Poverty Porn

Poverty porn refers to any type of media that exploits the poor's condition in order to generate the necessary sympathy for selling newspapers or increasing charitable donations or support for a given cause (Aid Thoughts, 2009). Poverty porn comes in many forms including news stories about people living through humanitarian crises, television advertising for charities, documentaries exploring people living under the poverty line, and Hollywood blockbusters sensationalising the concept of suffering and the lives of people from the so-called Global South.

Our host Anna Ramskogler-Witt discusses with  Isabelle Roughol (The New Humanitarian) and Celia Parbey (journalist) how journalists, filmmakers, advertisers, marketers, and audiences can navigate the fine line between information, awareness-raising and capitalised voyeurism, between observation and documentation and the commercialisation of poverty.