| This is a study of how power relations are constructed within the public sphere; my specific focus was discourse about poverty. Using Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis, I examined two data sets: the academic and political literature about poverty and editorials from two leading newspapers, thought to occupy different positions on the political spectrum. For a thematic analysis of discourse, I selected 78 editorials from the Wall Street Journal and 162 editorials from the New York Times covering 1980 to 2004. From this sample, I selected 10 editorials from each paper for an in depth textual analysis.; The dominant discourse about poverty in the academic and political literature constructs it as a personal, rather than a structural, problem in which the causes and solutions to poverty are ascribed to individuals, rather than the political or economic system. In this discourse, poor persons are cast as "clients" and depicted as passive. The discourse in the New York Times editorials was consistent with that in the literature; the Wall Street Journal differed in that it contained depictions of poor persons as capable and industrious, victimized mainly by governmental policies and programs. While the two papers appear, at the thematic level, to take different attitudes toward poverty, they are linguistically more similar than different. They both cast poverty as a problem that must be solved at an individual level and gave agency to experts, politicians and program personnel more than to poor persons. Based on these findings, I conclude that both papers conform to the dominant discourse about poverty in which poor persons are depicted as needy or pathological and as passive recipients of aid, rather than as citizens, taxpayers or active players in the field of poverty abatement. The New York Times appears, at the thematic level, more sympathetic to poor persons than the Wall Street Journal. However linguistic analysis of the two papers shows that power is more obscured in the New York Times than in the Wall Street Journal, thus making the Wall Street Journal more open to challenge and resistance. |
