What about the actors involved in news about poverty? Disrupting determinist accounts

Research on news and poverty tends to treat people in poverty as passive victims of news coverage and journalists as tied by professional and institutional constraints. Consequently, poverty news is portrayed as a largely homogeneous and stable news genre that necessarily serves those in power and fails to contribute to social justice. This chapter questions this deterministic approach by contrasting it with contemporary calls for recognition in poverty research and for examining the news in relation to practices of production in journalism studies. Informed by practice theory, the chapter stresses that agency and structure do not cancel, but presuppose, each other. This dialectical understanding of the relation between agency and structure helps resolve apparent contradictions in this field of research. It becomes possible to acknowledge the capacity of journalists and people in poverty to think and act as autonomous beings without neglecting the market-driven and precarious working conditions of contemporary journalistic work and without accepting accounts that blame people in poverty for their situation. A few existing studies help exemplify this approach’s potential contribution to a more nuanced understanding of poverty news and a more productive assessment of its possibilities for resistance and change.