by Elizabeth M Young

Created on: September 23, 2009   Last Updated: October 21, 2011

Any television show requires both advertiser and viewer attention and interest. If the viewers tune out, then the story will not be told, unless a popular "host" covers it in a special report. Then it is the host's popularity, the network hype, and the trust that the audience has in that host that draws and holds viewers to stories about poverty.

Broadcast news is a commodity. The old adages that "sex, scandal, sensationalism, and money sell", are not far from the truth. Showing poor people without a hot topical context or without a competitive "hook" is the same as showing a story about senior citizens or high schools. It is a sad indictment that CNN, for example, will spend a full hour on Larry King's interview with Liza Minnelli, when at least a 10 minute segment on people who have lost their jobs would be far more worthwhile.

But, when Larry King does a show on "Poverty In America", he draws a huge audience.

Print and on line print is another story. When we look at a major search term trend page, as with Google Trends or Yahoo Buzz Index, poverty is nowhere to be seen as a top or even major search topic. This means that on line, the most searched for web content is not about poverty.

However, a Google search on "poverty," then a click on "news" will return a huge number of news stories about some aspect of poverty. Poverty topics tend to be more reported in highly localized venues. People want to hear more about poverty as it affects their local communities, families and friends.

In other words, poverty is a mega topic that is difficult for national news organs to digest. National audiences do not have a compelling interest in another location's poverty issue. Unless a major study or horrendous event occurs, like politics, all poverty is local.

As a result, there is plenty in the print and online news about poverty and the audiences are huge. The content and audiences, however are confined to niches that trend programs do not know about or see.

Another problem is that there are many specific components of poverty. The "story" is really about ten thousand stories. Mentioning poverty in general is far too broad a topic to mean very much. So, a google search on "Poverty in America", then a click on "news" my bring up 10 pages of news. Some articles will have thousands of articles that address a single sub topic about poverty!

Even YouTube netted over 51,000 video results from a search on "Poverty".

In other words, there are thousands of words and hours of video produced to highlight issues of poverty. Those words simply do not aggregate well under the standard web trend and search systems. There are not so many words spoken on national television about poverty every day, but local news reports will cover at least one charity or incident that relates to local poverty issues. Of the many, many specific components, demographics, and issues of poverty, there is a lot of broken up news that is being published.

So the final result seems to be that, when any information about poverty that is wanted, the information can be easily found. It is just that poverty is such a huge subject that no one cannot digest it all.

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