Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Keeping Poverty on the Front Page

Suggested Host Intro: Why were experienced journalists so stunned that most of those left behind in flooded New Orleans were poor and black?

They were stunned because the news media had been ignoring poverty, race and class for a long time. Which is understandable considering that few whites who command national attention - and that includes politicians of both parties and religious leaders of all faiths - were talking about "the elephant in America's living room," as one writer put it. Then came Hurricane Katrina, and the news media could not help but show us those men, women and children trapped on rooftops, trudging through waist-deep floodwaters and huddled on the floors of arenas. Almost all of them were poor and black, without cars in which to escape. Even when a degree of normality returns to the Gulf Coast from Alabama to Texas, I hope poverty, race and class continue to be a big national story. I think it's news that the income gap between the affluent and the poor in our country actually is growing wider. I think it's news that almost 13 percent of our population lives below the poverty line and that the percent has gone up for each of the past four years. I think it's news that our poverty rate is the highest in the developed world and that infant mortality and illiteracy rates in Mississippi and Alabama rank with a Third World country's. But an ongoing story of poverty, race and class in America must go beyond the statistics. The human dimensions should be conveyed in clear and vivid terms. People in poverty should be allowed to tell their own stories without being patronized. From time to time the news media re-discover poverty, race and class and focus for a while on "The Other America," the title of an influential 19960s book by Michael Harrington. Will the news media become bored with the subject as they have in the past? Not if they keep in mind that "The Other America" really is part of "Our America." In the 1960s I was a young reporter on what was then the new "poverty beat" at the Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky. I saw poverty up close and came to realize that poor people were just like me, only not as lucky. They work hard. They want a better life for their kids. They want to be treated with respect. Their plight should never stop being news.

Host Outro: Media commentator Paul Janensch is a former newspaper editor who teaches journalism at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. You can read his column in the Hartford Courant.