Criticizing The Media's Focus on Nouveau Poor

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of "Nickel and Dimed", and she wrote an op-ed this week for the New York Times that caught our eye here at the Economic Edge. It is titled "Too Poor to Make the News". In it, she criticizes the media for being consumed with stories about "the nouveau poor," without taking stock of how the already poor are being hit by this recession.

I reccommend reading the entire column, whether you're a member of the media or simply a consumer of it, because we can all take stock of what we render invisible or visible with our attention, air time, and/or dollars. I've pasted a the beginning section of the column below to give you a sense of where she is coming from:

THE human side of the recession, in the new media genre that’s been called “recession porn,” is the story of an incremental descent from excess to frugality, from ease to austerity. The super-rich give up their personal jets; the upper middle class cut back on private Pilates classes; the merely middle class forgo vacations and evenings at Applebee’s. In some accounts, the recession is even described as the “great leveler,” smudging the dizzying levels of inequality that characterized the last couple of decades and squeezing everyone into a single great class, the Nouveau Poor, in which we will all drive tiny fuel-efficient cars and grow tomatoes on our porches.

But the outlook is not so cozy when we look at the effects of the recession on a group generally omitted from all the vivid narratives of downward mobility — the already poor, the estimated 20 percent to 30 percent of the population who struggle to get by in the best of times. This demographic, the working poor, have already been living in an economic depression of their own. From their point of view “the economy,” as a shared condition, is a fiction.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich