Poverty, it seems, is a constant in today's news, usually the result of famine, exclusion or conflict. In Blaming the Victim, Jairo Lugo-Ocando sets out to deconstruct and reconsider the variety of ways in which the global news media misrepresent and decontextualise the causes and consequences of poverty worldwide. The result is that the fundamental determinant of poverty - inequality - is removed from their accounts.
The books asks many biting questions. When - and how - does poverty become newsworthy? How does ideology come into play when determining the ways in which 'poverty'...

Development is a recurrent theme in the media. It is often linked to different items on the news agenda such as progress, economic growth, foreign aid and poverty, among others. However, the way in which the media covers development often tells us more about the innate biases of the news media than it does about the subjects being covered.

Far from there being a homogeneous or unified view, development is represented and misrepresented in the so-called Western media by means of different narratives. Topics such as economic growth, foreign aid, trade and industrialisation are...