Three years after the federal government ended subsistence guarantees for low-income people–and after hundreds of thousands of people have left or been kicked off the benefit rolls–welfare is no longer considered newsworthy. And the people, the vast majority of them children, whose lives have been irrevocably altered by benefit cut-offs simply aren’t worthy of public attention. That’s the conclusion that emerged from an exhaustive five-month study of welfare coverage in five major California newspapers. Media Alliance and media advocacy organization We Interrupt This Message surveyed the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Sacramento Bee, San Jose Mercury News, and Contra Costa Times from January 1 through May 31 of this year, analyzing all stories containing the word welfare in either the headline or subhead. We wanted to know how mainstream papers have approached the issue, and what this coverage has contributed to public perceptions and policy.
We found that welfare reform has essentially disappeared from four of the five papers. The vast majority of articles that did appear during the study period were superficial pieces lacking any real investigative effort or analysis. And most importantly, welfare recipients themselves–their experiences and the obstacles they face–were largely ignored in favor of spoon-fed stories based on press releases from think tanks eager to pronounce welfare “reform” a success.
A Resounding Silence
With the unexpected exception of the Contra Costa Times, which had a full-time reporter on the social services beat and accounted for 31 of the 72 articles found, the papers virtually ignored welfare reform. The San Jose Mercury News ran only four articles on welfare in the entire five-month study period, and the San Francisco Chronicle contributed a mere eight. The Sacramento Bee ran 13 stories and the Los Angeles Times ran 16.
By comparison, the same publications ran a total of 86 stories with the word pet in the headline or subhead during the study period.
Armchair Journalism
Investigative reporting on welfare reform’s effects was scarce. Only six of the 72 articles evaluated were generated by a local reporter personally investigating the issue and digging for critical, hard-to-find information.
“Not many news organizations devote a reporter to full-time coverage of either poverty or social issues,” explains Meredith May, who as the Contra Costa Times‘ social services reporter wrote the few stories that profiled current and former welfare recipients and touched on some of the failures of current welfare policies.
“I was lucky in that I didn’t have a daily beat and I could develop sources and come up with ideas and issues,” says May, now a San Francisco Chronicle reporter covering K-12 education in the East Bay. “I had the luxury to read books and spend a couple of hours on a lunch with a social worker, or hang out in a housing project. That helped me enormously.”
Normally, she adds, newspapers don’t make poverty a beat.
Without the “luxuries” May had, it’s no surprise that stories from wire services and press releases accounted for the vast majority of our sample.
The Chronicle had the worst track record in this regard: six out of eight–75 percent–of its welfare-related stories came from wire services. The San Jose Mercury News was hot on its heels, with 50 percent of its welfare stories provided by the Associated Press.
The high level of dependence on such sources translated to a lack of coverage on how welfare reform is being implemented in California and how it affects local communities.
And the reliance on press releases contributed to an absence of any discussion of welfare costs. Not one of the 72 articles surveyed even mentioned welfare’s relation to local, state, or national budgets. A sample of what they left out:
Welfare (all means-tested entitlements except Medicaid) accounts for only six percent of the national budget for fiscal year 2000, according to the federal government. That’s less than half the Defense Department’s share and less than federal subsidies to the energy industry alone, according to The Center for Popular Economics, a progressive think tank.
Poverty: Stricken From the Story
Regardless of their source, the study articles routinely failed to place welfare within the dynamics of poverty.
Although some stories mentioned the low wages many former welfare recipients receive, analysis of the burgeoning low-wage job market was absent. “There was no examination of the loss of well-paying jobs,” laments John Avalos, program associate at We Interrupt This Message, “or of the loss of manufacturing centers, downsizing, globalization, and the shift to a low-paying service economy. What’s happening in the economy? Are there enough jobs? How does discrimination limit opportunities? News reporters need to find answers to these questions.”
Fewer than half the articles (35) even addressed whether welfare reform has been successful so far. Of those that did, most measured success in the narrowest of terms: the decline in welfare caseloads.
Asked to comment on this finding, Philadelphia Inquirer editor David Zucchino, author of Myth of the Welfare Queen, responded: “I don’t think it’s being accurate or thorough or fair to leave that as the defi nition [of success]. It’s what happens to [recipients] and their children afterward” that matters.
Yet only 26 percent of stories mentioned what happened to people once they left welfare, and these tended to profile particular cases rather than overall statistics.
With headlines such as “On the Road from Welfare to Careers” (Sacramento Bee), “Donna Quincy: No Longer Living on the Streets” and “Vicky Strock: New Job, Husband, and Family” (Contra Costa Times), these profiles tended to be of the welfare poster child variety, and thus unrepresentative of the lives of most people struggling to escape poverty.
Only 11 percent of the articles studied broached the issue of whether welfare reform and its concomitant welfare-to-work mandate have helped lift people out of poverty.
The oversight isn’t due to lack of information: According to the latest statistics from CalWORKS, California’s welfare program, the average starting hourly wage of San Franciscans who have moved from welfare into the workforce is a meager $6.60 an hour. The average number of hours worked per week is 27. That means the average former welfare recipient is grossing only $751 a month in a city where the market-rate rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $1,100 per month.
“They have all these figures of the thousands of people who’ve left the rolls, but if you look at the people who’ve newly applied, half of them were on [welfare] before,” says Ilana Berger, lead organizer at San Francisco’s workfare workers’ union, People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER).
Staffing a National Temp Agency
No story in the survey touched on the fact that benefits are cut off at a very low income level, which means that many people can’t afford to leave welfare. A parent of two children who earns $1,477 per month is no longer eligible for childcare and health-care subsidies, and is often faced with the choice of leaving her children at home unattended to work for wages that do not provide for the family’s basic needs, or leaving her job and going back on welfare.
“What they don’t talk about,” says Berger, “is that the system is set up as a big circle. People have to stay poor in order to get help. It’s a self-perpetuating system that ends up acting like a national temp agency.”
Who’s staffing that temp agency? Women and children make up the vast majority of welfare recipients. According to California’s Department of Social Services, 70 percent of the state’s welfare recipients are children. Yet only seven of the 72 articles in the study mentioned the impact of welfare reform on children, and only one addressed the issue directly. Just nine stories looked at how gender affects survival in the current welfare environment.
“There are unrecognized forms of labor that are very rigorous, such as being a mother,” says Tiny Grey-García, editor of Poor magazine. Grey-García and her mother spent many years on welfare before founding Poor. Now they work with other current and former recipients to challenge the stereotypes of the poor that are so prevalent in the mainstream media.
For example, Grey-García says, “You can’t really have a ‘lazy’ welfare mom, because [that person] doesn’t exist. If a mother is being a good mother, then she’s working.”
“That’s what has to change in coverage of welfare,” says We Interrupt’s Avalos. “We need to know how children are doing. We need to know if families transitioning off welfare can support children. Do they have child care, jobs with economic security, adequate housing, enough money for nutrition. News coverage needs to address families and children so we can get the full impact of welfare reform. That way we can gain a clear understanding of what it takes for the working poor to raise children. Sound public policy is based on this understanding.”
Photo courtesy of People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER).
The only study article that provided any concrete statistical breakdown of the effects of welfare reform on people of color–an Associated Press story reporting that “minorities” were leaving welfare at a lower rate than whites–did not even mention immigrants, who have been hit hard by recent cuts. The Associated Press story’s appearance in three of the papers surveyed accounted for half the scant six articles on welfare that dealt with race.
“Color blind policies often do not have color blind results, and the impact on people of color can be devastating,” says Hunter Cutting, co-director of We Interrupt This Message. “When news coverage ignores the institutional results of racial discrimination, welfare agencies and the elected officials who oversee them are let off the hook.”
Voice of Inexperience
Biases in favor of institutional sources and against institutional explanations for poverty were also hallmarks of the surveyed stories.
Government officials’ remarks constituted 33 percent of all quotes.
In contrast, current and former welfare recipients accounted for 18 percent of quotes, while advocates for the poor accounted for only 9 percent. Welfare experts and social service personnel supplied the rest of the quotes.
Bias was evident not only in the number of times each type of source was quoted, but also in the treatment each type’s comments received. Across the board, the claims of politicians and social service officials were accepted at face value, while the claims of noninstitutional sources were met with skepticism.
“It would be really useful if the media were actually challenging government officials instead of taking them at their word and that’s it,” says Berger. “You see the challenging questions coming to recipients or to advocates or to folks in the community, but whatever the head of the Department of Human Services says, whatever the county director says, is the truth. You don’t need to do any fact checking.
“It’s great that they quote folks on assistance,” Berger continues, “but the articles I’ve seen have not talked to recipients as if they were experts. The only people who can really and truly be the experts are the people who go through it. And if that was the orientation to policy making, we’d have much better policy. But that should at least be the orientation to reporting, so that people actually get the accurate story. Otherwise it’s just sloppy reporting.”
Most stories presented poverty as the result of personal failure rather than structural inequities. By inference then, the poor, though they might struggle with difficult circumstances, could be considered undeserving of assistance.
Whether consciously or unwittingly, the loaded language in study stories– “the dole,” “federal charity,” “earn their check,” “family values,” “work ethic,” “relapse”–also helped perpetuate the image of welfare recipients as lazy or drug-addicted people who would rather milk the system than go out and get a job. The implication is that those remaining on or returning to welfare simply don’t have the will power to pull themselves up and need the “tough love” approach provided by welfare reform to “regain control of their lives.”
Not once were these cliches countered with analyses by recipients or advocates. But if reporters were to dig a little deeper, they would find that welfare reform’s welfare-to-work programs aren’t living up to their promises.
“No one gets hired from workfare,” says Berger of POWER. “There are people who’ve done it for five years, for ten years, who’ve applied for city jobs every week and they’re told they don’t have the experience because they’re not doing the whole job.”
Berger adds that while San Francisco workfare workers toil for $355 a month, city workers doing the same jobs collect $15 to $27 an hour.
“If someone has been showing up under these conditions for five years, at 6:30 in the morning, plus dealing with their welfare appointments–being made to wait for four hours, getting through all these hoops, the issue isn’t that they don’t know how to work or that they don’t have a job. The issue is that they’re not getting paid for that job,” Berger says. “We want to see living-wage jobs with benefits coming out of these programs.”
Part of the problem with mainstream news coverage, according to Poor‘s Grey-García, is that reporters typically haven’t experienced poverty and so are unable to capture its realities. “Essentially, they’re not coming to this debate informed,” she says.
“I would say the reporter should actually find out what’s really going on,” Berger says. “They should look for tracking, for statistics. They should look at why people are going off the rolls, what’s happening to them afterwards. It’s basic, basic stuff.”
Camille Taiara is a freelance journalist, media maker, and politivcal activist who lives in San Francisco. She assisted with the study on which this article is based.