David Shipler was a journalist with the New York Times from 1966 to 1988, when he concluded his newspaper career as the paper’s chief diplomatic correspondent in Washington, D.C. He is also a Pulitzer Prize winning author of four nonfiction best sellers, including his latest, The Working Poor: Invisible in America.
Shipler will be a featured speaker at the David Pike “Excellence in Journalism” award ceremony on June 17. The award is given annually by Street Sense to honor mainstream journalists’ coverage of poverty issues. The award was established to keep alive the memory of Pike, a journalist and Street Sense board member who died in November, 2007.
Q: In your early years as a reporter you covered housing issues. What topics were you writing about then?
A: In New York housing is a complex issue because of the laws that restrict what landlords can do. That was also the period in which the Johnson Administration’s Model Cities Program was active, and the tail end of the War on Poverty. The housing beat carried me into a lot of interesting areas, like labor relations, politics, poverty, and drug addiction. It was a real education.
Q: You became well known for your work as a foreign correspondent in Saigon, Moscow and Jerusalem, and for your books about the latter two. What led you to switch to a domestic focus on race relations and poverty?
A: I came to feel that covering foreign policy from Washington was too vicarious; interesting but unsatisfying. What I really enjoyed most was writing about the country I was in. So I turned to writing about my own country. It was my way of coming home. I write by following the lines of my own curiosity, and for my own education. Race relations had interested me since my undergrad days when I wrote my senior thesis on a fair housing group in New Jersey. And while poverty impacts minorities disproportionately, it is an area in which whites, too, share many of the same problems.
Q: How long did it take to research “The Working Poor,” and what D.C.-based organizations did you look at?
A: I worked on it over a period of five years. Not exclusively, because I had a number of other projects as well. But it was a good thing that it took so long, because it gave me a chance to go back and see how peoples’ lives developed. If you’re with someone when they’re going through traumatic times, you’ll recall things that they might forget later.
The centerpiece of my D.C. experience was my time at So Others Might Eat [SOME], and particularly their Center for Employment Training. I met a lot of people that I wrote about at the Center. I also visited an H&R Block storefront office during the tax season, which for the working poor begins in late January when they get their W-2 statements. I looked at how that company priced their services for the poor.
Q: You describe “poverty” as a constellation of inseparable, interactive problems – employment, housing, education, parenting, health care, etc. And you’ve criticized the formula by which the government defines poverty. How do you think government should define and address poverty in America?
A: After 9/11, we were told that if only we had been able to “connect the dots” among the scattered information we’d had, we might have been able to prevent the attack. It’s the same in understanding poverty. Poverty is not one problem, but a series of problems that create a chain reaction. Housing problems can lead to health problems that create bills that cause credit problems. There’s a cascading effect that is not that obvious to most people.
If you attack each problem in isolation, the other problems will undo your efforts. So Balkanized service provisions that only address discrete problems aren’t effective. What we need are “gateways” to multiple services. SOME is an example of this to some extent, as is Bread for the City.
As for defining poverty, the federal poverty line is based on the cost of a basket of food. That’s out of date, especially because of the rise in housing costs. Some poor working families pay as much as 50% to 70% of their earnings on housing. To be realistic, a formula needs to accurately reflect nonfood costs, certain benefits not now included, and make regional adjustments. The National Academy of Sciences has developed an alternative formula.
Also, poverty is not just about income. Debt is a strong element of poverty. If someone accumulates debt, he can still find himself in poverty even if he finds a decent job. If you want a true measure of poverty, you need to look at net worth.
Q: The recession has led to greater press attention to housing and employment issues. What sort of job do you feel the press is doing in covering the circumstances of the working poor?
A: The press tends to cover government. If the government is active in an area, you get stories about it. In the 1960s there was lots of federal money flowing into antipoverty programs, so poverty was news. During the last eight years we haven’t seen much of an anti-poverty effort. You can now read the New York Times regularly and barely know that poverty even exists in New York City.
With the recession, problems of poverty are spilling up into the middle class. The recession may have a silver lining if it leads to health care reform and job training programs that help both the newly unemployed and the underpaid and underemployed poor.
Q: Are you working on another book?
A: I’m writing a book on civil liberties. It’s part of my quest to discover my own country. I’ve had a fascination with constitutional law since college, and living in Moscow got me reflecting on America as an antithesis of autocracy. But I really decided to do a civil liberties book at about 10 a.m. on September 11, 2001. I knew we were going to be in for a rough ride. I hadn’t finished with the poverty book yet, but I began taking notes. The new book is not only about counterterrorism. It’s about how the main elements of the Bill of Rights play out in everyday life.
