WHY AMERICANS HATE WELFARE.

• Author: Harwood, John
• Position: Review

WHY AMERICANS HATE WELFARE by Martin Gilens University of Chicago Press, $25

For at least 20 years, people in and around national politics have operated on the assumption that public debate over welfare policy was powerfully influenced by race. Anger over welfare abuses was the anger of middle-and working-class whites convinced that their tax dollars were being squandered on undeserving black beneficiaries. And many journalists, in particular, assumed they knew who was responsible for inflaming those feelings: Republican politicians seeking white votes. In combination with other racially-charged issues such as crime, taxes, and civil rights, welfare has been portrayed as a "wedge" that Republicans Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush exploited to identify Democrats with their black constituents, split off disgruntled whites, and hold the presidency.

Those assumptions weren't unfounded. But the most important contribution of Martin Gilens' Why Americans Hate Welfare is to identify the responsibility of another agent--the journalistic community itself--in turning the welfare issue into a racial Rorschach test.

It's an interesting notion, given the widespread and largely accurate belief that reporters and editors at major news organizations tend to sympathize with blacks and Democrats in those political arguments and view GOP "wedges" as callous demagoguery. The journalistic imperative to "Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" is not an auspicious formula for Republicans in such debates.

But consider what Mr. Gilens, a political scientist at Yale, discovered from an examination of the content of TV broadcasts and newsmagazines dating back to the Eisenhower era. During the 1950s, the relatively spare media coverage of poverty was dominated by images of whites. The same was true in the early '60s, after works such as Michael Harrington's The Other America had helped prod a Democratic administration into launching the War on Poverty. When Newsweek magazine ran a twelve-page takeout on the subject in February 1964, for example, its cover photo depicted a young white girl in a ramshackle rural setting. The story highlighted hard times in Appalachia; only 14 of 54 people featured in photographs for the story were black.

But soon after, Mr. Gilens argues, coverage of poverty-related issues was increasingly "racialized." Blacks began to assume an outsized role in depictions of the poor, and particularly in stories about...