Narrative Shift: From The War on Poverty to “Ending Welfare as We Know It”

The conversation about the War on Poverty, welfare, and other public assistance programs has reflected a series of narrative shifts. This case study describes how this conversation evolved over a period of three decades, from 1964 to 1996—from a time when the federal government’s intervention in the economic life of the country to create more opportunity for those on the bottom rung was seen as a positive good, to a time when such a role for government was seen as counterproductive and even harmful. It tells the story of how a relatively small conservative movement was able to harness the power and resources of major corporations to fund think tanks and foundations that would produce the intellectual capital to attack the liberal War on Poverty and Great Society of the Johnson years, how the mass media would carry this new conservative narrative, and how the dog-whistle rhetoric of Ronald Reagan would reinforce and reify it.

METHODOLOGY

Our research methodology included in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, a comprehensive literature review, and traditional and social media research.

INTERVIEWEES:
  • Frances Fox Piven, PhD, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and author of Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, Vintage Books, 1979
  • Martin Gilens, PhD, Professor of Public Policy, UCLA, and author of Why Americans Hate Welfare, University of Chicago Press, 2009
  • Rebecca Vallas, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
  • Lee Cokorinos, Director of Democracy Strategies and author of Upsizing Democracy: Confronting the Right Wing Assault on Government, 2007
OTHER SOURCES CONSULTED:
  • Marisa Chappell, The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.
  • Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Anti-Poverty Studies. University of Chicago Press, 1999.
  • Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: America’s Enduring Confrontation With Poverty. Oxford University Press, 2013.
  • Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980. Basic Books, 1984.
  • Annelise Orleck and Lisa Gayle Hazirjian, Eds., The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964–1980. University of Georgia Press, 2011.
  • Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado, No Mercy: How Conservative Think Tanks and Foundations Changed America’s Social Agenda. Temple University Press, 1996.
  • George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty. Basic Books, 1981.
  • Lawrence Mead, Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship. Free Press, 1986.

Based on a series of historical benchmarks, we identified three time periods and their external (i.e., events beyond the control of the advocates) and field-wide (or internal) tipping points that comprised the stages of narrative shift:

EARLY YEARS: THE GREAT SOCIETY, 1964–1970

EXTERNAL TIPPING POINTS
  • President Johnson declares a War on Poverty and makes his “Great Society” speech.
  • The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act are passed and signed into law.
  • The Equal Opportunity Act and Community Action Program are passed and signed into law.
  • The Supreme Court upholds the rights of welfare recipients.
INTERNAL TIPPING POINTS
  • The National Welfare Rights Organization is founded.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr. launches the Poor People’s Campaign.
  • Rights of welfare recipients begin to be established through litigation.
  • The concept of “community control” takes root.

MIDDLE YEARS: THE RISE OF THE CONSERVATIVE NARRATIVE, 1970–1990

EXTERNAL TIPPING POINTS
  • Economic recession and cutbacks take place.
  • Urban uprisings begin to occur.
  • Increasingly negative media coverage of welfare fraud, “dysfunctional black family,” and crime is seen.
  • Ronald Reagan is elected, and the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act is passed.
INTERNAL TIPPING POINTS
  • The Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, and Americans for Tax Reform are founded.
  • Losing Ground by Charles Murray and Beyond Entitlement by Lawrence Mead are published.
  • The terms “the underclass,” “culture of poverty,” and “black family dysfunction” emerge.
  • Reagan launches his attacks on “welfare queens,” “welfare chiselers,” and “poverty pimps.”

LATER YEARS: “ENDING WELFARE AS WE KNOW IT,” 1990–1996

EXTERNAL TIPPING POINTS
  • Clinton makes the campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it.”
  • Republicans sweep Congress in 1994 midterm elections.
  • The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act passes.
INTERNAL TIPPING POINTS
  • Gingrich’s Contract with America introduces the Personal Responsibility Act.
  • Religious right’s influence grows with “family values.”

THE WAR ON POVERTY

On January 8, 1964, in his first State of the Union Address, Lyndon Johnson declared an “unconditional war on poverty in America.” Describing his declaration as a continuation of the Kennedy legacy, he told the nation, “The program I shall propose will emphasize this cooperative approach [between federal, state, and local efforts] to help that one-fifth of all American families with incomes too small to even meet their basic needs…. Our aim is not only to relieve the symptoms of poverty, but to cure it, and above all, to prevent it.” Several months later, Johnson gave his “Great Society” speech at the University of Michigan’s commencement exercises in which he called upon the graduating students to “join the battle to give every citizen the full equality which God enjoins and the law requires, whatever his belief, or race, or the color of his skin” and to “join the battle to give every citizen an escape from the crushing weight of poverty.”

The “War on Poverty” was both a set of social policies and at the very core a narrative about the role of government in alleviating the effects of severe economic inequality. The Economic Opportunity Act (EOA), passed by Congress in August 1964, poured $947 million into anti-poverty programs. The four main policies enacted under the banner of the “war” were breathtaking in scope:

  • The Social Security Amendments of 1965, which created Medicare and Medicaid and also expanded Social Security benefits for retirees, widows, people with disabilities, and college-aged students.
  • The Food Stamp Act of 1964.
  • The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which established the Job Corps, the VISTA program, and the federal work-study program. It also established the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the arm of the White House responsible for implementing the war on poverty and that created the Head Start and Legal Services for the Poor programs in the process.
  • The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which subsidized school districts with a large share of impoverished students.

It’s important to note that the cash assistance program, otherwise known as “welfare,” had already been established in 1935 as the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program as one of the signature achievements of the New Deal.

Along with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and later the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the War on Poverty manifested the positive role the federal government could, and should, play in addressing injustice and inequality. The aspirational narrative that propelled the War on Poverty was contained in the introduction to the Equal Opportunity Act:

It is the policy of the United States to eliminate the paradox of poverty in midst of plenty in this nation by opening, to everyone, the opportunity for education and training, the opportunity to work, and the opportunity to live in decency and dignity.

Its soaring rhetoric emphasized the values of compassion, empowerment, and entitlement. It helped that in 1962 a book was published that had a profound impact on how the American public viewed poverty. This was The Other America by Michael Harrington, in which he revealed that 25 percent of the nation was destitute and “for reasons beyond their control, cannot help themselves.” The book was a publishing phenomenon; Time magazine named it one of the 10 most influential books of the twentieth century and it sold millions of copies. That such hidden suffering existed in the midst of the country’s post-war prosperity stirred the conscience of America. The successes of the New Deal, especially Social Security, were still fresh in voters’ minds, and a proactive role for the federal government in ameliorating social and economic problems was relatively uncontroversial.

The War on Poverty unleashed a wave of grassroots organizing and activism.[1] The OEO itself called for “maximum feasible participation” by the poor, and the Community Action Program (CAP) was adopted by Congress to funnel resources into local anti-poverty programs nationwide. In submitting the bill to Congress, President Johnson stated:

[THE CAP] asks men and women throughout the country to prepare long-range plans for the attack on poverty in their own local communities…. [T]hese plans will be local plans calling upon all the resources available to the community—Federal and State, local and private, human and material.

“Community control” became a watchword, and men and women living on the margins of society began to assert their rights. Women in particular were galvanized and advocated for better food, schools, and healthcare for their children. In 1966 the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) brought more than 50 local welfare rights groups under one umbrella; at its peak the NWRO had 25,000 mostly African American poor women as members. It engaged in legislative lobbying and public protest. In 1970 the welfare rights movement scored a major victory when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Goldberg v. Kelly that welfare benefits were “entitlements” in which recipients had a “property interest” that could not be abrogated without a hearing and other due process rights. In his majority opinion, Justice William Brennan echoed the fundamental premise and narrative of the War on Poverty:

“From its founding the Nation’s basic commitment has been to foster the dignity and well-being of all persons within its borders. We have come to recognize that forces not within the control of the poor contribute to their poverty. This perception, against the background of our traditions, has significantly influenced the development of the contemporary public assistance system.”

Many of the War on Poverty’s early programs are still functioning today and are considered fixtures of the nation’s social safety net. They include Medicaid and Medicare; Legal Services for the Poor; Head Start; the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC); and Job Corps. Nevertheless, in today’s public discourse, the War on Drugs is considered a failure, or, as President Ronald Reagan put it, “The federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won.” This case study describes, in broad strokes, the narrative shift that took place between President Johnson’s declaration of war and President Clinton’s promise to “end welfare as we know it.”

A TUMULTUOUS DECADE

The War on Poverty was launched on the eve of a tumultuous decade. At the same time the massive federal poverty program was being developed and implemented, the country was entering a period of sustained economic decline. It is also important to note that the coinciding war in Vietnam contributed to the shaping of perceptions and policies around the War on Poverty, particularly how returning soldiers were treated and the ongoing movements for civil rights and justice. For the millions of African Americans who migrated out of the Jim Crow South and moved into poor urban neighborhoods in the north and west of the country, the collapse of manufacturing and heavy industry in those areas meant living lives of extreme poverty. Frustration with police misconduct, joblessness, and the slow pace of change sparked urban uprisings in poor black communities across the country. According to the Kerner Commission report issued in February 1968,[2] there were more than 150 “urban riots” between 1964 and 1968.

Media coverage of conflagrations in Newark, Detroit, Watts (neighborhood of Los Angeles), and other cities carried images of African Americans looting stores and burning buildings in their own “ghetto” neighborhoods.[3] While the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement in the South garnered support from a majority of Americans—a Gallup poll taken in 1964 showed that the public approved of the Civil Rights Act by nearly two-to-one—many, if not most white Americans viewed the “ghetto riots” with fear and disapproval. Poverty became more and more associated not with widows and orphans or Appalachia, but with black city dwellers. This association was reinforced by the mass media all through the late-1960s and ’70s.

Martin Gilens, a political scientist at Princeton University, studied decades of media coverage for his book Why Americans Hate Welfare.[4] He found that up until the end of 1964, accounts of the War on Poverty were generally positive and were mostly illustrated with images of poor white people. He explains:

Starting around 1965, the discourse about the War on Poverty became much more negative, and that was for a few reasons, one of them being that programs that the administration had been promoting were now out in the field, and people, especially conservatives, were starting to take aim at them. And the media started to portray those programs much more negatively as being abused by people who didn’t really need them, as being inefficient and so on. And it’s really right at that time—and it’s a very dramatic shift in the media portrayal—that the imagery shifts from poor white people, positively portrayed, to poor black people, negatively portrayed.

The “black ghetto” became a metaphor for criminality, idle youth, teenage pregnancy, out-of-wedlock babies, and welfare.

THE “UNDERCLASS,” THE “CULTURE OF POVERTY,” AND “BLACK FAMILY DYSFUNCTION”

Beginning in the mid-1970s journalists, academics, and other influential voices introduced and popularized concepts that became the received wisdom when it came to the causes of poverty in the United States. Each of them set poor African American urban dwellers apart from the rest of society. In August 1977, Time published a cover story entitled, “Minority Within a Minority: The Underclass.” It began:

Behind the [ghetto’s] crumbling walls lives a large group of people who are more intractable, more socially alien and more hostile than almost anyone had imagined. They are the unreachables; the American underclass.

From this underclass, the article went on to say, came “a highly disproportionate number of the nation’s juvenile delinquents, school dropouts, drug addicts and welfare mothers, and much of the adult crime, family disruption, urban decay, and demand for social expenditures.” (Emphases added) Time’s formulation rapidly morphed into “permanent underclass” and “black underclass” and remained a staple in the mass media throughout the 1980s and 1990s. A 1986 U.S. News and World Report cover story, “A Nation Apart,” portrayed poor people of color in America’s inner cities as “a second nation…outside the economic mainstream—a separate culture of have-nots drifting further apart from the basic values of the haves.” That same year journalism professor Nicholas Lemann authored two widely read articles in The Atlantic in which he posited that the rise in out-of-wedlock births was “by far the greatest contributor to the perpetuation of the misery of ghetto life.” A year later, a prominent article in Fortune defined “underclass communities” as “urban knots that threaten to become enclaves of permanent poverty and vice.” Their “behavior—their chronic lawlessness, drug use, out-of-wedlock birth, non-work, welfare dependence, and school failure” defined the “underclass” which was “at least as much a cultural as an economic condition.”[5] (Emphasis added)

The idea that there was a “culture of poverty” gained currency during this period. This was not a new concept. Anthropologist Oscar Lewis introduced it in his 1961 award-winning book, The Children of Sanchez, a field study that was heralded as a “watershed achievement in the study of poverty.” He followed up that book with another, La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty, and an influential article in Scientific American entitled simply, “The Culture of Poverty.” According to Lewis, this culture was characterized by “the lack of effective participation and integration of the poor in the major institutions of the larger society,” a distinctive family life characterized by  early initiation into sexual activity and a high incidence of abandonment of wives and children, and feelings of “marginality or helplessness, of dependence, and of inferiority.” Lewis has always maintained that his intention was not to perpetuate stereotypes or justify prejudices, but rather to shed light on intractable poverty so that conditions could be improved. Nevertheless, by the 1970s the “culture of poverty” had become a conservative concept used to further conservative social welfare policies.

Out of the urban underclass and the culture of poverty came an additional racist trope: the dysfunctional black family. In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan was an assistant secretary of labor in the Johnson Administration and a supporter of the War on Poverty. Drawing on the work of black sociologists E. Franklin Frazier and Kenneth Clark, his confidential report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” also known as the “Moynihan Report,” described a “cycle of poverty” and a “tangle of pathology,” which were fundamentally problems of family structure. Most troubling was the fact that “almost one-fourth of Negro families are headed by females, forcing Negro families into a ‘matriarchal structure’” and, as a consequence, a “startling increase in welfare dependency.” Based on the available evidence, he wrote, “[T]he Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling…. So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself.”

The Moynihan Report was intended “For Official Use Only,” but it was leaked to the media and picked up by the widely syndicated conservative newspaper columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, who wrote that Moynihan’s document had exposed “the breakdown of the Negro family,” with its high rates of “broken homes, illegitimacy, and female-oriented homes.” The Wall Street Journal and National Review also embraced the report. Ignoring Moynihan’s call for massive federal intervention in the labor market, they highlighted his sections on the “dysfunctional black family” to support their narrative’s emphasis on personal responsibility over government intervention.[6] The report became a string to the conservative movement’s bow.

THE RISE OF THE CONSERVATIVE NARRATIVE

During the 1960s the American conservative movement was in disarray. The stunning defeat of Barry Goldwater and his vision of small government and laissez-faire economics was a major setback for the movement. Days after the election, a small group of conservative intellectuals, including William F. Buckley, Jr., met and decided to form the American Conservative Union. One of their chief objectives was to discredit the War on Poverty. The conservative movement viewed the War on Poverty as a threat to its social philosophy based on personal responsibility; individualism; and a laissez-faire, free market economy. According to its adherents, programs for the poor might be a necessary evil at times, but they should be kept as small as possible. To challenge the War on Poverty and the values it stood for, they needed to construct a narrative that both discredited the social and economic policies enacted under its mantle and stigmatized the recipients of its programs. The tumultuous events of the late-1960s and ’70s set the stage for narrative shift.

This narrative began to be built toward racializing public assistance, and that was the key point of the transition. It was part of the tumultuous 1960s and it was fought really intensely by not just the think tanks, but by the corporations who were beginning to think that they were losing the battle big time, especially when the social programs of the Great Society came in. That’s when the alliance or fusion between the corporations and the think tanks and the conservative movement and funders, the four billionaires—John Olin, Richard Mellon Scaife, and the Koch brothers—took place.

LEE COKORINOS

The conservative narrative received a considerable lift from the state of the American economy during the mid-1970s. The fiscal crisis that drove New York City to the brink of bankruptcy was characterized by low economic growth, high unemployment, inflation, and a dramatic increase in AFDC rolls nationwide. All these factors lent support to the conservative narrative that blamed federal programs for concentrated urban poverty and economic decline. Their argument that the “welfare state” was bankrupting the country gained traction with the public.

The conservative movement was able to catalyze a backlash against the War on Poverty by tapping into this growing antipathy and anxiety and emphasizing a distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. A consistent majority of Americans over time have believed that it is the responsibility of the government “to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves,” the “truly needy.” But the same sentiment does not extend to those viewed as “lazy” and capable but unwilling to work and seeking “hand-outs.” For more than 40 years, public opinion researchers have been asking the following question: “In your opinion, which is generally more often to blame if a person is poor—lack of effort on their own part or circumstances beyond their control?” The results expose the continuing tug of war between the belief in personal responsibility and the awareness of structural barriers to opportunity, and different policy preferences flow depending on which explanation is in ascendance at any given time. The following two figures show a correlation between responses to the question and the unemployment rate: When the unemployment rate is high, more people choose “circumstances beyond their control” as the reason a person is poor.

 

Conservatives put serious resources into their narrative shift project. In his authoritative book, The Undeserving Poor, historian Michael B. Katz describes how the movement created a network of think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute, The Heritage Foundation, and the Manhattan Institute, “designed to counter liberalism, disseminate conservative ideas, and promote conservative public policy.” Within a year of its founding in 1973, for example, The Heritage Foundation received grants from 87 corporations and several major foundations. Heritage and other conservative grantees published a steady stream of books and articles criticizing federal anti-poverty programs, and they invested in the aggressive marketing of their ideas. A 1997 report from The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy titled, “Moving a Public Policy Agenda: The Strategic Philanthropy of Conservative Foundations,” observed that one of the factors accounting for the think tanks’ effectiveness in influencing public opinion was as follows:

The foundations have invested heavily in institutions and projects geared toward the marketing of conservative policy ideas. Through the provision of both general operating and project specific support, these funders have enabled policy institutions to develop aggressive marketing campaigns, media outreach efforts, and new communications tools with which to build their constituency base, mobilize public opinion and network with other organizations around a common reform agenda.

Government social welfare spending was in the crosshairs from the start. In 1984 the Manhattan Institute sponsored two books that argued for the elimination of federal anti-poverty programs: Wealth and Poverty by businessman and author George Gilder and Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 by Charles Murray, a political scientist. Gilder’s book contended that poverty was the twin result of the lack of personal responsibility and government programs that rewarded and encouraged it. Murray’s most provocative argument was that the anti-poverty programs launched by the War on Poverty were themselves responsible for continuing poverty because they discouraged work effort and promoted idleness. He called for “scrapping the entire federal welfare and income-support structure for working-aged persons, including Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Medicaid, Food Stamps, Unemployment Insurance, Worker’s Compensation, subsidized housing, disability insurance and the rest.” With copious graphs and charts, Murray argued that the condition of black families in particular worsened during the 1960s; while poverty rates declined, illegitimacy, welfare dependency, and youth unemployment increased, leaving the “black underclass” behind.

The Manhattan Institute sent 700 free copies of Murray’s book to influential politicians, academics, and journalists and paid for a public relations specialist to manage the “Murray Campaign.” The Institute held a seminar featuring Murray and paid participants honoraria to attend. The book was a media sensation and it set off a public debate between defenders and detractors of the War on Poverty. Losing Ground was followed by another very influential book, Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship by Lawrence Mead, a conservative political scientist. Published in 1986, Mead’s book picked up Murray’s argument and promoted the idea that welfare recipients be required to work. These books, along with a flood of materials published and distributed by conservative and libertarian think tanks, created the intellectual framework for an attack on federal anti-poverty programs in particular and “big government” in general.

Conservative think tanks featured heavily in news media coverage of poverty, with The Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, and Manhattan Institute quoted in more than 11,000 mainstream news media articles since the late 1970s. At the core of the conservative narrative was the idea that poverty was the lot of people whose culture and behavior kept them at the bottom of society and that the “perverse incentives” of the welfare system only encouraged and deepened their misery. Conservative opinionmakers wrote and talked about “disturbing symptoms of social pathology such as crime and broken homes.” Typical of this underclass discourse was a column by neoconservative Irving Kristol that appeared in the Wall Street Journal. In this piece, entitled “The Poverty of Equality,” he wrote:

In New York we have tried to abolish poverty through a generous welfare program, and while statistically lifted out of poverty, the city’s poor have simultaneously sunk to various depths of social pathology. Welfare has produced a largely demoralized population, with higher rates of crime, juvenile delinquency, drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, alcoholism, and other disastrous behaviors.

These were the “undeserving poor.”

RONALD REAGAN POPULARIZES THE CONSERVATIVE NARRATIVE

Among the many conservative leaders who embraced the theses of Murray, Mead, and others was Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s opposition to social spending in general, and welfare in particular, was well known. In his 1970 California gubernatorial campaign Reagan called welfare a “costly and tragic failure” that was “destroying people, our most precious resource, by creating a permanent and growing poverty class.” During his 1976 failed candidacy for president, Reagan introduced audiences to the “welfare queen” at every campaign stop:

There’s a woman in Chicago. She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veterans’ benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she’s collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.

Attacking “welfare chiselers” was also an integral part of Reagan’s stump speech, and it resonated with voters.

As a politician, Ronald Reagan was known for his anecdotal style of speech-making and none was stickier than his story about the welfare queen.[7] As Mark Shields put it in his post-election column in the Washington Post on November 27, 1981:

More than any other modern American politician, Ronald Reagan has employed the graphic anecdote as a devastating campaign weapon. A listener could almost see the notorious Welfare Queen in her designer jeans and Mercedes Benz as candidate Reagan described her collecting nearly as much in AFDC payments as Mobil was willing to pay for Marathon Oil….The anecdotes were basic to the challenger’s basic speech, and the challenger won.

Hundreds of references to the “welfare queen” appeared in media reports about welfare fraud during the early 1980s, and the belief that “welfare cheats” and “deadbeat dads” were robbing the taxpayers gained ground. Again, this established a dynamic of racism and assumption around the profile of the “welfare queen” and the “deadbeat dad,” a set of stereotypes that have endured into modern times through cultural memes and other dominant frames.

Reagan also popularized the notion that welfare was responsible for “intergenerational poverty” and the “breakdown of the family.” In a weekly radio address in 1986 he noted that the number of illegitimate births had doubled since 1960 and that many of the mothers were teenagers. “In inner cities today,” he said, “families as we’ve thought of them are not even being formed…. [I]n some instances, you have to go back three generations before you can find an intact family… Government programs have ruptured the bonds that held families together.” This was powerful rhetoric. Reagan is justly credited with popularizing the conservative narrative that undermined support for the War on Poverty and social spending on the poor in general.

The choice of language and terminology is key in the framing and promotion of a narrative. The field of cognitive linguistics tells us that people form their views about issues based more on their values than on the facts alone. Using language that evoked the shared American value of “personal responsibility” combined with implicit appeals to racism made Reagan’s messages extremely potent. The effectiveness of Reagan’s vilification—and implied criminalization—of people who received welfare is revealed in news media data. The term “welfare queen” began to emerge in mainstream media coverage in the early 1970s. As a result of Reagan’s stump speech during the 1976 presidential campaign, references to “welfare queen” in news media began to climb, almost doubling between 1980 and 1981 when Reagan took office.[8]

Upon his election, President Reagan moved quickly to curb welfare spending. The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 cut the welfare rolls by 400,000 individuals and reduced benefits for hundreds of thousands more. Federal spending on food stamps was also reduced. In his 1985 State of the Union address at the beginning of his second term, Reagan echoed the conservative narrative when he said, “Policies that increase dependency, break up families and destroy self-responsibility are not progressive…” By the late 1980s, the idea that poor people were too dependent on welfare had gone way beyond its conservative origins and had become mainstream. By 1992, 79 percent of the American public agreed with the statement, “Poor people have become too dependent on government assistance programs,” and “personal responsibility” was the catchphrase of the day.

When Reagan came into office The Heritage Foundation published something called Mandate for Leadership. Mandate for Leadership took every independent agency and federal department and proposed a right-wing agenda for them. It was a 1,000-page document. Heritage provided the blueprint and they provided the transition and the leadership. They parachuted in ideological activists at the beginning of the Administration—kind of like Sherpa teams or like Special Forces teams—to transform the agencies from within and undermine the Great Society programs.

—LEE COKORINOS

“WELFARE REFORM”

Talk of reforming welfare had been abuzz well before Bill Clinton made it a centerpiece of his 1992 presidential campaign. All through the 1970s and 1980s, support grew for “workfare”—the requirement that able-bodied recipients “work off” their welfare checks. As far back as 1967 the federal government had instituted the Work Incentive Program (WIN), but in its first 20 months, only 10 percent of the cases referred for work were considered employable. This was also the experience of the bipartisan Family Support Act of 1988, which directed all the states to phase in comprehensive welfare-to-work programs by 1990. The initiative was unsuccessful, however, because states lacked the money needed for matching funds to implement education, job training, and job placement programs.

By the time of the 1992 general election campaign there was all but universal agreement that the AFDC program was broken, and Gov. Clinton’s promise to “end welfare as we know it” and the companion phrase “Two years and you’re off” had great popular appeal. As president, Clinton’s first reform proposal would have required younger welfare recipients to go to work after 2 years, but in return it guaranteed low-paid public sector or government subsidized jobs. It also provided that those who “played by the rules” but couldn’t find work could continue to receive benefits within the same needs-based framework that had existed since 1935. But the Republican sweep of Congress in the 1994 midterm elections killed any possibility that the Clinton reform bill would pass. That year, the conservative narrative achieved its goal to devalue a narrative of compassion, empowerment, and entitlement and replace it with one celebrating and emphasizing personal and individual responsibility. Henceforth that narrative would dominate the debate and would lead to a more radical reform than Clinton had originally contemplated.

Six weeks before the midterm elections, the House Republicans, then in the minority, released their 10-point “Contract with America,” which identified their legislative priorities for the first 100 days of the 104th Congress. Third on the list was the “Personal Responsibility Act”:

Discourage illegitimacy and teen pregnancy by prohibiting welfare to minor mothers and denying increased AFDC for additional children while on welfare, cut spending for welfare programs, and enact a tough two-years-and-out provision with work requirements to promote individual responsibility.

The Republicans were banking on the electorate’s overwhelming dislike of welfare and its acceptance of the conservative narrative. By 1994, 72 percent of the public said the system of public assistance did not work well, and 73 percent believed it discouraged people from working. Seventy-one percent believed the welfare system did more harm than good “because it encourages the breakup of the family and discourages the work ethic.”

Congressional Democrats lambasted the Personal Responsibility Act, warning that it would send more than 1 million children into poverty. Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts called it “legislative child abuse,” and President Clinton vetoed two versions passed by Congress. As the 1996 presidential election loomed, Clinton’s promise to “end welfare as we know it” was still unfulfilled, and he signaled that he would sign a Senate bill that was less draconian than the House version.

Beltway pressure was building to do something, and on August 12, The New Republic published its notorious cover story urging Clinton to sign the welfare bill. It featured a picture of a black woman cradling an infant while smoking a cigarette with the words “Day of Reckoning” splashed above. The editorial inside labeled welfare “America’s gravest problem” and tapped into the racial resentment that drove much of the debate. On August 22, just months before the November election, Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. The new legislation replaced AFDC with TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) and provided block grants to the states. Lifetime benefits were limited to a maximum of 5 years, although states could set lower limits. Families had to make “verifiable efforts to leave welfare for work” and to “avoid births outside marriage.” A poll taken at the time showed that 82 percent of the public approved of the Act.

CONCLUSION

The fiftieth anniversary of the War on Poverty in 2014 brought forth a spate of articles and reports, some celebrating its accomplishments and others condemning its failures. President Obama said the programs it created “lived up to our best hopes as a people who value the dignity and potential of every human being.” The Heritage Foundation called it “Fifty Years of Failure.” But there is little doubt that the conservative movement was successful in popularizing a narrative that is still resonant with many Americans and that continues to pose a major obstacle to the passage of progressive social welfare policies. As Rebecca Vallas, head of the Poverty to Prosperity Program of the Center for American Progress, explains:

I think that generally when you use the word poverty most people’s minds are still going to the image shaped by the Reagan-era welfare queen. I think it’s still infused with race; I think it’s still likely to be a person of color that someone imagines. I think it’s still likely to be someone who is experiencing homelessness. And so I think that the dominant narrative about poverty continues to be that somebody who is not working and is facing some level of visible destitution. I do think that because of the success of the Fight for $15 movement and the debate over minimum wage that we are moving in a direction where the binary between the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ is starting to break down and people are starting to appreciate that poverty is the result of an economy that isn’t working for everyone. But we have a lot more work to do to truly get to a place where someone’s brain immediately goes to poverty being a matter of policy choices rather than a matter of a person’s individual ‘bad choices.’

It is also the case that a powerful counternarrative is gradually taking hold in America that emphasizes the extreme economic inequality that defines the nation today. Beginning with the Occupy Wall Street movement following the 2008 economic crisis and evident in the strength and breadth of Bernie Sanders’s campaigns for president during which he popularized social democratic values, more Americans, especially younger Americans, are hewing to a structural explanation for poverty and a belief in a positive role of government. A Pew Research Center survey of members of Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2012) found that they are more likely than older generations to look to government, rather than businesses and individuals, to solve problems. Fully seven-in-10 Gen Zers say the government should do more to solve problems.[9] The COVID-19 pandemic and its economic aftermath are sure to sharpen this fundamental debate.

Request Interview Transcripts


1 In the introduction to The War on Poverty; A New Grassroots History, 1964–1980 (Eds. Annelise Orleck and Lisa Gayle Hazirjian) the editors capture the energy of the early War on Poverty: “In decaying, inner-city neighborhoods, Rust Belt towns, backwoods hollows, and Indian reservations, grassroots activists, elected officials, and social welfare professionals feverishly conceived and submitted proposals to the OEO for ‘community action’ projects. Channeling federal stipends and grants, poor men and women rehabilitated abandoned buildings and opened clinics, preschools, and community centers. Residents cleaned up neighborhood parks, planted community gardens, and renovated and reopened public swimming pools. They published community newspapers, chased drug dealers out of neighborhoods, and kept them away with resident-run anticrime patrols.”

2 The Kerner Commission, officially named the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, was appointed by President Johnson and chaired by Otto Kerner, governor of Illinois. It held public hearings throughout the country and released its comprehensive report in 1968.

3 For a historical description of how the term “ghetto” was first appropriated by African Americans to describe segregated housing and then became a pejorative racial term see Daniel B. Schwartz, “How America’s Ugly History of Segregation Changed the Meaning of the Word ‘Ghetto’” at https://time.com/5684505/ghetto-word-history/

4 Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy, University of Chicago Press, 2009.

5 These articles are cited in The Undeserving Poor by Michael B. Katz, who also describes the debate over the term “the underclass” between social scientists on the left and the right.

6 The report quickly generated tremendous controversy. At the time it was criticized by civil rights leaders and supporters for blaming the victim and painting an overly negative picture of black culture. Criticism by black public figures was not universal. Sociologists Kenneth Clark and William Julius Wilson, for example, praised the report.

7 In his 2019 book, The Queen, Josh Levin shows that the “queen,” Linda Taylor, was in fact a con artist and in no way representative of AFDC recipients of that era.

8 References to “welfare queen” and other negative terms began to spike dramatically in the early 1990s and again beginning in the mid-2000s. It remains a trope referenced in media coverage of poverty, with just under 12,000 articles published between 2015 and 2019 making reference to the term or the concept of welfare fraud and dependence.

9 https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/essay/on-the-cusp-of-adulthood-and-facing-an-uncertain-future-what-we-know-about-gen-z-so-far/

Power of Pop: What TV Gets Wrong About Getting By

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In The Opportunity Agenda’s Power of POP research series, we explore the impacts of pop culture vis-à-vis scripted television[1] and influencers[2] on social issues. The subject matter we address is related to our work in economic opportunity, immigration, racial justice, and democracy. By considering the leading social issues of the time within a framework of new, values-based narrative goals, we engage in study that we hope bolsters discourse.

We are currently living through a global reckoning on workers’ rights, corporate greed, and economic justice. Across the headlines, we see examples of workers, from John Deere to the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), who are organizing and striking against exploitative corporate practices that leave them unable to maintain a cost of living or receive adequate health care and workers’ compensation. This developing narrative around what employment should look like in a post-COVID, worker-centered world is also being captured in the scripted works airing on television to mass appeal. In fact, one of the breakout hits of 2021, Squid Game, centers on a character who is traumatized by his experience in a work strike turned violent by company owners and law enforcement—reminiscent of the real-world strike of SsangYong Motor in 2009.[3]

As a continuation of The Opportunity Agenda’s Power of POP series, the focus of this report draws from the cultural moment in its aim to gain a comprehensive understanding of the portrayals of income differences within streamed and broadcasted television shows. We engaged in thorough television content analysis by designing a codebook, examining broadcasted and streamed television programs, and analyzing the data gathered. The research outlined within this report examines the representation and dominant storylines associated with household income, quality of life, and the culture surrounding different income levels within popular television programs during the Fall 2017 to Spring 2018 television season.

With about one in seven Americans projected to have annual family resources below the poverty threshold and the projected poverty rate in 2021 being similar to the one from 2018 (13.7%), understanding the plight of low-income households is as important as ever. Although 4.4% of people live in deep poverty in the United States, 45% of households subsist on resources no more than twice the poverty threshold. This holds true for Black and Hispanic people whose rates of poverty—18.1% and 21.9%, respectively—are nearly twice as high as their white peers. Most of these families are projected to have fallen from above to below the poverty threshold due to job loss—a major occurrence with the onset of COVID-19 in the United States.[4] It is in this economic landscape that people look for representation in the media they consume of the issues people face every day.

The television analysis in this report is based on content analysis of 105 randomly sampled television episodes from popular television shows aired on broadcast, cable, and streaming services divided into 70 episodes reflecting the gamut of shows available during the Fall 2017 to Spring 2018 season, and an additional 35 episodes reflecting low-wage workers from this same period based on online episode descriptions. More than 1,200 codes were analyzed by variables including demographic details such as race/ethnicity, gender, and income, as well as observance of lack of social safety net, use of social services, or other indicators of financial hardship. The codebook dictionary and a sample of the completed codebook are available in the addendum of this report.

 

 

This report is intended to offer advocates, activists, entertainment executives and creatives, media commentators, and media literacy promoters a more holistic understanding of the dominant media narratives while adding a strong voice to a growing canon of study on the impacts of media representation on narratives about directly impacted populations. This report also offers guidance and tips for improving the portrayal of working class and lower income families in popular entertainment and best practices for using popular culture to advance a social justice cause and engage new audiences.

 

KEY FINDINGS

Dominant Storylines and Themes Associated with Income and/or Its Disparity

  • Entertainment, as exemplified by these episodes, further plays into the comparative nature of finding the affluent aspirational and the poor as unfortunate.

 

 

  • Each television show avoids discussion of the precarious nature of meeting daily expenses—such as the ability to pay for utilities, phones, food, and other essentials—for those working with a low income.

We posit that this absence contributes to the culture of poverty narrative wherein stigma associated with asking for assistance when faced with obstacles to survival leads those impacted to be ashamed for shortcomings associated with the “bootstrap” narrative rather than holding the systems that deny them access to adequate housing or food.

  • Health care is the leading issue used by shows within the study to garner discussions about how low-wage workers are impacted by their lack of safety net. Regardless of whether white or Black, Indigenous, People Of Color (BIPOC) characters drive the story, it’s their personal flaws—not societal ones—that land them in financially precarious circumstances.

 

Working Class and Lower Income Character Representation

  • Characters from the 2017–2018 season of television in the United States were significantly less likely to represent household incomes lower than $41,000 than any higher income.
  • Low-wage workers tend to be centered as lead characters in comedic television shows, but not as much in other genres.
  • There is an overrepresentation of white and upper-middle to high-income characters that leaves a void in representation for BIPOC families of low means.
  • This is pressing in a nation consistently moving toward greater economic disparity, which is felt most drastically by the most marginalized.

 

RECOMMENDATIONS

If you are creating messages about economic justice issues in your advocacy work…

Know that many of your audiences are viewing incomplete and unbalanced portrayals of people with low incomes. And there are almost no portrayals of people experiencing poverty. The narratives available to audiences reveal few solutions to economic instability or poverty. At the same time, audiences are seeing that most people’s basic needs are being met with a few scattered examples of true need. It is therefore important to start communications about economic justice with some context and big-picture thinking. Without doing so, we risk our solutions seeming unnecessary or even just strange.

Fill in the gaps by providing a larger vision of what the world could look like if we had real solutions in place. Show how that world would better align with your audience’s core values. They are not seeing much of this type of expansive thinking in current TV, so we can step in and provide this big picture thinking, embracing themes like abundance, community, shared responsibility, and opportunity for all.

Frame the problem systemically. It is important to link personal stories to widespread problems, point to the systemic cause, and then move to the systemic solution. Fictional portrayals of any issue are almost always going to focus on an individual character. Watching those portrayals, as well as typical media coverage, can lead audiences to a very individualistic mindset that assumes if the problem is with the individual, so is the solution. By expanding audience’s understanding of the problem and linking a character’s challenge to the many other people experiencing that challenge, we can move them to understand the systemic solutions better.

Center solutions. None of the shows we sampled portrayed systemic solutions, such as how safety net programs can alleviate economic instability, how unions protect workers, or how paid family and medical leave make it possible for families to provide for their children. Leveraging storylines can help to spotlight problems, but economic justice communicators will need to bring the solutions to the table. When solutions are left out, audiences are likely to fall into the trap of thinking that poverty, income disparities, and other barriers to economic justice are inevitable.

 

If you want to leverage popular television to highlight economic justice issues…

Use storylines and characters to make a point. While they are few and far between—so much so that many did not show up in our sample—some portrayals of economic injustice and solutions to it do exist. Later seasons of Superstore focused on issues such as paid family and medical leave, healthcare expenses, and labor organizing, for instance. Talking about these issues through the lens of popular TV offers an opportunity to showcase solutions in a more interesting and unexpected way than fact sheets or tweets about legislation can.

It’s also true that centering popular characters’ experiences can help build an emotional understanding and connection to your issue. Research has shown that we develop parasocial relationships with characters we regularly watch on television, identifying them (in our brains) as friends of sorts. So, talking to some audiences about the economic experiences of Amy from Superstore, for instance, could help them see those experiences in a new light and likely with more empathy. As with any individual storytelling, however, doing this needs to be balanced with other kinds of stories that broaden the focus so that audiences aren’t just focused on that individual’s plight, strengths, and weaknesses.

Highlight shows that showcase themes like community care, abundance, and even joy, in addition to those that provide portrayals of economic injustice. While more recent releases such as Netflix’s Maid and Squid Game provide some of the low-income character representation we would like to see more of, audience appreciation for Ted Lasso—a show equally about rich people and being a person who cares for others—shows that audiences are primed for more representation of community care. By building upon the abundance narrative over scarcity, creators can build worlds that show how communities support their own with love, care, and joy, bringing this positive energy into their advocacy for a better life for everyone. ABC’s upcoming television show Abbott Elementary appears to be a potential example of what the integration of community care, Black joy, and advocacy for better financial support can look like on television.

Monitor shows that offer opportunities to spark conversation about income inequality or instability. To keep up with opportunities to leverage relevant plotlines, formally select a few shows that appeal to your target audience and follow them. Watching whole episodes is not even necessary as there are many recaps available online on sites such as Vulture, EW online, and ShowSnob.

Choose your timing carefully. On the one hand, things move quickly online and issues come in and out of focus at a rapid pace. It is typically a good idea to respond within a 48-hour window for simple social media engagement and within a week for more detailed media pieces. On the other hand, social media engagement with television content spikes significantly at certain points within a show’s schedule. For series that consistently engage in narratives about poverty and economic instability, look for opportunities such as premieres and finales. Significant episodes and major award shows also draw significant audiences. Use these moments to live tweet, host a Twitter chat, or host an online watch party.

 

If you want to influence portrayals of income instability and poverty…

Give positive reinforcement for good portrayals. This could be as simple as encouraging fans to thank show writers and networks for an authentic character or storyline via social media. Or, you could create an award to the networks or individuals using their platforms to tell compelling stories about people with low incomes or that promote a social justice narrative. Positive reinforcement is a good place to start to both encourage good storytelling and lay the foundation for relationships with creators.

Create your own hashtags or memes to draw attention to representations. For example, #StarringJohnCho memes went viral as people photoshopped John Cho into famous movie posters that starred white male actors, creatively criticizing the lack of diversity in Hollywood. The #OscarsSoWhite hashtag was started by April Reign to raise the same issue and sparked a national debate that resulted in changes in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Engage progressive fandoms. Find the online communities of popular shows where fans are already gathering to talk about them. Create toolkits or messaging guides around a particular series to spark fan engagement.

Encourage networks to engage with and hire people who have experienced economic instability. We need more stories centered on low-income characters written by people who have lived through poverty for prolonged periods. This is particularly true for houseless representation and should be a component for any creative work related to this issue, whether it is a television program or advocacy campaign. Directly affected writers can bring their lived experiences to light in a way that helps us move from a voyeuristic, socially distanced interaction to one of better relatability and nuanced understanding. After all, if the producers and writers of Modern Family and Maid can bring their personal issues into scriptwriting, why can the same not become true for character portrayals unseen in other recent television shows?

Build relationships with script writers, producers, and show runners. Introduce script writers, producers, and show runners to stories that not only are personal and compelling but also are diverse and affirmative and more fully depict the experience of people living in economic instability. Note that to be effective, this strategy may require more significant long-term investments in both time and resources.

 

If you want to add positive portrayals to the mix…

Rewrite shows or plots to show how they could tell a fuller story of economic insecurity and what we can all do about it. You can use social media to spread your ideas about what popular TV could look like in this regard. To do this, put yourself in the shoes of a Hollywood writer who wanted to ethically depict characters experiencing poverty and imagine what they would come up with. You can also engage in a “what if?” exercise online, inviting your audience to help fill in how a show could depict the low-income experience more realistically and compassionately. Or suggest a whole new TV show that would accurately show the causes and solutions to poverty.

Partner with artists and creatives to tell new stories about economic instability and poverty. Artists should be included in strategic conversations early because their perspectives often lead to out-of-the-box innovations. Just like graphic designers, researchers, or anyone else with a specialized skillset you wouldn’t ask to work for free, keep in mind that artists should also be paid. Consider budgeting ahead of time to be able to include their talents.

Produce your own content. Creating your own content is now more accessible than ever. Creatives with limited resources are making use of content-sharing platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and SoundCloud and crowdsourcing sites like Kickstarter to launch independent projects and tell otherwise untold stories. Videos, web series, and podcasts are within reach, although we recommend partnering with a creative that is skilled at storytelling in your chosen format to maximize the impact.

 

If you want to help audiences become educated consumers of entertainment and other media…

Organize watch parties and discussion groups. Assemble around helpful, harmful, and nuanced portrayals.

Provide guides. Develop study guides and curricula that help support young people to become more educated consumers of entertainment and other media.

Make your organization a resource. Offer cultural critiques of select shows on a regular basis. Pitch yourself as a resource to media who cover pop culture and are interested in how portrayals interact with real-life experiences.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Opportunity Agenda wishes to thank and acknowledge the many people who contributed their time, energy, and expertise to the research and writing of this report. The report was researched and written by Porshea Patterson-Hurst, Charles Sherman, Wendy Li, and Wesley Huang, with guidance and editing from Adam Luna, Julie Fisher-Rowe, Elizabeth Johnsen, and Lucy Odigie-Turley of The Opportunity Agenda. The illustrations were created by Justin Nguyen of Yellow Panda and the design and layout were completed by Lorissa Shepstone, Being Wicked. Final proofing and copy editing were conducted by Margo Harris. Special thanks to Brian Erickson, Christiaan Perez, and J. Rachel Reyes for outreach and distribution coordination. Additional thanks to Caty Borum-Chattoo of American University and Josh Gwin of Marion Polk Food Share for field knowledge.

This report and the work of The Opportunity Agenda are made possible with funding from The Annie E. Casey Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The JPB Foundation, The Libra Foundation, The Marguerite Casey Foundation, The Nathan Cummings Foundation, NEO Philanthropy, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Tow Foundation, Unbound Philanthropy, and Wellspring Philanthropic Fund and would not be possible without the contributions of time, treasure, and talent from our many supporters.

 

ABOUT THE OPPORTUNITY AGENDA

The Opportunity Agenda was founded in 2006 with the mission of building the national will to expand opportunity in America. Focused on moving hearts, minds, and policy over time, the organization works with social justice groups, leaders, and movements to advance solutions that expand opportunity for everyone. Through active partnerships, The Opportunity Agenda synthesizes and translates research on barriers to opportunity and corresponding solutions, uses communications and media to understand and influence public opinion, and identifies and advocates for policies that improve people’s lives.

 


1 https://opportunityagenda.org/explore/resources-publications/power-pop

2 https://opportunityagenda.org/explore/insights/more-just-fad-power-cultural-influencer

3 https://jacobinmag.com/2021/11/squid-game-ssangyong-dragon-motor-strike-south-korea/

4 https://www.urban.org/research/publication/2021-poverty-projections

Methodology

​TELEVISION CONTENT ANALYSIS

The television analysis in this report is based on content analysis of 105 randomly sampled television episodes from popular television shows aired on broadcast, cable, and streaming services divided into 70 episodes reflect-ing the gamut of shows available during the Fall 2017 to Spring 2018 season and an additional 35 episodes reflecting low-wage workers from this same period.

For the purpose of this study, popular television shows were defined as shows that attracted a large general audience when originally aired on broadcast and cable networks in the United States and/or shows that were ranked high on Parrot Analytics’—the singular source compiling international demand for streaming plat-forms—The Global Television Demand Report: Full Year 2018.[5] In an effort to better capture these emergent consumer habits, our population of popular television shows was generated using a combination of traditional rating metrics from consumer habits research firm Nielsen[6]  and viewership measurements compiled in the Global Television Demand Report.

After compiling a sample reflective of the most in-demand shows, we utilized the Microsoft Excel function RANDBETWEEN to select the first 40 episodes. To remain consistent in the manner of sample selection within the Power of POP series, we made use of Research Randomizer, an online random sampling tool, to generate a random number sequence to the remaining episodes for in-depth content analysis.

SAMPLE

The 105 episodes included in our random sample include 44 comedies, 15 action shows, 16 dramas, 14 crime shows, six comedy-dramas, three science-fiction shows, two mysteries, two horror-dramas, one action drama, one reality television show, and one comedic crime drama. Forty-one shows aired on broadcast television (CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox, and CW), two were aired on cable television (AMC and Showtime), and 11 originally aired on streaming services (Amazon Prime, CBS All Access, Hulu, and Netflix).

Part of the overall sample includes 35 episodes selected based on the marketing of certain shows portraying the experiences of low-wage to working-class characters. A brief list of these shows was compiled, and the randomizer tool mentioned above selected episodes from the following programs: Bob’s Burgers, Mom, On My Block, Orange Is the New Black, Roseanne, Shameless, Sneaky Pete, Speechless, Superior Donuts, Superstore, and The Middle.

CODING & TERMINOLOGY

To ensure inter-coder reliability,[7] the coding team created and then trained using a project codebook (see Appendix I), which established guidelines for the specific episodic and character variables to be analyzed. The codebook includes 12 episode variables, including genre, tone, and depiction of low-income lifestyle, and 27 character variables used to identify the likely income of a character. To ensure more accurate character counts per episode, we made use of both coder notes and IMDb databases. In the coding of episodes, a low-income character was defined as any person working in a position whose pay fell within Pew Research Center’s definition for low-wage work (below or at $40,100 per year).[8] Middle-income characters were defined as those who made between $41,000 and $120,400 per year, and high-income characters earned more than $120,400 per year. Using Glassdoor, coders used character job roles and location to define their yearly income expectancy.

In addition to the wage observation, the following qualitative criteria were used to identify characters working for low wages:

An explicit reference was made to a character’s low-income or working-class status in the context of the show or storyline.

Particular social markers were used by show creators to implicitly signify low-income characters. Signifiers identified include poor or insufficient housing, food insecurity or scar-city, lack of social safety net when confronting money insecurity, and dependence on social programs.

LIMITATIONS

The goal of this research is to provide insights into patterns of representation in popular television shows and the potential use of these representations to mobilize audiences. As such, this research makes use of both qualitative and quantitative content analysis methods. However, because of the relatively small sample size compared to the overall population, it is important to note limitations in the generalizability of our research findings. In future studies, we aim to analyze a larger sample size, including a survey of the impact of these representations on the directly impacted.

Because streaming platforms are constantly changing contracts and provision of different TV series, we are only able to document the streaming services utilized in our development of the study. For instance, while Superior Donuts may be available on the Paramount Network in 2021, we notated usage of Amazon Prime to gain access to the episode during the timeline of our study within the codebook.

Episodes included in this study were the result of random selection, which means background information about show premise or characters was not strictly observed. Therefore, some of the information collected may miss de-tails that only long-time consumers of a program would know. Where possible, the coders relied on search engines for each program to clarify details like job titles during the season, utilizing fan encyclopedia websites when necessary. All levels of education not stipulated on the screen were instead determined by minimum job requirements

Character Representation

FREQUENCY OF LOW-INCOME CHARACTER REPRESENTATION

With the median U.S. household income in 2017 being $62,626 and more than 50% of the U.S. population falling below or at this income, we hypothesized that a significant amount of television episodes would reflect this level of income distribution. However, in our analysis of more than 100 randomly selected TV episodes from the 2017–2018 season, we found that the lower brackets of income were underrepresented in favor of overrepresentation of middle to upper-middle income households.[9]

While there was an abundance of representation for middle-income individuals within our sample (indeed, most characters in this study represent this social stratum at 54%), we found that most of the characters from our sample fell on the higher side of the middle-class range, which includes those making incomes from $41K to $120K.[10]

Within the select sample of 35 episodes specifically centered on low- and lower-middle wage workers, characters held a range of low-paying job roles, including handyman, health inspector, mechanic, speech aide, bail bondsperson, server, and big box store associate. A not insignificant amount of the job roles captured had a pattern of being elevated in pay based on the minimum level of education required to fill the job role. However, investigator and detective pay, in particular, seemed to have no cumulative tie to higher education requirements and was the most consistent job role within the dataset to be ascribed a level of pay within the $100K+ pay range.

No significant disparity among income level was found within demographics. Actors with perceived male – Assigned Male at Birth (AMAB) – or female gender assignment at birth (AFAB)[12] had near equal representation within each income level. AFAB characters made up approximately 42% of the characters studied, whereas AMAB represent 54%.[13] With a ratio of 3:4 where for every three AFAB characters there are four AMAB characters, representation is relatively constant across the board. That is not to say that the ±6% of characters are not indicative for change in this area. Within an entire sample of more than 1,200 codes, there are only two examples of gender nonbinary characters and there is still much to be done on better inclusion of AFAB characters as a whole.

Relative to income representation, 10% of AFAB characters qualified as low income to AMAB’s 11%. Middle income has a greater difference in gender disparity, with AFAB characters yielding on 21% to AMAB characters 31%. Parity for high-income characters shows AFAB characters make up 10% of these characters, while AMAB characters represent 13% of those observed.

Similar relationships can be found in racial representation within the study, with the caveat that there was absolutely no representation of Indigenous American or Native characters within the episodes watched.[14] White characters make up the majority of character representation, consisting of 65% of characters in the study. Meanwhile, Asian (5%), Black (16%), Hispanic (6%), and Other (6%) occupy significantly less space within the shows sampled. For additional details about this dynamic and the level of representation within key vs. recurring roles, please see Breaking Down Portrayed Income.


9 Explore this in greater detail within, “Breaking Down Portrayed Income,” of this report.

10 Explore this in greater detail within, “Breaking Down Portrayed Income,” of this report.

11 Explore this in greater detail within, “Breaking Down Portrayed Income,” of this report.

12 These terms used to best encapsulate gender nonbinary individuals and those with undisclosed gender designation and reflect the ways genders exist beyond binary observation.

13 The 4% not accounted for here represent missing data within the dataset.

14 At least none of the characters identified themselves as such.

Dominant Storylines & Themes

This section provides an overview of the dominant genres, storylines, and themes associated with low-income characters and the lifestyles of characters making  low wages more broadly. As the graph below attests, character representation among those making this level of income is not widely covered in most genres. One genre does reign supreme, however, dominating representation of low-wage workers and their strife. That genre? Comedy.

As a quote attributed to Mindy Greenstein goes: “Comedy is not the opposite of darkness, but its natural bedfellow. Pain makes laughter necessary; laughter makes pain tolerable.”

This concept seems to generate a great deal of steam within the television industry, as each of the shows focused on characters receiving low income within this study fall under the comedy genre—51 out of the 105 episodes in this sample are some form of comedy. Even the grittier, cross-genre (i.e., critically listed as comedy-dramas) shows like On My Block, Orange Is the New Black, and Shameless make sure to include the absurd and darkly comedic sides of their stories in each episode. For instance, in the Shameless episode “A Gallagher Pedicure,” Debbie Gallagher suffers a foot injury while training as a welder. Because she is a student without healthcare coverage and used to less ethical work-arounds to major issues in her life, she asks her middle school–aged brother to ply off the dead toes as she has no means to afford the surgery the doctor told her she needed.

In fact, most of the examples we found of characters confronting an issue without  enough money to cover a direct need centered around medical care. On the “Health Fund” episode of Superstore, the health concerns of various staff members are confronted when Mateo discusses his inability to see a doctor for his ear infection due to a lack of health coverage and his undocumented status. He, too, resorts to using nonmedical means of recovery, despite the mutual aid fund concept that floats around during the episode. The episode ends by touching upon the real-world similarity to Walmart’s infamous canned food drive for its own employees[15] by having Mateo’s co-workers chip in one hundred dollars for a cure. Yet even this show of goodwill is twisted when he announces that he will instead use it to purchase a bag, possibly highlighting the fickleness of capitalistic interest versus self-care, as one hundred dollars is likely to cover more expense for a low-end designer bag than it ever would in the costs of healthcare coverage.

THEME: BROKE CULTURE

Comparative experiences between keeping up appearances and satisfying an actual need is yet another storyline that occurs in many of the episodes that cover low- or low-middle income characters. Episodes “Please Don’t Feed the Hecks” and “Thanksgiving IX” of The Middle show the upwardly mobile Hecks family working through their moments of “brokeness” despite generating enough household income to have sent two of their children to college. In “Please Don’t Feed the Hecks,” Sue, a sophomore in college, and her best friend/roommate Lexie are forced to live in Lexie’s car for a few nights due to the people they’d sublet their apartment to during the summer renting their place out as an Airbnb. They are stymied from booting the Airbnb renter out themselves because Sue is conflicted about getting into the good graces of the professor who is renting their place. By the end of the episode, they are back in their apartment and their brief experience with houselessness is little more than an anecdote.

The Hecks family continues to show that their proximity to being broke is relative in the “Thanksgiving IX” of The Middle. At the beginning of this episode the father, Mike, disputes a charge that he later finds out was his wife treating herself to a coffee. When the company shuts down usage of the card because of the claim, the family trip to a relative’s house for the holiday is put into turmoil. They run out of gas on the drive to the relative’s house and have no cash or other means to pay for or borrow the money they need to return to the road without the credit card they usually rely on. It is by their daughter Sue’s ethically unclear ingenuity to take money from the water fountain of a nearby mall that they are able to get on the road again.

Outside of these circumstances, we ran into no storylines centered around characters struggling for an immediate need. As with the cases exemplified by The Middle, being broke is often related to the level of means available to any character at any given period of time rather than a fear of having actual utilities or other needs cut off. In fact, we found few episodes even mentioned a concern for food or shelter. When adjusting for the household income, we find that each parent—Frankie and Mike—bring in around $65,000 annually, which is later upgraded when Mike receives a promotion toward the end of the series, now making $74,975—an estimate we deduced from Glassdoor averages for this job title in the character’s home location. This is in addition to knowledge that they could afford sending their first child to college and business school and sell ownership in a family business to pay for their second child’s college tuition. Their first child, Axl, is able to depend on the safety net of his family such that while he lives with his parents, he goes from making $41,600 as a bus driver in episode 2 of their final season to $49,463 as an entry-level plumbing supply salesperson in episode 21. Not only does he have the safety net of living with his parents—albeit in cramped circumstances—but he also is able to pursue work in his field of choice within his first 6 months out of school without fear of being houseless or unable to pay for necessities.

The fact that the Hecks family still sees themselves as broke despite showing all indication of maintaining a lifestyle commiserate with their cost of living bears questioning of the concept of “brokeness” and who truly meets it.

THEME: WORTH

As discourse around wages and how people find themselves on the various rungs of the class ladder persist in society, many of the stories in our study that followed characters living within the low to low-middle rungs tend to explain why their pay does or does not reflect their actual “worth” as humans.

For the Gallagher family of Shameless, they are making the best of a hopeless situation as children of a conman and an addict living in a home falling apart in South Side, Chicago. The siblings often endure dehumanizing situations that limit their self-worth, such as an instance in “Gallagher Pedicure” where Debbie Gallagher waits in a dingy basement line with her toddler in tow to pick up a mismatched box of food at a local food pantry. They also resort to crafty means because they have learned not to trust in good from the world yet strive to remain good at heart so that they are at least morally superior to their unscrupulous father. Similar to their real-world counterparts, the Gallaghers hold distaste for the wealthy while also striving to become financially successful themselves—a great irony of morality under a capitalist system.

In Mom, the mother and daughter relationship between the series’ main protagonists, Bonnie and Christy, presents as a narrative around rehabilitation both in health and life with Christy learning to forgive and understand her mother’s transgressions as an addict during her childhood. The mishaps and adventures that the two go on serve to “heal” the rift between them and show that anyone is worthy of a comeback, even if that comeback isn’t under the most ideal of circumstances.

The issue with these sorts of tales is that they frame these primarily white families as falling upon hard times or having drawn a bad lot in life to now depend on low-income options. Comparatively in Superstore, their cast members, with a fairly representative spread of BIPOC characters, don’t get a lot of exposition for how they ended up in low-wage jobs. Even this show provides reasoning for why one of its white characters, Jonah, works at Superstore, buying into this thematic framing that is rooted in the comfort of intrinsically linking race and class.

THEME: OTHERING AND VOYEURISM

While it is the nature of capitalist society to treat engagement or watching of the affluent as stoking ambition within people with lower levels of income, the opposite, the rich having a level of fascination in consuming the experience of people from lower classes, is downright voyeuristic. In season 8 of Shameless, we see Carl Gallagher get entangled in a relationship with a young addict, who we later learn is from a well-to-do family and pulled herself into the Gallagher’s orbit because she is enticed by their lower-class struggle to survive. This character’s journey is reflective of the phenomenon of “slumming drama,” wherein the rich become interested in, and even sexually attracted to, the poor. It is also a blatant usage of the culture of poverty narrative, which insists on presenting issues faced by low-income characters as personal rather than structural developments.

The rich sense that the poor have something they lack—bodily strength, excitement, unrestrained sex, or a simple authentic life—and want to possess it. Presented in a sensationalist mode, slumming dramas elicit a titillating reading or viewing experience.[16]

Not only does the exploitative nature of these relationships harm lower income people, but it also furthers their victimization. Yet, it is a practice that has remained somewhat acceptable in popular society as it plays into the “culture of poverty” narrative that has influenced social scientific research for decades and has informed both politicians’ (predominantly Republicans’) and the public’s understanding of poverty. This concept posits that living in persistent poverty results in the formation of a specific culture that, passed on over generations, produces attitudes and values that yield to dysfunctional behavior.[17]

Ironically, with the people behind the camera of these television programs coming from circumstances completely unlike their low-income characters, they also ask the audience to view these characters in a voyeuristic, judgmental lens—without their consent.

THEME: PERSONAL FAILURE PREVAILS, NOT STRUCTURAL EXPLOITATION

Indeed, prevailing narratives of individualism determining one’s lot in life (i.e., every person having the ability to pull themselves out of abject circumstances into a more favorable lifestyle) lead to findings in the Power of POP study looking much like those of Conrad et al., wherein individual causes of homelessness are attributed to individual or group decisions, actions, or behaviors, including criminal behavior, mental illness, substance use, distability, or failure to meet bills.[18] There were very few instances where characters living within these circumstances ever aligned their issue with a systemic shortcoming or oversight, sparing the sarcastic and inauthentic Frank Gallagher of Shameless or the “Health Fund” episode of Superstore, which relies on the audience to pick up on the dysfunction of the health insurance industry.

This bias stems from the “culture of poverty” frame, which blames the individual for failing to obtain a better life, consequently shifting the blame of addressing the problem of poverty on the individual. This approach furthers a centuries-old binary of “the deserving” and “the undeserving” poor, which is equally rooted within white American racist attitudes that insist Black people are naturally inferior. With a focus on the failings of the individual, this narrative emphasizes personal inadequacies including addiction, laziness, or “making the wrong choices” or “bad decisions.” By instigating a separatist culture, those with influence and power are exonerated from responsibility for discriminatory laws and institutions.[19]

This furthers an argument for the use of charity to maintain the status quo of systemic behavior among the classes. In fact, the television episodes in the Conrad-Perez et al. study found 44% of the resolutions presented to counter homelessness centered on charity—going so far as to present charity as the solution to institutional issues for characters like a disabled veteran and a runaway foster child. The fact that the charitable solutions found for both of these cases were only stopgap measures makes clear that charities are often not organized to change the structural conditions upon which homelessness rest. Nevertheless, this frame went unchallenged, instead opting to pull on the heartstrings of viewers who want to see the main characters as heroes, not perpetrators of bad systemic practices. Centering storytelling directly on houseless characters could instead use their brushes with charity to highlight the many stopgap measures that persist within these systems without providing long-term solutions to eradicating poverty.


15 https://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/11/18/walmart-store-holding-thanksgiving-charity-food-drive-for-its-own-employees/?sh=29172af32ee5

16 Gandal, K. (2007). Gandal’s Class Representation in Modern Fiction and Film.

17 Lewis, O. (1959). Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty.

18 Conrad-Pérez, D., Chattoo, C. B., Coskuntuncel, A., & Young, L. (2021). Voiceless Victims and Charity Saviors: How US Entertainment TV Portrays Homelessness and Housing Insecurity in a Time of Crisis. International Journal of Communication, 15, 22.

19 Lemke, S. (2016) The Nation: American Exceptionalism in Our Time. In: Inequality, Poverty and Precarity in Contemporary American Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.

Breaking Down Portrayed Income

In the 2017–2018 season of television, character representation across race and ethnicity skews overwhelmingly white. This disproportionate sample means that each level of income holds double-digit percentage rates of white representation, whereas their BIPOC peers remain 8% or less in any income representation. The greatest distribution of income representation by race/ethnicity occurs at the middle-income tier—with white characters making up 37%, Black characters 8%, Hispanic 3%, and Asian and Other at 2% each. This is unsurprising, given the wide range of income this designation covers.

The overwhelming whiteness of the 2017–2018 TV season means that all calculations of race and income for this study are more likely to represent white characters and households. White characters out-ratio Black characters such that we see 4 white characters for every 1 Black character, 11 white characters to every Hispanic character, 13 white characters to every 1 Asian character, and 14 white characters to every character included in the “Other” category—which typically identifies persons of mixed ethnicity or race. There is, in fact, no representation at all in the entire sample of Native/Indigenous characters, an extremely excessive oversight on behalf of casting in Hollywood.

Approximately 75% of all characters included in this sample were part of the main cast of their respective shows, while 23% of the sample filled either recurring or guest spots. Much of the same race/ethnicity breakdowns remain the same in this breakdown, with 52% of key characters being white to 15% recurring, 12% key Black characters to 4% recurring, 5% key Hispanic characters to 1% recurring, 4% key Asian characters to 1% recurring, and equal amounts of characters representing key and recurring roles for those categorized as Other at 4% each. Here the overrepresentation of white characters stands without overrepresentation of any other race in either key or recurring roles. As far as income, key characters represent 18% of low-income characters to recurring characters’ 3%, 39% of middle-income characters to 13%, and 17% of low-income characters to 6% of high-income characters. To better encapsulate the circumstances these characters represented, we conducted an analysis of characters representing recurrent or low wage–bearing professions by their local or regional wage representation via Glassdoor. This includes common roles that place characters within the upper-middle income range of pay—such as investigators and detectives—as well as families of three or more living on lower middle to low incomes.

The spread of income presented in the table must be further scrutinized by the number of people in each household who also generate income as well as cost of living per locality. What we overwhelmingly found is that those with higher salaries tended to live in households with partners who generate similar income or on their own, leaving them free to afford cost of living in the cities they inhabit. For example, Rainbow Johnson from Black-ish not only generates high income as a physician, but she also is also married to a senior advertisement executive who helps their family of five children, two retired grandparents, and two working adults to pay for college, private school, and a lifestyle befitting the suburbs of Los Angeles. This representation is in direct juxtaposition to the DiMeo family in Speechless, who get by on the single income of the father, Jimmy DiMeo, and any disability aid that supports one of the three kids, JJ, who has cerebral palsy.

This is significant not only for offering a snapshot of the general spread of income representation and why outliers like the Johnson family influence the sample’s observed income by race, but also because studies indicate that many lower-middle to low-income families are simply one economic emergency away from being impoverished—with 45% of families having resources no more than twice the poverty threshold.[20]

 

Indeed, observations from hunger experts like Josh Gwin of Marion Polk Food Share shows that people who are only one missed utility bill away from hunger or eviction often depend on social services like food drives,[21] which bears questioning of the ways income have been calculated by scholar and the general public alike given inflation, stagnant wages, and increases to the cost of living throughout the United States. If someone who is considered middle income by current estimates is only one debt away from facing denial of food or shelter, is the income bracket underestimating poverty?

In terms of this report’s sample, while we found the levels of income tied to racial representation as a whole, we would like to note that the only key BIPOC character of The Big Bang Theory, Raj Koothrappali, works in a field that pays significantly less than his fellow scientists, at $60,056 to his peers’ income upwards of $90,000. While he is shown to be supported by his parents, who bring in significant wealth, this was an observance of significant difference by race within one show included in the sample.

While the above observations sum up the report sample, they do not represent the reality or scope of racial disparity in economic opportunities. In a 2021 Urban Institute report, two-thirds of white children were estimated to be born into advantageous circumstances, while only one in five Black children and one in three Hispanic children are born into advantageous circumstances. This study further projected that 50% of all children born into disadvantaged circumstances versus more than 66% of those born into advantaged circumstances are on track toward healthy development and economic security at age 30. This disparity in reaching economic stability by 30 is further stratified by race, where 58% of white children from disadvantaged circumstances are on track but only 37% of Black, non-Hispanic and 50% of Hispanic children from similar circumstances meet this projection.[22] With structural economic and social stakeholders like residential segregation, unequal access to educational opportunities, and unequal treatment by law enforcement contributing to this ongoing disparity, the 2017–2018 season severely misrepresents reality.

Not even in our select sample of shows depicting low-income characters did we find representation of a low-income BIPOC family to help us exemplify the above finding. Thus, there is a void in scripted television for this arena of representation.


20 https://www.urban.org/research/publication/2021-poverty-projections

21 Asian, 2018: https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?tid=ACSSPP1Y2018.S0201&hidePreview=true&t=012%20-%20Asian%20alone%20%28400-499%29%3A031%20-%20Asian%20 alone%20or%20in%20combination%20with%20one%20or%20more%20other%20races%20%20%28400-499%29%20%26%20%28100-299%29%20or%20%28300,%20A01-Z99%29%20 or%20%28400-999%29
Black, 2018: https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?tid=ACSSPP1Y2018.S0201&hidePreview=true&t=004%20-%20Black%20or%20African%20American%20alone%3A005%20-%20 Black%20or%20African%20American%20alone%20or%20in%20combination%20with%20one%20or%20more%20other%20races
Hispanic, 2010: https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=&t=400%20-%20Hispanic%20or%20Latino%20%28of%20any%20race%29%3AEarnings%20%28Individuals%29%3AIncome%20 %28Households,%20Families,%20Individuals%29%3AIncome%20and%20Earnings%3AIncome%20and%20Poverty%3ASNAP%2FFood%20Stamps&tid=ACSDP5YSPT2010.DP03
Other, 2018: https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?tid=ACSSPP1Y2018.S0201&hidePreview=true&t=070%20-%20Some%20other%20race%20alone%3A071%20-%20Some%20other%20 race%20alone%20or%20in%20combination%20with%20one%20or%20more%20other%20races
White, 2018:  https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?tid=ACSSPP1Y2018.S0201&hidePreview=true&t=002%20-%20White%20alone%3A003%20-%20White%20alone%20or%20in%20combi-nation%20with%20one%20or%20more%20other%20races

22 https://www.urban.org/research/publication/identifying-pathways-upward-mobility

Comparative Analysis

The primary aim of this study is to further the in-depth research conducted on this subject and its relation to overall character portrayal and audience impact. It is well documented and researched that media has the capability to wield profound power in altering public perceptions and opinion.[23] These perceptions and opinions, in turn, can lead to policies and actions that can have potentially significant social implications. With the advent of the digital age and the Internet, the role of mass media has become especially important and influential. In light of this fact, identifying and evaluating the media’s portrayal of social issues may be more valuable than ever before. The following analysis incorporates results from similar literature as it relates to this report’s findings.

Even when there is an oversample of television episodes displaying characteristics of lower income lifestyles, television programs do not include these storylines in a meaningful manner:

In a similar study, Conrad-Perez et al. found that only 22% of their sample episodes referred to homelessness or housing insecurity in some way and that, of this already small percentage of representation, a character experiencing homelessness did not contribute a single line of dialogue in one of every three episodes in which they appeared. This furthers the Power of POP report’s inability to identify significant character dependence on social services or any other major indicators of financial instability. With nearly 70% of low-income adults reporting “a great deal” of concern about hunger and homelessness,[24] this is an egregious void in storytelling.

More unsettling, this study uncovered a prevailing depiction of houseless characters as outsiders to the social world of the shows that include them—only gaining contact with members of the main cast through unexpected encounters. Therein, people experiencing houselessness in popular television programs are more frequently “seen” or “spoken for” rather than “heard from.” These incomplete portrayals only further marginalize the houseless in reality.

Societal hierarchy has bearing on the amount of representation devoted to each income range:

Depictions of characters represented within this study illuminated the class divide in who receives quality screen time. We can expect circumstances of low-wage existence, like falling behind on bills or not having adequate housing or food, to be completely absent from a protagonist’s experience. The majority of the episodes in this study reveal a dependence on depicting lifestyles of upper-middle to higher income workers such as police commissioners, pharmaceutical scientists, police investigators, surgeons, and aerospace engineers. This is a capitalist approach of depicting those who do well under a free market economy as aspirational and, therefore, worthy of the most screen time. Lower income consumers further the dominance of this reasoning when they fall into the allure of what could be set in front of them. As noted in their 2016 study,

Likewise, if the poor connect with the non-poor—outside of the workspace or social networks—they do so mainly through representations—circulating on television, online, on billboards, etc. Of course, their interest in the reality of the affluent, like the Kardashian family, is significantly higher than the prosperous class’ interest in the social reality (sic) shows about the dispossessed—such as Here Comes Honey Boo, The Wire, or Shameless. The inequality in media access aside, representations play a pivotal role in our construction and understanding of class matters.[25]

What, then, could be gained by depicting class distinctions in ways that help the audience to better articulate the growing wealth divide? How could a structural lens help viewers deconstruct narratives about their own struggles with financial barriers?

Current depictions of class perpetuate the status quo rather than propose an alternative because those behind the depictions benefit from this system:

Class is about the unequal distribution of wealth and income—stratification—just as it is about the acquisition of prestige and cultural capital. It is ordered hierarchically. The norm in capitalist societies is defined by wealth and prestige, which positions those who lack either one or both at the “bottom” and subjects them to discrimination, stigmatization, and all forms of violence—real, symbolic, and otherwise. The “Other” of class is not only economically and politically excluded, but also socially excluded and silenced just as surely as its Black, female, disabled, or queer counterparts with which it often overlaps.[26]

Bearing this framework in mind, it is of small wonder that poor characters are underrepresented on screen because their middle-class showmakers and writers are often unqualified to portray poverty. The experience and worldview of the poor are never fully intelligible to outsiders; Jones insists: “pauperism … resists representation.” In other words, the economic subaltern cannot speak. Those who speak on behalf of lower income individuals without having shared the lifestyle run the risk of misrepresenting or othering low-income subjects.[27]

It is for these reasons and those featured throughout this study that we recommend adding writers who have had prolonged experience with poverty into the writers’ room, giving them the opportunity to spearhead stories of their own. This would enrich the television-scape with nuanced portrayals of low-income characters in established shows while also offering us stories centered on these characters from their iteration. By adding these multifaceted portrayals to media, the audience will gain additional opportunities to interrogate their misconceptions about how financial strife affects the most marginalized, in addition to an understanding of structural inequality.

The connection that audiences maintain through frequent viewership creates space for narrative shift:

Parasocial relationships are affective bonds audiences foster with media characters and celebrities that last beyond episodic exposure. These relationships mirror real-life social relationships, but are unique in that they lack reciprocity. Much like real-life social relationships, individuals are more likely to report parasocial relationships with characters they perceive to be similar to themselves.[28] Even as early as kindergarten, people become attuned to parasocial relationships between themselves and their favorite characters—namely, those for whom they develop feelings of comfort, safety, trust, and relation in shared real-world circumstances.[29]

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, face-to-face socialization became heavily restricted, leading to an uptick in the intensity of parasocial closeness for those who experienced a decrease in their face-to-face social engagement. Within one study conducted during this period, even participants with strong ties to their close friends experienced significant growth in their parasocial relationships, suggesting that favorite media personae complemented rather than compensated social relationships.[30]

Hence, the importance of parasocial relationships that audience members sustain with their favorite television characters not only has a bearing in their social lives but also in the impact of changing audience perspectives. For instance, one study conducted in 2020 found that participants who developed an affinity for gay characters in Six Feet Under significantly improved their attitudes toward white gay men after viewing the series over 5 weeks.[31]

In a joint report on frequent television viewers of the 2018–2019 season by Define American and the Norman Lear Center, regular viewers of Superstore who felt a level of friendship with the character of Mateo were more likely to support an increase in immigrants coming to the United States. This association was particularly pronounced among those who had little to no real-life contact with immigrants. Displaying an attachment to regular immigrant characters can compensate for the absence of real-life contact with immigrants. This could reduce support for restrictive immigration policies across the board.[32]

White resentment toward the progress of BIPOC communities is rooted in racism directly tied to perceived racial status in a changing population:

Studies have shown that white resentment toward BIPOC communities gained significant growth after the election of Barack Obama as president and the perceived change in racial hierarchy. In fact, one study found that white people withdraw support for welfare programs—which disproportionately aid white people—when they perceive these programs to primarily benefit people from marginalized backgrounds.[33] Hence, showrunners hoping to influence this particular audience would have had a vested interest in low income characters being portrayed on television, as we found in our sample of the 2017–2018 TV season, remaining majority white for ongoing seasons of television. This may indeed answer why we did not find significant representation of BIPOC families of limited financial means in our study.


23 Happer, C., & Philo, G. (2013). The role of the media in the construction of public belief and social change. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 1(1), 321-336. 

24 Conrad-Pérez, D., Chattoo, C. B., Coskuntuncel, A., & Young, L. (2021). Voiceless Victims and Charity Saviors: How US Entertainment TV Portrays Homelessness and Housing Insecurity in a Time of Crisis. International Journal of Communication, 15, 22.

25 Lemke, S. (2016) The Nation: American Exceptionalism in Our Time. In: Inequality, Poverty and Precarity in Contemporary American Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.

26 Lemke, S. (2016) The Nation: American Exceptionalism in Our Time. In: Inequality, Poverty and Precarity in Contemporary American Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.

27 Jones, G. (2009). Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840–1945.

28 Bond, B. J. (2021). The development and influence of parasocial relationships with television characters: A longitudinal experimental test of prejudice reduction through parasocial         contact. Communication Research, 48(4), 573-593.

29 Brunick, K. L., Putnam, M. M., McGarry, L. E., Richards, M. N., & Calvert, S. L. (2016). Children’s future parasocial relationships with media characters: The age of intelligent characters. Journal of Children and Media, 10(2), 181-190.

30 Bond, B. J. (2021). Social and parasocial relationships during COVID-19 social distancing. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 02654075211019129.

31 Bond, B. J. (2021). The development and influence of parasocial relationships with television characters: A longitudinal experimental test of prejudice reduction through parasocial contact. Communication Research, 48(4), 573-593.

32 https://www.defineamerican.com/hollywood/change-the-narrative-change-the-world-launch

33 Wetts, R., & Willer, R. (2018). Privilege on the precipice: Perceived racial status threats lead White Americans to oppose welfare programs. Social Forces, 97(2), 793-822.

Recommendations

If you are creating messages about economic justice issues in your advocacy work…

Know that many of your audiences are viewing incomplete and unbalanced portrayals of people with low incomes. And there are almost no portrayals of people experiencing poverty. The narratives available to audiences reveal few solutions to economic instability or poverty. At the same time, audiences are seeing that most people’s basic needs are being met with a few scattered examples of true need. It is therefore important to start communications about economic justice with some context and big-picture thinking. Without doing so, we risk our solutions seeming unnecessary or even just strange.

Fill in the gaps by providing a larger vision of what the world could look like if we had real solutions in place. Show how that world would better align with your audience’s core values. They are not seeing much of this type of expansive thinking in current TV, so we can step in and provide this big picture thinking, embracing themes like abundance, community, shared responsibility, and opportunity for all.

Frame the problem systemically. It is important to link personal stories to widespread problems, point to the systemic cause, and then move to the systemic solution. Fictional portrayals of any issue are almost always going to focus on an individual character. Watching those portrayals, as well as typical media coverage, can lead audiences to a very individualistic mindset that assumes if the problem is with the individual, so is the solution. By expanding audience’s understanding of the problem and linking a character’s challenge to the many other people experiencing that challenge, we can move them to understand the systemic solutions better.

Center solutions. None of the shows we sampled portrayed systemic solutions, such as how safety net programs can alleviate economic instability, how unions protect workers, or how paid family and medical leave make it possible for families to provide for their children. Leveraging storylines can help to spotlight problems, but economic justice communicators will need to bring the solutions to the table. When solutions are left out, audiences are likely to fall into the trap of thinking that poverty, income disparities, and other barriers to economic justice are inevitable.

If you want to leverage popular television to highlight economic justice issues…

Use storylines and characters to make a point. While they are few and far between—so much so that many did not show up in our sample—some portrayals of economic injustice and solutions to it do exist. Later seasons of Superstore focused on issues such as paid family and medical leave, healthcare expenses, and labor organizing, for instance. Talking about these issues through the lens of popular TV offers an opportunity to showcase solutions in a more interesting and unexpected way than fact sheets or tweets about legislation can.

It’s also true that centering popular characters’ experiences can help build an emotional understanding and connection to your issue. Research has shown that we develop parasocial relationships with characters we regularly watch on television, identifying them (in our brains) as friends of sorts. So, talking to some audiences about the economic experiences of Amy from Superstore, for instance, could help them see those experiences in a new light and likely with more empathy. As with any individual storytelling, however, doing this needs to be balanced with other kinds of stories that broaden the focus so that audiences aren’t just focused on that individual’s plight, strengths, and weaknesses.

Highlight shows that showcase themes like community care, abundance, and even joy, in addition to those that provide portrayals of economic injustice. While more recent releases such as Netflix’s Maid and Squid Game provide some of the low-income character representation we would like to see more of, audience appreciation for Ted Lasso—a show equally about rich people and being a person who cares for others—shows that audiences are primed for more representation of community care. By building upon the abundance narrative over scarcity, creators can build worlds that show how communities support their own with love, care, and joy, bringing this positive energy into their advocacy for a better life for everyone. ABC’s upcoming television show Abbott Elementary appears to be a potential example of what the integration of community care, Black joy, and advocacy for better financial support can look like on television.

Monitor shows that offer opportunities to spark conversation about income inequality or instability. To keep up with opportunities to leverage relevant plotlines, formally select a few shows that appeal to your target audience and follow them. Watching whole episodes is not even necessary as there are many recaps available online on sites such as Vulture, EW online, and ShowSnob.

Choose your timing carefully. On the one hand, things move quickly online and issues come in and out of focus at a rapid pace. It is typically a good idea to respond within a 48-hour window for simple social media engagement and within a week for more detailed media pieces. On the other hand, social media engagement with television content spikes significantly at certain points within a show’s schedule. For series that consistently engage in narratives about poverty and economic instability, look for opportunities such as premieres and finales. Significant episodes and major award shows also draw significant audiences. Use these moments to live tweet, host a Twitter chat, or host an online watch party.

If you want to influence portrayals of income instability and poverty…

Give positive reinforcement for good portrayals. This could be as simple as encouraging fans to thank show writers and networks for an authentic character or storyline via social media. Or, you could create an award to the networks or individuals using their platforms to tell compelling stories about people with low incomes or that promote a social justice narrative. Positive reinforcement is a good place to start to both encourage good storytelling and lay the foundation for relationships with creators.

Create your own hashtags or memes to draw attention to representations. For example, #StarringJohnCho memes went viral as people photoshopped John Cho into famous movie posters that starred white male actors, creatively criticizing the lack of diversity in Hollywood. The #OscarsSoWhite hashtag was started by April Reign to raise the same issue and sparked a national debate that resulted in changes in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Engage progressive fandoms. Find the online communities of popular shows where fans are already gathering to talk about them. Create toolkits or messaging guides around a particular series to spark fan engagement.

Encourage networks to engage with and hire people who have experienced economic instability. We need more stories centered on low-income characters written by people who have lived through poverty for prolonged periods. This is particularly true for houseless representation and should be a component for any creative work related to this issue, whether it is a television program or advocacy campaign. Directly affected writers can bring their lived experiences to light in a way that helps us move from a voyeuristic, socially distanced interaction to one of better relatability and nuanced understanding. After all, if the producers and writers of Modern Family and Maid can bring their personal issues into scriptwriting, why can the same not become true for character portrayals unseen in other recent television shows?

Build relationships with script writers, producers, and show runners. Introduce script writers, producers, and show runners to stories that not only are personal and compelling but also are diverse and affirmative and more fully depict the experience of people living in economic instability. Note that to be effective, this strategy may require more significant long-term investments in both time and resources.

If you want to add positive portrayals to the mix…

Rewrite shows or plots to show how they could tell a fuller story of economic insecurity and what we can all do about it. You can use social media to spread your ideas about what popular TV could look like in this regard. To do this, put yourself in the shoes of a Hollywood writer who wanted to ethically depict characters experiencing poverty and imagine what they would come up with. You can also engage in a “what if?” exercise online, inviting your audience to help fill in how a show could depict the low-income experience more realistically and compassionately. Or suggest a whole new TV show that would accurately show the causes and solutions to poverty.

Partner with artists and creatives to tell new stories about economic instability and poverty. Artists should be included in strategic conversations early because their perspectives often lead to out-of-the-box innovations. Just like graphic designers, researchers, or anyone else with a specialized skillset you wouldn’t ask to work for free, keep in mind that artists should also be paid. Consider budgeting ahead of time to be able to include their talents.

Produce your own content. Creating your own content is now more accessible than ever. Creatives with limited resources are making use of content-sharing platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and SoundCloud and crowdsourcing sites like Kickstarter to launch independent projects and tell otherwise untold stories. Videos, web series, and podcasts are within reach, although we recommend partnering with a creative that is skilled at storytelling in your chosen format to maximize the impact.

If you want to help audiences become educated consumers of entertainment and other media…

Organize watch parties and discussion groups. Assemble around helpful, harmful, and nuanced portrayals.

Provide guides. Develop study guides and curricula that help support young people to become more educated consumers of entertainment and other media.

Make your organization a resource. Offer cultural critiques of select shows on a regular basis. Pitch yourself as a resource to media who cover pop culture and are interested in how portrayals interact with real-life experiences.

Appendix I

This code book is designed to assist in the process of coding and analyzing television shows for the portrayal of character income and lifestyle parallels. The media content analysis will analyze the content of 105 television episodes randomly sampled from 53 popular television series. Our content analysis will focus on the frequency of inclusion and trends in the representation of characters across perceived income. Our analysis will also focus on storylines associated with low-income characters and income disparity more broadly.

Character income should be coded in instances when explicit references are made that identify a character’s income (through scripted dialogue or search engine) and also in instances when more implicit social/cultural markers are used to designate issues primarily faced by those with a low income (i.e. poor housing, food insecurity or scarcity, lack of safety net for financial straits or survival, and dependence on social programs).

Appendix II

The following character profiles were developed to showcase the depth of portrayal necessary to frame the hardships of living on a low wage. As stated in the report, none of these characters fully portray the level of hardship faced by most people living in the United States under similar incomes. We have chosen these characters for their accessible yet under-developed storylines, which serve as entry to better, fuller portrayals in the future. The blank template is for consumer use in embarking on a similar analysis of the characters they watch on TV.

close search

Hot Topics: