Mass Media, Stereotypes

Carey, Michael Clay.  The News Untold.  Community Journalism and the Failure to Confront Poverty in Appalachia.  252 pages.  (November 2017).  Morgantown: West Virginia University Press.  The News Untold offers an important new perspective on media narratives about poverty in Appalachia. The book’s focus is on small-town reporters and editors in some of the region’s poorest communities and how they decide what aspects of poverty are news, how their audiences interpret those decisions, and how those two related processes help shape broader understandings of economic need and local social responsibility.  The News Untold shows a lack of constructive news coverage of economic need can make it harder for the poor to voice their concerns. Critical and inclusive news coverage of poverty at the local level, Carey argues, can help communities start to look past old stereotypes and attitudes and encourage solutions that incorporate a broader range of community voices.  Such an effort will require journalists and community leaders to reexamine some of the professional traditions and social views that often shape what news looks like in small towns.

MacLowery, Randall, director.  The Feud.  DVD.  2019.  Written and directed by Randall MacLowery. Boston, MA: American Experience is produced for WGBH Boston.  The most famous family conflict in American history, the Hatfield-McCoy feud evolved into a mythic American tale of jealousy, rage, and revenge-one which helped create the negative “hillbilly” stereotype that has shaped attitudes towards Appalachia for more than a century.