Last Friday, AlterNet published a piece by Columbia Journalism Review Managing Editor Brent Cunningham, who argues that the media, by virtue of its elitist composition (amongst other things), has contributed to the invisibility of the working class in the United States.
As Cunningham argues:
We have a public discourse about poverty in a way we don’t about the working class. Still, that discourse is too often one-dimensional: The poor are a problem, victims and perpetrators, the face of failed social policies. Such stories need to be done, of course; news is often about problems, things that are broken. Yet for those of us who are lucky enough to have health care, plenty to eat, a home, and a job that gives us discretionary income, the news has a lot to offer besides problems. We see our lives reflected in the real estate section, the travel section, the food section, the business section. When was the last time you read a story about how to buy a good used car for less than a thousand dollars?
… Fear, too, makes it difficult to see what is familiar about the poor. Most people working in journalism today grew up in a society that taught us that housing projects were only dangerous places to be avoided. As Jamie Kalven, a Chicago-based writer and public housing activist, put it in Slate in 2002, fear “blocks our capacity for perception, for learning. When mediated by fear, ignorance can coexist with knowledge, blindness with vision.”
… There are consequences to covering the poor in this one-dimensional way, consequences that the more affluent subjects of news stories can avoid. “You’re dealing with a population that has extremely limited resources for self-representation,” says Jamie Kalven. “They have no mechanism for holding folks accountable.” In a Newsweek article on the Chicago transformation plan from May 15, 2000, for instance, Mayor Richard M. Daley is quoted as saying, “What people want is education, jobs and job training.” But in a survey that Kalven’s organization did in 2000 that asked residents of the Stateway Gardens housing project what they most wanted for their neighborhood, three of the top five answers were related to better health care, but the other two were “more activities for children” and “more cultural activities,” like theater and music. Says Kalven: “These people were asserting their dignity as human beings. Our entire discourse defines them as problems, and they quietly resist it, but no one is listening.”
After reading this, I thought, “Well the answer must lie in recruitment. If the problem is one of underrepresentation of an entire class of people, their lives, and problems by the media, then wouldn’t one solution be for journalism programs and various media outlets to recruit more working class people as students and staff writers? Wouldn’t this improve the ways in which their predicaments are narrated by other journalists as ‘someone else’s problem,’ ‘a life to be pittied,’ ‘a chaotic — even dangerous — lifestyle that suburbia should fear coming into contact with?’ If journalists reported with a grassroots flavor, in the truest sense of the word, wouldn’t we be able to bridge the misrepresentations, underrepresenations, and misunderstandings produced, at least in part, by the media — and in turn bridge the class divide, or at least better illuminate the problem?”
It was almost as if Cunningham could see me thinking this, however. A few paragraphs later, he suggested that getting more minorities involved in the media might help alleviate the problem of invisibility. But then he continued on to suggest that having a journalist go into his or her own working class community to report might give his or her subjects the wrong impression. That is, the people in the community might associate his or her profession with elitism and authority. In turn, locals might either treat the journalist with more respect than they would otherwise, undermining the realism and authenticity of the reportage, or they might not trust the journalist and his or her motives, preventing the journalist and his or her subjects from striking up a rapport that would allow the reporting to reflect the lives of the people in question on any given day (rather than on that particular day).
Can the underrepresented speak?
Cunningham isn’t mistaken on this account. His argument, in fact, is one that ethnographers and journalists have long struggled with: How can underrepresented people represent themselves with an authentic voice? No matter how good their intentions are, once journalists and ethnographers get involved, the voice is always likely to be a little less authentic as the interviews, the reporting, the interactions become an event, and the lives of the subjects become something of a spectacle — something out of the ordinary.
I’d love to tell you I have a solution, but I don’t think there’s a perfect solution to this problem. I think the closest solution to perfect we have is talking about it — figuring out who it is that we’re talking about, getting to know the people we’re writing and talking about, empathizing with them, understanding them as folks just like ourselves (despite potential differences in bank account balances), recruiting more underrepresented groups into journalism programs and to work at various media outlets.
Going from “wrong” to “write”
But for the underrepresented to want to partake in careers that rarely speak to them, we need to examine another representational problem first. That is, could the problem be not just with who tells the stories, but with how they tell those stories? What constitutes “news?” Why do we have such narrow structures for writing and defining news?
The vast majority of journalism programs are centered around teaching mass-communication. While, in theory, such programs should be speaking to — but for (and by) the masses — they don’t cater to a sizeable segment of the people in this country (or even in this world). Most of these programs don’t get down to the nitty gritty of how to discuss and write about cultures — particularly those of which the journalist does not consider him- or herself a part. These programs do, however, teach you how to write good lead sentences, where to put periods and commas, and what words to capitalize or italicize. And, of course, they teach students how be sparse of words when writing or speaking.
I realize I will sound like a hypocrite here, seeing as I’m one of those people who can be ridiculously anal about sentence structure and grammar and deleting redundant phrases and paragraphs to keep things short (though I’m sure you wouldn’t know that I try to “cut the fat” based on this article). But keep in mind two things: 1. I’m writing this criticism reflexively. That is, this is a criticism not just of other people, but one that affects all of us, one that affects the ways in which we create distance in our writing. 2. I have never been formally educated as a journalist, though I have edited countless stories for my younger brother, a journalism major at the University of Texas. My experience with journalism education, then, derives largely from our discussions, my frustration with his writing, and his pride in his ability to follow what, to me, seems to be a writing formula designed to make the journalist appear as neutral as possible.
In reality, this objectivity is frequently little more than a name, an excuse to hide (whether consciously or not) from digging deeper, discussing real issues, talking about people, culture, differences, similarities. Basically, all of the things I like to discuss.
While my rant may sound self-absorbed, it’s one small example of a much larger phenomenon in the way in which journalism is typically taught and the way in which I suspect that deters many people — particularly some of the so-called invisible working-class people — from choosing such a career path. That is, because most journalism programs are focused on mass-communication, they stifle individuality, creativity, and critical thought in favor of a formulaic, capitalistic/corporate mentality that wants to be able to spit out stories as quickly as possible.
Sure, this isn’t always the case; there are stories that require multiple writers, interviewers, editors, and subjects; stories or projects that take months, even years, to complete. Some of those are even stories about the working class — “special features,” they call them. But as Cunningham emphasizes, the problem for the invisible working class is that their lives aren’t lived as features or projects. They’re humans who live everyday, and most of those days go unnoticed because on a “normal” day, the media tends to de-emphasize (or ignore) the importance of personal experience and empathy.
Typically, the closest we get is replacing the ‘e’ with an ‘s’ and winding up with sympathy and pity – in other words, a means to problematize other people’s lives and distance ourselves from “those people” and their problems. Typically writing in the third person, journalists become invested with some authority; the opinions they articulate don’t seem to be opinions by virtue of keeping pronouns such as “I” out of the story and shielded from criticism. And when opinions do become apparent in non-commentary pieces, they’re frequently cast as universal opinions. Keeping things short and simple by writing as onlookers (i.e. – outsiders) also becomes a way to circumvent description, feeling, and humanity. Distance is, after all, what creates an aura of objectivity (though scratching the surface tends to suggest otherwise), which in turn creates an aura of authority – a privileging of the subjectivity of the reporter over that of the people s/he’s writing about, or a means of treating the subjects of the story as “foreign,” making it difficult for readers to treat those subjects any differently.
Speak, memory
The solution isn’t to abandon journalism or to abandon writing and communication conventions, but rather to experiment and embrace other types of communication — types that are less formal, less structured, more human, more personal. Two years ago when I worked with students in the Chicago Debate League, a debate league for students in urban public Chicago schools (which were predominately comprised of impoverished minority students), I found that the willingness to de-emphasize certain structures in favor of personal expression and inclusion can go a long way in making students feel empowered and feel as if someone is listening. That is, unlike suburban debate programs, which typically have a wealth of funding to send their students to pricey summer workshops where they can learn from successful college debaters and return home with mountains of research and refined speaking skills, students in the Chicago Debate League often don’t have much in the way of well-researched “evidence,” renowned mentors, or hours after school to prepare for tournaments with their teammates.
Many of these students have to work full-time to help support their families; many have been involved in gangs or been deemed “failures” by their teachers. They have lived life on the margins and grappled with what it means to be invisible and what it means to struggle to fit into academic and social structures that don’t accommodate the lives they live. And then they’ve become involved in the Chicago Debate League, which refuses to force students to assimilate into a predominant structure, allowing them to instead assimilate that structure into their lives, at least partially on their terms.
Because the Chicago Debate League encourages students to draw on their own resources — their community, themselves, a little bit of Web research here and there, and some amazing teachers who are committed to seeing their students succeed, many students have excelled despite the odds. Many have graduated from high school, gotten out of gangs to stay in school, gone on to attend top colleges, debated in college, earned scholarships, or stuck around to mentor debaters in their own community. Some have fallen through the cracks along the way, I’’m sure. But this has been the case for far fewer than you might expect. Because the communication activity is willing to broaden the parameters and relax its structures, a significant number of students who wouldn’t have otherwise excelled or felt empowered or visible have excelled, felt intelligent, gotten excited, and found a voice — one that allows them to represent themselves far better than anyone else can.
This, it seems, may be the best testament yet to our collective ability to bring visibility to those who have historically been invisible. Or rather, this may be a testament to the ability of the invisible to make themselves visible. And while this may not provide an overnight solution for alleviating the poverty associated with such invisibility, that empowerment and sense of self is most certainly a first step in rediscovering the “can do” attitude that this nation was founded upon. It may also underscore the importance and power of relaxing “formulas” for “good, objective” journalism and communication in favor of more human, subjective communication.
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