Voicing exclusion to implied audiences: Urban poverty in the North American press

In order to demonstrate how mainstream media  help define the emotional, moral, and rational orientations of  haves toward have-nots in the contemporary city, this paper develops a case study of  how the voices of the poor and homeless find their way into public dialogue without being the implied audiences of the stories about them.  The paper examines sources sited, modes of address, and judgements on their acceptance or rejection found in results from a dialogic analysis of a full year of reporting in 2010 on poverty or homelessness. The sample is drawn from keyword searches for a variety of mainstream newspapers  taken from three paired cities:  Vancouver-Los- Angeles, Toronto-Miami, and Montreal-New York. Most reportage on the urban poor or homeless rarely address the subjects being talked about as addressee. They are not excluded in the sense that media in the main do not talk about them, quote their voices, show their faces, or explain their points of view. Both mainstream journalism and mainstream sociology construct meaning at a second level for their audience by observing first level observers who act in the world. In this sense neither discipline or craft are required to address the subjects they speak of as audiences.  Critical sociology though does address the subjects it speaks of by pinpointing enduring forms of domination that confine them and, in our case,  by undoing entanglements between the  subjects of representation and the perceptions implied audiences are projected to have of them. Our research demonstrates how the voices of the socially excluded are often quoted as sources at the first level of observation and not addressed at the second level as if they themselves were the audience implied from the orientation or tone, mode of address, and judgement.