Between headlines and hunger: Media framing of food poverty on the island of Ireland

Food poverty has emerged as public health issues in the Republic of Ireland (ROI) and Northern Ireland (NI) in the last decade. Concurrently, food poverty has emerged as a significant news story across broadcast media in both ROI and NI. While research has emerged in relation to how food poverty is framed in the media, there is a dearth of literature on this in the Irish context. This article seeks to address this gap by setting out to understand the ways in which food poverty emerges as a news story in broadcast media on the island of Ireland. Through gathering broadcast material from media archives, between November 2017 and April 2023, this article deployed analysis using Entman’s framing theory as the a priori framework. In doing so, much of the media framing tended to orientate food poverty around discursive frames relating to the working poor, the ‘deservingness’ of help through food banks or through government failure. From these findings, the article makes two central recommendations: (i) the voices of those affected by food poverty need to be centrally included in news stories when it is helpful and (ii) news production cultures need to focus on more constructive journalism approaches.