The Vision-Impaired Rich.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara

"Where have the poor disappeared to?" the occasional journalist of conscience wonders. Officially, they amount to 13 percent of the population, although--since this number derives from an almost-forty-year-old definition of poverty (before rents went through the roof)--it may be a serious undercount. Yet we seldom see the poor in the media--unless they've managed to commit a particularly flamboyant crime--or hear them mentioned in the political rhetoric of either party. If any other comparably sized chunk of the population--college students, for example--were to vanish from public view, their faces would be appearing on milk cartons.

The disappearance of the poor from the media is easy to explain: The advertisers who support most corporate media outlets are interested only in reaching the affluent, and media decisionmakers oblige them. I learned this several years ago when I attempted to pitch a story on women in poverty to the editor of a glossy national magazine (which, in the interests of my future career, will remain unnamed). We were at lunch, always a high point in the life of an impecunious freelancer, and I made my case through the mesclun with parmesan shavings and polenta-crusted salmon while the editor yawned between bites. Finally, over the espresso and death-by-chocolate dessert, he rolled his eyes and said, "OK, do your thing on poverty. Only make it upscale."

I never could figure out how to do that, but now a cleverer journalist has. The title of James Fallows's article in the March 19 New York Times Magazine is "The Invisible Poor"--surprising fare, I thought, for a magazine that routinely brings us four-figure fashions and great recipes for artichokes and fennel. But the only humans we meet in this piece are members of the all-too-visible cyber-elite, a set which has little or no acquaintance with those unfortunates for whom, as Fallows puts it, "a million dollars would be a fortune." He finds his interview subjects wrapped snugly in their stock options, incapable of imagining anyone who might pause before breaking a twenty, or even several thou sand times that much. Well, actually, he does encounter one representative of the poor--an elderly office-cleaner in the software firm where Fallows does his interviewing, a woman with broken English and a painful-looking limp. But this solitary representative of the poor discomfits him so much, with her evident suffering, that he takes to leaving the building for the night as soon...