2.3 (July 2002): 318-320
© 2002 National Communication Association

Reading the Homeless: Communication Theory and Public Policy

Paul Soukup

Eungjun Min, editor. Reading the Homeless: The Media’s Image of Homeless Culture. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999. xiii + 222 pages. $72.95.

When communication scholars address public policy issues, they focus most of the time on issues of regulation, censorship, ownership, or something similar. This book differs by looking at homelessness in the media, arguing that the way we look at the homeless affects the way we look at homelessness and, ultimately, the social policies we choose. Homelessness itself touches most of us, at least indirectly as we see men and women on the streets or asking for work or begging for financial support. Many of us want to do something but don’t know what. We look for guidance, often to the news media. We less often think of homelessness from a social perspective.

Reading the Homeless examines media portrayals and tries to bridge the gap between our mediated experience and our walking-down-the-street experience. It raises the social perspective question: homelessness is a structural issue for our societies (the book examines the United States and Japan), and the media, at least, can claim to go beyond individual perspectives and touch questions of politics, economics, justice, and business decisions in so far as these affect homelessness.

This is a difficult book to read, though, for three reasons, two of them good. The first, of course, lies with the subject matter. Most people react to homelessness the way they react to the homeless. We know they are there, but we would prefer to look the other way or to contribute something without too much involvement. Reading the Homeless does not offer that alternative but insists that we examine the media’s interaction with the homeless and homelessness more carefully. It demands that we see, reflect, and—implicitly—act.

The collection (some reprints and some new material) provides several perspectives on both the homeless and the mass media. John Fiske details how a group of homeless men watch television and construct a world, providing a look at homeless culture. Richard Campbell and Jimmie Reeves examine how CBS (in particular) portrayed a case study of one homeless woman, Joyce Brown. Gerald Power proposes an interaction between these two: the culture of homelessness and the media’s construction of images. Insung Whang and Eungjun Min and Rebecca Ann Lind and James Danowski provide several analyses of news coverage, bringing various tools (discourse analysis, linguistic analysis) to bear on specific coverage patterns. Jeremy Reynalds, an advocate for the homeless, suggests ways that organizations can influence news coverage in order to benefit the homeless.

Other contributors take a wider view. Erik Mark Kramer and Soobum Lee draw on the phenomenological tradition to see how we objectify the Other, a perspective applied to Japan by Richiko Ikeda and Kramer. Linda Fuller traces the images of the homeless through motion pictures, watching how cultural definitions and attitudes change. Andrew Mendelson attempts to measure the effect of pictures (especially television pictures) on people’s attributions about homelessness.

The second reason for the difficulty of the book emerges from the question of theory. Homelessness and its media coverage present a hard area to theorize. Nothing quite fits. Some studies in the book employ existing theories—Isengar’s framing of news (unsuccessfully), for example; or theories of the audience (with partial success); or theories of media effects and cultural studies, applying these to the constructed audience. Others attempt to theorize from the topic, proposing a theory built on film meaning or semiotics, for example. The most sweeping theoretical view comes from phenomenology while some contributors propose theories of sense-making or structural analysis or linguistic and discourse analysis. Of course, all of these fit the topics at hand, but at a general level, they could describe any media content.

That’s the problem. A key question remains unanswered: Does existing communication theory go far enough to explain and predict in this area where public policy, media influence, and emotional response come together? Can a dispassionate theory help? Is it enough to understand—or should our theory engage us, move us to action on behalf of the homeless? This question does not appear strongly enough. If communication study is ever to matter enough to change public policy, it must seek a more actively engaged stance. If a reader’s only response is, “That’s interesting,” then no amount of explaining media practices or the construction of images will change the situation of the homeless among us.

Finally, the book is difficult to read, for a very bad reason: It suffers from serious failures in editing. On the lowest level, every chapter—and seemingly every page in some chapters—contains spelling, punctuation, or grammatical errors. While always annoying, at times these errors leave whole sections incomprehensible. On another level, the editing does not help the reader in the arrangement of chapters or the topics. The introduction gives a brief overview of the book but the logic of arrangement for the chapters does not come across clearly. Why, for example, does Reynalds’ chapter on public relations (shaping the media image) come between media effects analysis and discourse analysis? Indeed, the editor seems to agree since the introduction moves directly from presenting chapter 4 (media effects) to presenting chapter 7 (linguistic analysis) and skips past Reynalds’ chapter 5. Similarly a number of the chapters themselves seem to challenge the reader more than necessary by not giving the context or the direction of their work.

However, despite the errors, we cannot discount or ignore this book. It does seriously attempt to examine a serious topic in an extended way. It draws together the work of a number of scholars and asks us as readers to move beyond seeing the homeless to regarding homelessness. And it hopes that understanding will lead to action.

Paul Soukup, SJ, is associate professor of Communication at Santa Clara University.