Critical Explorations of Media and Inequality: (Discourse, Power and Society)

About the Book

Media discourses play a powerful role in shaping public understanding of inequality—yet they often obscure, distort, or individualize its causes.
Critical Explorations of Media and Inequality examines how mainstream media systems reproduce and legitimize unequal social structures by marginalizing, sensationalizing, or blaming those most affected. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars, this edited collection explores the persistent gaps, tensions, and ideological forces at work in media representations of class, poverty, homelessness, welfare, and immigration across diverse global contexts. Organized around the themes of changing media work practices, authoritative voices, representations, and implications, the chapters interrogate how neoliberalism and shifting journalistic norms continue to shape—and limit—the public conversation on inequality. Through rich empirical analysis and interdisciplinary insight, this volume offers a timely intervention into the politics of media framing and the structural silences that sustain social injustice.

Table of Contents:

List of Tables
List of Figures
Introduction: Through the Looking Glass: Critical Perspectives on Media and Inequality – Martin J. Power, Majka Ryan, and Eoin Devereux
Chapter 1: Inequality in the Newsroom: Understanding Journalism Work Through a Labour lens – Kathryn Hayes and Henry Silke
Chapter 2: Who is Entitled to Interesting Work? Inequality and the Cultural Lives of the British Working Class – Lisa McKenzie
Chapter 3:Representations of Poverty and Inequality in Hindi Cinema – Ameeta Motwani
Chapter 4: Interrogating Absence/Presence in the Representations of Poverty and the Poor in South African Soap Opera Dramas – Khanyile Mlotshwa
Chapter 5: A System of Negative Effects: Insights From Interviews with U.S. News Consumers Below the Poverty Line – David J. Park and Juliet Pinto
Chapter 6: Sensationalism of Suffering: The 'Kerala Model' Media Discourse of Poverty Porn – Sony Jalarajan Raj and Adith K. Suresh
Chapter 7: Continuity of Poverty: Religion, Populism and Hegemony. – Ugur Baloglu
Chapter 8: Poverty Where? Reframing Deprivation and Reportage of the Boko Haram Insurgency in Nigeria – Olufunmilayo Jinadu, Fergal Quinn and Elaine Vaughan
Chapter 9: Culinary Skills or Income Inequality? Mediating Food Poverty in Limerick, Ireland – Majka Ryan, Martin J. Power and Eoin Devereux
Chapter 10: “If it’s travellers, its news value is less” Media Constructions of Fratricide-Suicide in an Ethnic Minority Community – Audrey Galvin
Chapter 11: Media Representations of Irish Travellers: Implications for their Day to Day Lives? – Sindy Joyce, Martin J. Power and Eoin Devereux
Chapter 12: Framing Syrian Migration in Irish Print Media: A Critical Analysis of Evolving Narratives – Moufida Benmoussa
Chapter 13: What Do the Unhoused Tell: A Critical Discourse Analysis of News Stories Written by Unhoused People – Vojtech Dvorak
Bibliography
Index
About the Contributors

About the Author :

Majka Ryan is associate professor in work and employment at the University of Limerick.
Martin J. Power is associate professor of sociology at the University of Limerick.
Eoin Devereux is professor of sociology at the University of Limerick.

Review :
Against any presumption that the fragmentation of mass media and its audiences, the disorienting chatter of online platforms, or the decline of ‘legacy’ journalism might negate our capacity for critique, Critical Explorations of Media and Inequality calls our attention to the always political character of the media and to diverse manifestations of its continuing power. Interdisciplinary and internationalist in spirit, contributions to this engaging volume highlight how inequality both constitutes and is constituted by our encounters with media. Embracing a plurality of contexts and actors—from local to global, from newsrooms to cinema, from soap operas to online and print outlets—it offers accessible and generative analyses of the contemporary politics of media access, representation and voice. This book is both challenging and provocative. On the one hand, it makes us think deep and hard about inequality in the media space in ways that are not often thought of. On the other, it leaves us with the concerning anxiety about media dynamics in which inequality seems to be constantly misrepresented or obscured. It is a must read!