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Not long after Katrina struck, the Census Bureau released figures showing that the poverty rate had climbed for the fourth straight year. More than
37 million Americans live below the federal poverty level (defined as an income of $19,000 for a family of four), including 12 million children....
Stanford University researchers Emily Ryo and David Grusky, hearing pundits insist that Katrina "unleashed a newfound commitment among the public to take on issues of poverty and inequality," decided to measure this supposed awareness-raising effect...
Interpreting the findings, Grusky, a professor of sociology, says they show a majority of people already accepted that there was a problem and were doing something about it. The rest, he says, either see poverty as an individual problem or simply don't care.
"This idea that it's a dirty little secret, this poverty and inequality," he says, "just doesn't pass muster."
News coverage could partly explain the rise in denier and realist views. Some "did not take well to the liberal lesson that they no doubt regarded as foisted upon them," Grusky and Ryo wrote in their report, and so "the `call for action' story ... was countered by the equally powerful lesson that government intervention is all about inefficiency and ineptitude."http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/01/AR2006040100642_pf.html http://www2.umdnj.edu.nyud.net:8090/eohssweb/eohss_bbp04/WorkPractices/images/handwashing.jpg