Ann Curry Focuses On ‘Hidden America’: The Impoverished (PHOTOS)

This Sunday on NBC, Ann Curry will anchor a special report on impoverished Americans in Southeast Ohio.

“America Now: Friends & Neighbors” was produced from nine months of original reporting in the region, documenting those who have been hardest hit by the recession. The special includes a woman who opened a food pantry, a young mother who slept in a van with her children, a laid-off father unable to heat his home, and an extended family of 14 crowded into a 4-bedroom house to survive. It also features the Ohioans’ clever appeal to President Obama: making pleas for jobs and food written on thousands of paper plates.

“This reporting is more like my experiences covering third world countries than any other I have ever done in America,” Curry told TVNewser recently of the special. “The stories were unpredictable and you got the clear sense the people we interviewed felt invisible to the world outside their own. So much has been made of how the recession is affecting the middle class. Yet relatively little reporting had been done on how the poor have been impacted.”

She added, “This report in many ways is about a hidden America.”

Below, see some of Curry’s and Dateline’s photos from their time in the region.

“America Now: Friends & Neighbors” airs on NBC Sunday at 7PM.