By Tammi McElroy

In the recently published ``Why Americans Hate Welfare,'' Yale professor Martin Gilen accuses the media of racially stereotyping blacks as lazy and unmotivated recipients of welfare. He argues that the media's misrepresentation of the poverty-stricken has created a new class: the "undeserving poor."

Blacks only represent a third of those Americans receiving public aid. Does this mean that the others two-thirds, the white Americans, are the deserving poor? And would Americans' perception of the welfare program be different if poverty were not depicted as a black problem?

The author examines these questions and suggests that welfare has become a "code word" for race. His research has led him to believe that Americans are not opposed to government support for the needy, but for needy blacks. An example of this is the fact

that most middle-class Americans think welfare spending should be cut but support public housing, government funded day care, Head Start and job training programs.

The media's portrayal of black welfare recipients as unmotivated has lead to the widespread belief that they would rather sit home than work for their benefits. One survey showed that only 31 percent of Americans believe that most of those on welfare who can work actually seek employment, Gilen asserts.

The author uses Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report to examine how the news media has portrayed poverty over the past 45 years. He finds that African-Americans have been over represented in pictures of the poor since the early 1960s. And that poor blacks have been used to illustrate stories about waste, inefficiency or abuse of welfare. Photographs of whites have illustrated anti-poverty programs.

Gilens also examines television news coverage between 1969 and 1992. He finds ABC, NBC and CBS nightly news programs have portrayed the poor as predominantly black and that most television images of African-Americans have come from the urban ghettos. However, there are only 6 percent of blacks living in this subgroup of the poor, he says. While visual representation of black poverty is the norm, news coverage during times of widespread sympathy for the needy has left black faces noticeably absent.

Gilens reaches back into America's history of slavery and blames slave owners for negatively stereotyping blacks to justify their own non-abolitionist attitudes.

He accuses the media of subliminally distributing these unflattering characteristics about African-Americans for the last four decades. He argues that the media has turned positive public opinion about the welfare program into negative opinions about the black race.