Joe Pinsker: You recently reported a story about the origins of the phrase "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps." Can you say a little bit about where that phrase came from and how it shapes the way people think about breaking cycles of poverty?

Sarah Alvarez: I had just started producing specials in the way that I really wanted to, to take them away from call-in shows, which I hate, and have better production value. So we wanted to return to this question, "Why do people feel so distant from people in poverty?" When we were planning our coverage, we just kept coming back to that "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" phrase.

We tracked down a linguist, and she said that it was originally this term that was used to describe how absurd somebody's ideas were. It was used in this time when inventions were taking off and industrialization was beginning, so people were coming up with a lot of harebrained schemes, and that phrase was used to describe them. And then, I think James Joyce was one of the first people to use it to connote upward mobility, and now it is universally used as shorthand for the American Dream, but we've completely lost sight of how absurd that idea is. I always thought about it as absurd in the assumptions it makes about how people move out of poverty, but I didn't think about it as absurd in its very construction. I think even those of us who are really familiar with the phrase kind of lost sight of where it came from.

Pinsker: Yeah, I thought that story was well done. So, can you talk about the nature of the information gap that affects many low-income communities, and what it is about the media industry that perpetuates it?

Alvarez: Yeah, and of course, all of this goes back to James Hamilton [a professor of communication at Stanford University]. He gets tremendous props for caring about this. His story of how he came to study this is really interesting. I heard him describe it as, he was in a convenience store, and he saw a newspaper that was basically just made up of people's mug shots—super weird. And it was one of the only newspapers in this convenience store, and he's like, "What the hell is this? How is there a market for this and not a market for news? If people are willing to buy this, what are they not being served by traditional media?"

The research that he does is really interesting because he notes that even when low-income news consumers are taking in media at very similar rates to people who have more money, they're not being served by the media because the media is obsessed with their target audience. I know that to be true. I'm sure you know that to be true. In public radio, there's this person we consider, called "Mary." Sometimes, when people are pitching stories, somebody will say, "Well, why would Mary care about that?" And Mary is in her 50s, she's well-educated, she's white, she's affluent. And Mary is not Maria, you know?