The Hufflington Post and social responsibility

As a Vietnamese girl, I was really surprised when I was asked about top 5 most popular topics covered on the news. The answer from American friends and mine is likely to be the same: Politics, War, Education, Tax and Poverty. However, when I look at American mainstream newspapers such as New York Times or USA today, things is much different. On the column of Hufflpost’s big news pages, we could find Politics, Media, Entertainment, Business, etc, but poverty even is not in this list of The Huffington Post.

Poverty, which is known as a severe social problem, is not reflected in the media as accurately as we think. The percentage of poor people in reality is much larger than what is portrayed on The Hufflington Post. What did you think of when reading a post mentioned “the poor”? Is it the image of a group of thin people living in houses in bad condition? Or are they the black? There is a fact that when you enter the Poverty part of The Hufflington Post, you could find nearly a half of posts using the image of the black, especially black kids. By selecting some images of the reality of the black poor family and making them more noticeable to the audience, the reporters make us pay more attention to that image rather than others. This explains why when we talk about the poor, people have tendency to think about black family with many children. Poverty is also portrayed as a threat or suffering of the whole society on the media. Here are titles of some typical posts on The Hufflington Post: “Low Poverty Rates Mask Deeper Despair In Many States”, “More Cities Are BasicallyMaking It Illegal To Be Homeless”, “45 Million Americans Still Stuck Below Poverty Line”, etc. Such words as “despair”, “illegal”, “stuck” partly frames what the audience think about the poor. By framing, I mean when the media focuses attention of audience on some events provided with certain meanings.

The Hufflington Post is known as a liberal website, whose audiences are expected to care much about the social situations. When one of the issues of society is framed in such particular way (that might be found in other pages but not expected to be shown on The Hufflington Post), this becomes a problem. On many pages, stories of the poor are often represented without the social context. There are many reasons causes poverty, such as the lack of basic resources, or the consequences of earthquakes, floods, or when poverty is handed over from generations to generations. But these outside factors is barely mentioned on many online newspapers. The poor, in general, is also portrayed as experiencing their own culture instead of having no other options. The Hufflington Post- as one of the mainstream media channels- did a good job in reflecting the social issue with its underlying cause. However, that’s just the case with the context of their posts. By framing through images of black people and the title of the posts, The Hufflington Post implicitly reinforce the stereotype of the poor on their page. By doing that, audience who wants to access the accurate information about poverty and who are willing to take actions to solve the problem could be misled to feel sympathy for the poor instead of taking actions as soon as possible to manage the problem.

As one of the mainstream newspapers, The Hufflington Post should make a change to give the audience the good frame of the reality. It might be really difficult for small and unpopular pages to do that because they did a bad frame for their post, but to The Hufflington Post, the task is much easier. They just need to change their frame in some ways, such as using more suitable images for their posts, or considering the match between posts and images more carefully. Treatment recommendation for the problem or calling for actions is also needed in their posts so that their goal of doing social outreach could be attained. The media plays an important role in shaping public opinion and the media channel hold a part of responsibility to improve the social condition. By representing the real problem with the adequate image and providing the good treatment recommendation, The Hufflington Post could not only keep it position as one of the mainstream media channels but also fulfill their social responsibility.