they would have, says Bryant. “They're all races, all ethnicities, all genders, all orientations, all parental statuses, all caregiving statuses, all educational levels,” she notes.
Higher income voters get asked about all kinds of things, not just policy but also big-picture things about democracy, rights, global standing, what society should be, but people experiencing economic hardship get asked about their hardship, says Bryant. “They have just as complex and multifaceted existences and just as much inherent potential, but they're not treated that way or presented that way in reporting,” she points out.
Margaret Sullivan, executive director of the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security, takes a similar line. The news media tends to write about poor people as a homogeneous unit, categorizing them as "the poor" or "the underprivileged," and making blanket statements about how poor people live their lives, she says. “And that's if there is any coverage at all.” There is a tendency to "otherize" poor people, rather than to treat them as individuals with their own ideas, beliefs, hopes, plans, and agency, which includes their plans to vote in this election, she says.
‘No one owes us a conversation’
But why should low-income and poor people talk to journalists? Fortman points out that today’s political journalism has no utility for them. “It’s serving a bunch of other people's needs, but not their needs.”
Fortman makes the contrast in the vantage point elites have in relationships with reporters. “The elites are also using the media, right?” she asks. “We understand that to have your name printed in the news matters to your career, to your standing in a place,” she says. “If you're living in poverty, what is the value proposition, and talking to some random reporter from ABC News asking you, by the way, about the thing that's probably the most difficult for you to talk about?” asks Fortman. To add, story deadlines “do not encourage forming relationships,” she says.
Bryant draws another contrast. “The powerful get to choose the journalists they speak to. Everyone else does not. They get whoever shows up. They have the right to reserve their trust and candor until it is earned. Showing up once is the bar on the floor. Showing up consistently is the work,” she says.
Fields, the veteran AP reporter, asks journalists to be respectful and anticipate that some people do not want to be identified in articles, but they will offer context. “Then there are those who will speak up, on the record. My experience is if you show interest and are interested in what they are facing, they can sense that and speak to you,” says Fields. “And if they don’t want to talk, don’t push it. No one owes us a conversation.”
Bryant agrees. “People don't owe journalists sudden trust or sudden vulnerability. They don't owe the very real risk of being a voice in a story during a contentious election season that could get them harassed, bullied, or ostracized online or in their community,” she says. She advises caution. “If you aren't doing this as the start of a larger change, don't do it right now, not on deadline.”
Jill Geisler, the Bill Plante Chair in Leadership and Media Integrity at Loyola University Chicago, elevates care as the key ethic. "National news outlets aren't wrong for doing on-the-ground reporting in communities. But the best do it with care,” she says.
“They make contacts. They listen. They don't bring a pre-set story frame on arrival. They are alert to the danger of unconscious bias, stereotyping and the chance that putting vulnerable people in the public spotlight can expose them to harm,” Geisler points out. Geisler is a Wisconsin Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame inductee and veteran television debate moderator. She refers journalists to the University of Wisconsin’s guide to less-extractive reporting.
Partnering with local newsrooms
The consensus for a long-term approach is that national newsrooms partner with local media.
Acknowledging that a lot of national reporters will come in and out of Detroit (for example) during election season, Fortman asks for an attitude reset when the bigger media entities talk to local news outlets. “Don't just ask them for their sources. Work with them, credit them for their work.”
ProPublica’s local reporting network is a good example of what happens when you already have seeded resources into a local organization, says Fortman. “So when you need to do reporting, the bigger newsroom already has a relationship with that local entity,” she says. Local reporters are more likely to answer questions from national media around a relationship that is already established.
Geisler says national newsrooms can avoid ethical traps by connecting and partnering with grass-roots media outlets. “There are more of these than ever before. Like the Neighborhood News Service in my home area of Milwaukee, They’re not amateur, they’re authentic. And that can enrich national reporting," she adds.
Income diversity and democratic coverage
In the end, Sullivan nudges political journalists to expand the meaning of “diversity” in sourcing. “We hear a lot about the need for ideological diversity, but why not wealth/income diversity as well?” she asks.
“Given how important these voters are — and could be — that void may well amount to a failure to fulfill our journalistic mission in America's democracy,” she concludes, framing both the opportunity and sounding the bell at the same time.
*Disclosures: I interviewed Shailly Barnes and Candice Fortman on Zoom. Anita Varma, Gary Fields, Heather Bryant, Margaret Sullivan and Jill Geisler responded via email. Anita Varma and Jill Geisler are members of the Journalism and Media Ethics Council that I convene at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.