Student Scholars Day

Homelessness: Media's Role in Blaming the Individual

Henry Hall Atrium 74

With homelessness on the rise and shelters at full capacity, it is becoming long overdue to understand how people get into such poverty-stricken situations and why these outcomes are often misunderstood. Unfortunately, much of the information we receive comes from the media, an inconsistent source at best that manages to have a significant influence in conditioning people's beliefs. By incorporating the theory of intersectionality into a qualitative content analysis study of The New York Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Sun-Times, I'm interested in determining how newspapers use words and images to explain the causes of homelessness. Although newspapers do not represent the entire media, they play a significant role in promoting America's dominant ideology, and thus become a great place to start in unraveling all the misconstrued notions.