Blaming the Victim How Global Journalism Fails Those in Poverty

Poverty, it seems, is a constant in today's news, usually the result of famine, exclusion or conflict. In Blaming the Victim, Jairo Lugo-Ocando sets out to deconstruct and reconsider the variety of ways in which the global news media misrepresent and decontextualise the causes and consequences of poverty worldwide. The result is that the fundamental determinant of poverty - inequality - is removed from their accounts.

The books asks many biting questions. When - and how - does poverty become newsworthy? How does ideology come into play when determining the ways in which 'poverty' is constructed in newsrooms - and how do the resulting narratives frame the issue? And why do so many journalists and news editors tend to obscure the structural causes of poverty?

In analysing the processes of news production and presentation around the world, Lugo-Ocando reveals that the news-makers' agendas are often as problematic as the geopolitics they seek to represent. This groundbreaking study reframes the ways in which we can think and write about the enduring global injustice of poverty.

Jairo Lugo-Ocando is a lecturer and Deputy Director of the Centre for Freedom of the Media at the University of Sheffield (UK). His research addresses the relation between journalism, development, poverty and social exclusion. Before becoming an academic he worked as a journalist and news editor in South America.

Contents
Introduction
1. The Subjectivity of Poverty
2. A Brief History of Ideas on Poverty in the Newsroom
3. What Lies Beneath?
4. Africa, the Scar on the 'Beautiful' Face
5. The Story of the Sub-Informed People
6. The Visual-Culture of Global Poverty
7. Spinning Poverty!
8. The Emergence of the Poor People's Voice
Conclusions: Beyond the Unsustainable News Agenda