Recognition or Redistribution? How Mainstream Media Frames Charitable Responses to People Experiencing Poverty

Abstract

Charitable responses to people experiencing poverty are often viewed as valuable community-led initiatives that address the support gaps created by a withdrawing welfare state. This perspective provides important insights into the culturally valorised nature of charity. The role of the mainstream media in cultivating and valorising charity, in contrast, remains relatively underexplored. Drawing on a framing analysis of Australian mainstream news reports published between 2014 and 2020, we analyse how the media frames charity as a response to people experiencing poverty. We demonstrate that the media frames people experiencing poverty as having a devalued identity, for which the remedy is the restoration of dignity through charity. Little attention is paid to the material inequalities that underpin people’s experiences of poverty; nor the role of the media as a body that reifies the interests of the powerful, who benefit from poverty and charitable responses to it.