Representations of Poverty in Canada's Daily Press: An Exploratory Study of Contending Poverty Paradigms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores the ways in which Canadian poverty is represented in mainstream Canadian news media.The examination begins with the dominant poverty paradigms that characterize current poverty discourse.These paradigms, identified as Individual Responsibility, Structural Responsibility, and the Culture of Poverty, help to structure the ways that poverty has been and continues to be articulated.The paradigm of Individual Responsibility suggests that the individual is ultimately responsible for his or her own socio-economic conditions.The paradigm of Structural Responsibility suggests that various socio-economic structures are responsible for the creation of poverty and the subsequent management of the poor.The Culture of Poverty paradigm and its RightWing variant the Underclass suggest that due to isolation from the non-poor mainstream society, certain poor communities have developed a variety of specific and sometimes deviant characteristics and values that promote the reproduction of poverty within that community.This discussion is followed by a theoretical overview of representation, discourse, and the codes and techniques associated with the production of "objective" news.Here, this thesis discusses the importance of the inverted pyramid, frames of reference, primary definers, and constructed dichotomies.Finally, this thesis offers a content analysis of poverty articles as they appear over a 2-month period in The Vancouver Sun, The Vancouver Province, and The Globe and Mail, three largecirculation Canadian newspapers.Based upon this analysis, this thesis suggests that news media tend to reinforce beliefs associated with the paradigm of Structural Responsibility.This is due to such factors as news media's preference for official and institutional interpretations of events and issues, the prevalence of stories about particular institutions and structural decisions, the dominance of stories written by generalists trained to recognize and maximize general newsworthiness, and the prevalence of event-based coverage.recent coverage of the issue.Chapter 3 introduces the news study by establishing the representational function of news.It provides a theoretical overview of discourse, representation, and techniques associated with the "regime of objectivity" ' .Chapters 4 and 5 detail an analysis of news articles3 pertaining to poverty as they occur in three popular Canadian newspapers: the Vancouver Sun, the Vancouver Province, and the Globe and Mail.Chapter 4 outlines the general characteristics of the entire sample, with emphasis on general topic areas and news values, and their relationship to the poverty paradigms.Chapter 5 examines two artificially constructed weeks for the types of poverty reported, accessed sources, and presented causes, effects, and solutions.Based upon this analysis, the study reveals which, if any, of the poverty paradigms is favoured by news media and therefore dominate popular news discourse.2 The "regime of objectivity" is a useful term that refers to the processes and techniques associated with credible news reporting.It also reflects the understanding that all representation is subjective.It is a term used at length by Robert A. Hackett and Yuezhi Zhao (1998) in their book, Sustaining Democracy?Journalism and the Politics of Objectivity.3 This thesis is concerned with the representations of poverty in traditional news stories.These are stories, written in "inverted pyramid" format, demonstrate a clear attempt by the journalist to follow the "regime of objectivity" and to distance himlherself from the story.In this way, they are distinct from columns, editorials, and letters to the editor.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.015 | 0.029 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".